How to Successfully Grow Your RevOps Practice
In the modern and ever-evolving business landscape, Revenue Operations has become a critical function in driving efficiency and consistency across sales, marketing, and customer success teams. When businesses are eyeing high revenue goals, growing a robust RevOps practice is a significant instrument to this success. This paper delves into the major steps toward the successful building and scaling of a RevOps practice—an activity at the heart of driving sustainable revenue growth and operational excellence.
What is RevOps, and why is it so important?
RevOps is the strategic practice that all revenue-generating functions—sales, marketing, and customer success—are aligned around, in order to increase value through the life of the customer. It involves an integrated approach among the operations of various groups, enhancing collaboration and visibility into data, and leading better decision-making around rev ops. For those companies that have adopted RevOps practices, today’s productivity and outcomes both are highly increasing. Modern business strategy will remain incomplete without taking it into account.
For instance, SaaS companies with more mature RevOps practices reported:
- 100-200% hike in digital marketing ROI
- 10% to 20% improvements in sales productivity
- 30% cuts in go-to-market costs
You may think these are quite astounding results that display the value of RevOps in driving revenues up and improving operational efficiency. The demand for RevOps has boomed by 300% recently, so it is high time to focus on creating and building your RevOps practice.
When is it Right Time to Introduce RevOps?
It may be time to consider bringing RevOps into your organization if you’re facing challenges in sales, marketing, and customer success, trying to maintain some form of consistent set of revenue targets and metrics across the teams. Some common indicators that your company could benefit from a RevOps practice:
- A need for greater transparency and accountability across revenue-generating functions
- Revenue targets that are not aligned across different teams
- Conflicts and blaming between departments
- Key business metrics that don’t match up
If any of these challenges sound familiar, it’s time to consider building a foundation for RevOps within your organization.
Building the Foundation of RevOps
All successful RevOps practices follow these three components: cross-functional teams, clear metrics, and repeatable processes. Let’s dig into them.
1. Assembling a Cross-Functional Team
Put differently, the heart of RevOps is to align every department that interfaces with a customer: Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Renewals, and Product. This type of team, with alignment in place, sees to it that:
- Sales can identify the right customers for your products
- Marketing can attract and retain the ideal customers
- Customer experience remains excellent throughout the customer lifecycle
- Operations can implement the right tools, systems, and resources
Create a cross-functional team that works well in collaboration with the go-to-market efforts to achieve success with the RevOps practice.
2. Setting RevOps Metrics
Set Metrics with Your Team Once your team is aligned, you’re ready to set metrics that make it easy for you to monitor RevOps performance. Some common metrics adapted in RevOps include:
- Revenue: Track monthly or annual recurring revenues (ARR) based on your business model.
- Revenue Retention: Watch and track gross revenue retention and net revenue retention to ensure you are really focused on the right customers and doing all you can to support them appropriately.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Make sure your CAC does not exceed your product’s CLV.
- Sales Pipeline Velocity: Calculate the revenue generated per unit of time to gauge the efficiency of your sales process.
- Customer Churn Rate: Keep track of the percentage of customers who discontinue the use of your product to research some bugs in customer support.
- Sales Forecasting: Have accurate forecasts of sales, considering factors like marketing spend and customer churn.
In other words, you will be able to set and track those metrics accordingly to have more visibility into the performance of your RevOps; adjustments can be done informedly.
3. Defining Repeatable Processes
RevOps is really about breaking down silos in organizations between departments in order to provide a very unified customer experience. While you establish your RevOps practice, focus on evolving processes which will ease operations and offer transparency. The processes could include:
- How leads are handed off between marketing and sales
- How it prioritizes and manages customer support requests
- How data is collected, analyzed and shared between departments
This underscores the importance of clearly laid out and repeatable processes to keep your RevOps practice going smoothly so that you can deliver consistent results.
Growing Your RevOps Practice
Once a sound base for RevOps is laid, the next step is to take it up with scaling practice to add value to business growth. Here’s how you scale your RevOps practice:
1. Building your RevOps Team Structure
As businesses scale, the RevOps team will need to grow alongside the company’s growing demands. The various roles that a well-constituted RevOps team includes:
- Head of Revenue Business Strategy or RevOps: The cohesive revenue business strategy is headed by this individual, who reports to the CEO.
- Sales Enablement Manager: Delivers to the sales team all essential information, tools, and training materials to close deals smoothly.
- Systems Administrator: Manages the tech stack, integrations, and data migrations.
- Business or Sales Analyst: Analyzes RevOps metrics and figures out possible efficiency and productivity improvements.
Begin by identifying internal team members who can fill in these roles, hats they may have to change, and further fill in the gaps by hiring additional staff only where absolutely necessary.
2. Technology and Automation
Technology is at the core of scaling your RevOps practice. As your company grows, its operations gain complexity, and your tech stack needs to stay apace. The tech stack’s development flows through these stages:
- Seed Stage: Think fundamental tools like CRM, proposal software, and payment solutions.
- Series A: Scale with new platforms for sales engagement, customer success, and commission tracking.
- Series B and C Raise: Upgrade your tech stack to support even larger teams and increasingly complex deals, including sales intelligence and analytics tools.
Investing in the right technology and automation solutions is what can make an effective, scalable operation out of a RevOps practice.
3. Fostering a Culture of Continuous Improvement
A successful RevOps operation is done with continuous improvement and learning in the culture. Regularly track and analyze RevOps metrics for optimization opportunities. Instill the change mindset, fostering continuous innovation within your team, so that your RevOps practice evolves along with market conditions and the needs of business.
Conclusion
A solid RevOps practice can drive consistency in revenue growth, better operational efficiency, and an overall superior customer experience. You can build a RevOps function by putting in place a cross-functional team, figuring out the right metrics, establishing repeatable processes, and scaling your practice with technology for getting into a better support position of your business goals and long-term success.
