A Complete Guide to Revenue Operations (RevOps) [+ 4 Tools]

Due to increasing customer acquisition costs and decreasing lead conversion rates, revenue has now become the center of business conversion. Using the RevOps model, companies are attaining new growth levels and you can achieve that too!

Revenue Operations or RevOps business model creates unified marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Companies, especially B2B organizations, are adopting this model at a quick speed to boost team productivity and ROI growth.

If you want to know about RevOps, this is the right place. Let’s go straight to the main discussion.

What Is RevOps?

Revenue Operations or RevOps model means a combination of a company’s sales, marketing, and customer success teams that work on achieving a unified revenue process. In this process, the marketing funnel, sales process, and customer retention strategy is integrated to combine data, goals, and processes. 

RevOps aim to increase revenue exponentially while achieving end-to-end accountability and visibility simultaneously. While doing so empowers revenue teams to build a relationship of trust with their customers. The process involves key transformations in strategy, RevOps role implementation, and using RevOps tools.

Why Do Companies Opt for RevOps?

In conventional businesses, multiple departments used to work with separate missions. There was no connection between customer experiences and other teams, and no combined analytics data was available. It was a time when companies could only wish for better revenue. 

With the introduction of the RevOps model, companies have become capable of implementing strategies across their entire organization for increased revenue.

The major reasons why companies go for the Revenue Operations model are:

• The increased importance of marketing technology in the present business landscape.
• The need for unified management across marketing, sales, and customer service.
• The demand for a connected and personalized customer experience at scale.

Moreover, companies choose to implement RevOps to avoid a lack of bottleneck visibility, operational inefficiencies, customer experience discontinuities, and a lack of insights on revenue-generating possibilities.

Benefits of RevOps

Growth Predictability

With RevOps, organizations can get accurate revenue growth predictions they are looking for. Designing a streamlined blueprint for revenue generation is possible wIth such predictions. Also, you can plan and test each strategy, including marketing and investment using prediction data.

Collaboration Between Teams

When teams work in collaboration, new revenue opportunities arise through innovation. RevOps allows the working of cross-functional teams together where they can find solutions to problems through a new perspective and quickly and effectively attain the goals.

Engaged Employees

In a RevOps environment, clear and collaborative goals align with larger organizational objectives. Since employees know what the company expects and how they can contribute to company success, they stay motivated while working.

Cost Reduction

Businesses with RevOps strategy implementation can see a significant reduction in go-to-market costs. Efficient processes, resource allocation, accurate forecasting, and aligned teams are some RevOps-powered functionalities responsible for reduced costs.

Transparency

With RevOps in place, companies get a centralized data system that they can use as a single source of truth. It removes all the inconsistencies and data gaps so companies can confidently execute data-driven activities.

Boosted Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction at every step of their journey is essential for customer retention and loyalty. RevOps can internally align all teams and customers with benefits such as faster response times, personalized offers, and cordial engagement.

Differences Between Sales Ops and RevOps

Since RevOps is a comparatively new concept to Sales Ops, some readers might find these confusing. But these are different models, and this segment will discuss how they differ from each other.

The Sales Ops team mainly focuses on sales, but the RevOps team focuses on multiple arenas, including marketing, sales, and customer service. The first team only works to increase revenue by sales, while the latter can drive revenue growth across the entire company.

While many companies already have a Sales Ops team, most companies are still unfamiliar with RevOps. If your company already has a Sales Ops team, you can also incorporate a RevOps team. The sales team can concentrate on sales, while the RevOps team can work from behind to collect and manage data.

Major RevOps Metrics

If you want to measure the success of your RevOps policy or team, you should watch out for these metrics:

Revenue

Revenue is the prime goal of RevOps and the main metric to measure its success. It is the amount your company generates through selling products in a fixed time.

Sales Cycle Length

The sales cycle refers to the time taken from the first contact of a prospective customer to the purchase completion.

This cycle length can be longer for B2B companies as the products involve a large investment, and the clients need a longer time to decide. However, your aim should be to keep the length as short as possible while retaining your customer experience quality.

Pipeline Leads

Your pipeline can forecast future revenue, so you need to measure it regularly to identify and address any issues before they start to reflect in sales numbers. Qualified leads indicate whether your marketing and sales teams reach the right audience.

Customer Lifetime Value

Since acquiring a new customer is more expensive than existing customer retention. With the prevalence of subscription-based business models, businesses focus on customer retention for revenue growth. As a result, customer lifetime value has become central to the overall revenue potential of a company.

Retention

Retention lets you understand the health of the customer base of your company. It indicates whether customers are satisfied with your services or not. Every team should keep retention on their priority list.

Pillars of RevOps

The RevOps business model consists of three pillars or foundations. Companies must ensure that all are established for clarity and accountability across the teams.

1. Process

Process means the sequential actions necessary to achieve your objectives. It is a framework, including steps, resources, and technology, for the team that they need to follow.

A process with well-defined procedures and steps will ensure a good customer experience and easy inter-departmental interactions. Regular evaluation of each step can determine if it needs any improvements. 

2. Platform

All existing tools and technologies are in sync for gathering accurate revenue information. Your company’s tools should be connected to the revenue funnel to get the real scenario. When there is a single source of truth, teams can easily get the big picture and assess their activities.

3. People

The final pillar of this process is the people in charge of putting the other pillars together and supervising them. You can either create a dedicated team for RevOps or share the responsibilities among current team members — depending on your organization’s size.

Implementation of RevOps

• Even before you have a RevOps policy, you should hire a CRO. This new executive leader will take your initiative forward. 
• Next on the list is to perform a maturity assessment to develop an effective RevOps strategy. Considering where your business stands, you need to create a roadmap. 
• Document the vision and objectives of your teams to create a revenue growth strategy. CRO needs to discuss this with the CEO and other executive leaders before developing a final plan.
• For any organization, changes are complex. But at the same time, they are absolute necessities. RevOps implementation also needs restructuring of your organization. While making the changes, ensure the teams can communicate effectively and your organization is transparent about the work responsibilities. 
• Share the documented strategy with your go-to-market teams. Make them understand how they can contribute through individual contribution and collaboration.
• RevOps teams should focus on streamlining their tools once the initial strategy is in place. 
• It helps with pipeline management, data visibility, and sales forecasting.
• This continuous workflow and process optimization step are highly relevant during the RevOps launch. CROs can ask for customer feedback or input from the team members to know how to automate the process and make it more efficient. 
• After implementing the above steps, you must continue reviewing your performance regularly. It will give you a clear idea of how your team adopts the RevOps model.

Best Revenue Operations Tools

RevOps tools are applications that let you share data and KPIs to keep marketing, sales, success, and other customer-centered teams aligned. These platforms assist teams in collaborating with greater accountability. Here are the best RevOps tools that can help you with the model implementation:

Clari

Businesses that want to convert their strategic goals into performance should go for Clari. This RevOps platform understands the value of revenue in the present day and stops it from leaking. 

It automatically accumulates data from all avenues of your organization, from emails, meetings, and outbound marketing to conversations. This platform uses actual deal data to automatically generate forecasts across every rep, overlay, channel, region, and product line. 

Thus, companies can make smart and confident strategic decisions and share those with the shareholders and stakeholders. Also, Clari uses AI and ML algorithms to get risks and actionable insights from the centralized database. 

You can use this platform for pipeline management as well. It lets you look at the existing and future transactions and deals, so you know about any changes and can maximize opportunities by quickly identifying risks.

Revenue.io

Revenue.io is an AI-powered RevOps application that guides your team toward faster growth. Besides scaling your top performers, it finds out what works best for you so you can optimize your revenue operations accordingly.

In this platform, you get both insights and tools required for real-time revenue performance optimization. Revenue.io offers features such as sales forecasting, performance insights, conversation intelligence, data and activity capture, buyer prioritization, conversation nudges, recommended coaching, and many more. 

It analyzes conversation data with AI to develop the next-best actions for your team. Empowering revenue operations, the platform converts your sales reps into superheroes.

Gong 

Gong is a Revenue Operations software application that helps your business with powerful data and incredible forecasting. Using it, you can capture activity data across your organization and generate forecasts. 

It uses AI to analyze all customer interactions in sales and CS departments and develop insights into deals, teams, and pipelines. Gong helps you get massive visibility into deal functionalities, team performance, and market status.

It analyzes the conversations and makes custom suggestions for each team member. Thus, the sales team members know which topic to discuss more and what to discuss less.

HubSpot

To address all your RevOps functions, HubSpot launched its latest suite named Operations Hub. HubSpot CRM can provide you with all the tools necessary for a full end-to-end customer experience. 

Hubspot also supports integration with many popular apps and platforms so that you can access the data from anywhere. Its top features include data sync, data quality automation, programmable automation, workflow extensions, team management and permissions, snowflake data share, datasets, and custom report builder.

With these tools, you can connect apps, automate the business process and categorically store the customer data from one central CRM platform. As a result, you get an efficient and aligned team that delivers a smooth experience to your customers.

FAQ

Conclusion

In recent years, how businesses approach revenue has changed. Hence, they are moving towards implementing RevOps models to maximize the company’s revenue potential with full-funnel accountability.

This guide touched upon all crucial aspects of RevOps, including its definition, benefits, pillars, metrics, and implementation method. From here, you can also learn about the best RevOps tools.

You may also be interested to explore some new Ops trends that are getting adopted by many organizations.