While digging into your favorite marketing, sales, or business resources this year, you may have seen a significant rise in the mention of RevOps. RevOps is the common term for Revenue Operations. It’s a process for optimizing those business decisions and strategies which have a direct impact on revenue generation. RevOps is designed to unify the efforts between sales, marketing, and customer service, to yield and wield smarter and more relevant data sets, and to make a shared frontier for that collaboration, using more singular technology.
Defining RevOps and predicting the future
Marketing technology (commonly, MarTech) is kind of a big mess. For many agencies and brands, the “tech stack” or series of tools they use to manage marketing and sales, has become synonymous with a labyrinth of recurring subscriptions, half-configured tools, and lost logins.
RevOps is a solution to this mess but it’s so much more. What began as a way to foster greater accountability between teams on the revenue front lines has now expanded into a series of technology solutions designed to support the effort.
The future of RevOps is about more than getting sales and marketing to work together – it’s also pioneering the pursuit of cleaner shared data, leaner technology solutions, and a new way to communicate from the top down.
In RevOps, we believe:
More tech isn’t better.
The tech stacks we built proudly in the 2010s will be dismantled, trimmed significantly, or rebuilt. The marketing tinkerers of the early web will now become informed on the best technologies for the objectives they set. No more shiny object syndrome!
Marketing and customer service are both revenue drivers.
Sales might seem like they have all the fun, but marketing and customer support close the cycle and ensure revenue is stabilized throughout the journey of each customer. These departments are no longer treated as soft or nice-to-have.
Processes matter.
Investment into smart processes is a pathway to revenue opportunities and company longevity – employees are satisfied with processes that work, customers are satisfied with a pipeline that considers their needs. This is a win-win.
Four core benefits of RevOps
RevOps is so much more than a trend – it’s an effective umbrella term for a holistic strategic paradigm and approach to sales, marketing, and customer management, at least. In truth, RevOps is less of a specific answer to a specific problem, and more of a strategic framework to rethink the aspects of your business that could (or should) generate revenue.
Because RevOps is a customizable strategic framework, the potential benefits are endless. The most positive outcomes can be categorized in four ways:
- RevOps unifies and integrates processes across departments
RevOps creates an opportunity for sales, marketing, brand, customer support, and other teams to integrate their processes using technology designed to help. In this way, communication is de-siloed, making teams more productive individually and in all collaborative efforts. Project management, customer relationship management (CRM), and marketing software can take teams in hundreds of different directions that become condensed and detangled through RevOps. When teams can understand each other’s objectives, and even co-support on those objectives, valuable data is shared and opportunities are unlocked. Technology is the first step into this visibility and shared use.
- Data is kept secure and accessible in a RevOps model
By using a cohesive and lean set of tools across teams, data is made shareable, navigable, and manageable. Imagine a future where your sales team shares insights about customers with customer service teams, so issues are anticipated on sight. Imagine a revenue model where marketing and sales share an ultimate objective and set of data. These datasets aren’t just an analyst’s plaything, but a quantitative storyboard of the customer’s experience and the company’s growth – something every team member should care about equitably.
- RevOps untangles the customer life cycle
Using a combination of smarter tools and more communicable processes, a RevOps agency brings clarity to the customer life cycle – end to end. Now, teams at every touchpoint of the customer’s experience with your company can seamlessly guide from what your customer knows and has experienced through marketing channels and online communities, through the sales cycle and onboarding as a client or opening their first package as a customer, and back to various communication channels for support
- RevOps balances revenue accountability to drive greater revenue overall
In a RevOps future, sales isn’t the only team informed on or motivated by revenue growth. With datasets wide open and teams communicating in meaningful ways through shared tools, revenue moves through a shared pipeline. Marketing, brand, creative, customer service, accounts, and product teams should see the pipeline between their work and the profit of the company. Any and all touchpoints to the customer become touchpoints to revenue.
How to integrate RevOps into your strategy this quarter
The how-to for integrating RevOps into your business plan is far more involved than a quick paragraph can provide. The readiness for RevOps requires:
- An intelligent audit of current tools, tech stack, and systems
- Review of processes, communication between teams, and the funnel that moves a customer from aware to acquired to loyal.
- Preparation of a RevOps strategy that aligns with company objectives and budget while promising foundational improvements to the activities that drive revenue within your company – and those that should be.
- A plan to monitor and improve RevOps processes in accordance with revenue objectives
This is a process you can begin right away with your leadership team or collaborate on, with experts who specialize in this space. A RevOps agency employs experts in process planning, revenue driving strategy, and technology, with a high proficiency in HubSpot, and other platforms that enable RevOps.
Executives and directors in sales and marketing should be aware of RevOps as a means to integrating sales, marketing, and customer service teams, balancing accountability for revenue growth, and retooling processes. If you’re looking to add this type of revenue-driving value to your process, consider working with a HubSpot certified RevOps agency with experience implementing systems in your sector.
