In a quickly changing and increasingly competitive business environment, companies are being pushed to embrace new strategies to remain a step ahead and ensure sustained, long term growth. Brand positioning, product-market fit and other factors greatly influence any company’s long-term success and more than ever, companies are realizing the importance of the Revenue Operations (RevOps) function, to optimize efficiencies like never before.
In the B2B SaaS sector nowadays, innovation along with Revenue Operations (RevOps) is crucial for success. This importance stems from the nature of SaaS companies, which are typically data-driven and depend heavily on effective sales and marketing to attract and retain customers. Add to it the plethora of SaaS tools to integrate seamlessly, AI disrupting virtually every commercial function and the complexities of managing international expansion, and the crucial role of RevOps becomes even more obvious.
In this article, let’s answer just 2 basic questions before diving further into the exciting world of RevOps.
- What is RevOps?
- What are the 4 pillars of RevOps?
What is RevOps?
Revenue Operations or RevOps (not DevOps!), is a strategic approach that aligns and optimizes all the customer-facing functions within a company, including marketing, sales, customer success and increasingly, partnerships. The goal of RevOps is to drive growth by breaking down silos between these departments and creating a more cohesive, efficient operation that enhances the customer journey from first contact to ongoing engagement.
RevOps aims to help a company achieve long-term, sustained growth, with a relentless focus on data transparency and continuous process optimization across the board.
Lastly, it would be tempting to just limit RevOps’s involvement to these 4 departments – sales, marketing, customer success and partnerships, but in reality, RevOps will often cross paths with finance, legal and even HR, albeit ideally, not on a day-to-day basis.
The 4 pillars of RevOps
My research has concluded that there seem to be two versions of the “Pillars of RevOps” depending on who you ask.
- Process, platform, people
- Operations, Enablement, Data & Insights, Tools & Technology
The terms vary and you’ll find versions using “Strategy and alignment” to refer to Operations or perhaps “Revenue intelligence and analytics” to refer to Data & Insights” but by and large, we can stick with the second version above. Version one, aka “The 3 Ps of RevOps” sounds lovely, but fails to give a complete 360 view of RevOps.
In all honesty, the variations across the board tell you just how nascent the understanding of RevOps as a function is and I for one, find that incredibly exciting!
So let’s dig in with version 2. 🙂
1. Operations
Optimizing day-to-day operations and process flows across teams to eliminate inefficiencies and increase revenue generating actions is one of the most critical aspects of the RevOps function. This involves standardizing processes, adopting best practices, and developing a strong operational framework across the sales, marketing, customer success and partnerships teams.
Your goal is to create the most seamless experience across all teams with a focus on the end customer experience, such that there are no bottlenecks and it’s a pleasure for all departments to work cross-functionally.
Examples include defining processes for a smooth sales to marketing handover, ensuring leads are followed-up with in a timely manner, processes to have an evergreen sales pipeline and fool-proof deal pipeline progression with no missing data.
2. Enablement
Enablement in RevOps is no different from Sales Enablement, except we’re looking at a winder picture, involving sales, marketing, customer success and often, partnerships.
This encompasses implementing training and development programs, the right resources with easy access to them, and keeping communication channels open for sharing knowledge.
Depending on the size of the organization, all of the company’s commercial enablement efforts won’t necessarily fall under RevOps and it’s important to scope out the roles & responsibilities before you get started. For example, you might already have a sales enablement person or department and you wouldn’t want to do double work.
Before getting too excited with enablement, make sure you take the time to understand exactly who needs what and when, and how it can be best delivered and accessed, to really facilitate revenue generation. Often, companies have document after document that was worked on once, never updated and never looked at twice. Try not to fall into this trap by implementing methods to keep your documents, training etc up to date and relevant at all times.
Data & Insights
Data is undoubtedly the backbone of a successful RevOps function and for that matter, any successful SaaS organization that really knows what they’re doing. As Edwards Deming famously said, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion” and unfortunately, biased opinions don’t generate recurring revenue growth.
The RevOps function is responsible for setting up, maintaining and enhancing a robust data warehouse with reliable data, from which real-time insights can be gleaned to make sound, rational business decisions.
Unifying data with different structures and naming conventions across departments is one of the trickiest parts of the RevOps function but when executed well, can result in compounded business growth which would otherwise be unfathomable.
The goal should be to have every commercial department and leadership equipped with real-time, reliable data and reporting, to help the company understand what’s working and what’s not. The data warehouse and tech stack you choose to enable data collection and analysis are therefore extremely impactful, which brings us to pillar number 4.
Tools & Technology
Yes, you can still go a long way running a company’s operations solely on Google Sheets but all good things must come to an end. At the crux of RevOps is leveraging tools and technology to streamline and automate processes, glean real-time (data) insights, and allow inter-departmental collaboration that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
As the RevOps function, you’re responsible for selecting the right set of tools (think CRM, outreach tool, call recording & analysis tool, marketing automation platform etc) that work for your organization, that can talk to each other. Integrations are key, for seamless data flow across the tech stack and for management to have a helicopter view of the business health, at the press of a button.
You’re always optimizing for revenue which means not only supporting revenue generation, but also managing costs, so it can be tempting to skimp on tools to save a buck or two. But be careful and very diligent when selecting your tech-stack, looking at the long-term impact. A tool that’s 20% more expensive but reduces the time it takes sales to put together a proposal by 70% is likely a good investment.
The four pillars will interplay with each other ever so often and overlap is inevitable, but using this framework helps set the much needed clarity you need to succeed in your endeavors. Depending on the organizational setup, RevOps can also be heavily involved in setting and optimizing KPIs for and across departments, but understanding these 4 pillars first is key to helping RevOps help you shine.
I like to use the acronym TODE, but that’s probably just me!
