Why You Need to Adopt a RevOps Mindset

What is RevOps?

Revenue Operations is a function that is responsible for the development, measurement, and refinement of the company's revenue strategy across all customer journeys. 

In short, it is a function that combines Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service/Success Management into one holistic view to identify and increase revenue opportunities for an organization.

To implement RevOps in organizations, all operations/departments need to unite around one goal (Revenue) and develop metrics that drive the behaviours required that optimize an organizations' opportunity.

Why is this needed? 

Traditionally no matter the size of organizations, marketing/advertising, sales, and product or service delivery operations were segregated functions with customer service as the department that interacted with customers when things went wrong. 

Marketing had the job of increasing awareness for the brand and providing leads. The sales job was to qualify and close the leads. The operations job was to deliver the product or service, and the customer agent's jobs were to keep the customers. Each department worked with individual goals as per their function. 

While this does work and can work, there is a better way. Have one goal for all departments to focus on: increasing revenue and the customer lifetime value.

Why have one goal?

Today's customer expects omnichannel service and a seamless experience not segregated between departments and disjointed with handoffs. The customer expects that all company members are aware of the customer's current situation, history, immediate and future needs. 

Customers want to be serviced at any touchpoint in their experience and advance their goals no matter with whom they interact. Enter RevOps.

With RevOps, there is a dedicated focus on the entire customer experience spanning all departments that impact the customer's journey. As stated above, historically, individual departments focused on optimizing their area of the customer journey and had a limited view of the overall customer experience. Revenue operations focuses and analyzes events and touchpoints in the customer journey, which advances the customer towards buying (or repeat buying) and higher engagement.

The RevOps focus then provides each department with this data and processes to realize optimized customer engagement and address detrimental areas to the experience. As a result, increasing revenue opportunities with customers can now happen at all customer touchpoints. All departments are working towards one goal, which is increasing revenue. 

How to Adopt Revenue Operations

First, RevOps is a culture change, and you need to have foundations in place before fully implementing it. 

You will need to audit your data, processes and technology platform you are using.

There are universal basic data sets required, and the first step is often just gathering data outputs on your processes, such as:

• Funnel Metrics:
  - Cost per Lead
  - Close Rate
  - Cost per Acquisition
  - Deal Velocity 
• Average Transaction or Annual Account size
• Customer Life Time Value
• Churn Rate
• Renewals or Upsells

The second step in your audit is to review your processes and map your customer journey to understand and uncover metrics and methods for optimizing your journey. For instance, the close rate may increase or decrease depending on the processes used. You will not know this until you map it and iterate with data to validate the impact of the change.

The final step is to review your Technology platform in place that provides a single source of truth about your customer experience, be it Marketing Operations, Sales Operations or Service. Many organizations have this spread over many disjointed systems. (i.e. Marketing has its systems and data, Sales has its systems as does service) Gathering data and getting a single view is all but impossible or so complex that it is rarely done.

What is needed is a unified platform in place, which can gather and create reporting to understand the metrics that matter to efficiently see the impact actions are having on the entire customer journey.

Once the audit is completed and the baseline created only then can you move to the next phases:

• Designing and aligning your RevOps processes, building your go-to-market plan, and new supporting processes. 
• Implementing a technology platform that can provide the data to see your customer journey and understand the impact of your processes.
• Continually optimize your systems through a changed culture that uses customer data, process metrics, and regular reviews and dashboards to make choices. 

In the end, with the complete adaptation of RevOps you will have a wholly aligned organization around the entire customer journey with a predictable revenue model that grows the business instead of the old sales forecast (or hopecast) based on historical norms and best guesses. 

Which one do you want?