By Adi Jagan
RevOps (a.k.a. revenue operations) is all the rage in business lingo these days, but it’s also a very real concept that is helping businesses run better—improving conditions for their employees and customers, as well as their bottom line.
A good RevOps strategy removes the barriers that wall off your Marketing, Sales and Service departments from one another. It’s a mindset in which Marketing, Sales and Service are all going in the same direction and syncing their efforts—and are given the tools with which to do so easily. With RevOps, revenue is everyone’s job.
Here’s three examples of problems that commonly arise in the workplace that RevOps can solve:
1. Bad blood between your Marketing and Sales departments.
The often-strained relationship between Sales and Marketing is well documented. Marketing thinks Sales isn’t taking full advantage of carefully planned lead generation campaigns, while Sales thinks Marketing is out of touch with what customers really want, since they’re not out in the field.
We’ve all worked for companies where different departments are perpetually at war with each other. It’s unpleasant, bad for morale and bad for business. It wastes everyone’s time.
A RevOps approach reforms this standoff by crafting a unified strategy for both your Sales and Marketing departments, one with complementary goals and shared revenue goals where possible. This strategy gets Marketing and Sales on the same page in terms of customer journeys, and rewards the achievement of shared goals, which fosters collaboration instead of competition. As a bonus, when people work harmoniously with each other towards shared goals, employee satisfaction, productivity and retention goes up.
2. Missed opportunities for upsells with existing customers.
Many organizations struggle to adapt to customer needs and gain insights from data. While Service departments don’t traditionally think of themselves as revenue generators, in a RevOps model, that’s exactly what they are. Indeed, they’re the front line of communication with any business’s most important audience: their existing customers.
If Service remains isolated, they’re not upselling or sharing valuable feedback with the Sales team. RevOps solves this problem by establishing systems where customer service departments can easily document and share customer feedback in ways that generate leads for the sales department.
If Service receives a great review, they share that information as a warm lead for the Sales department, complete with data about the reviewer’s purchase history. Speaking of data sharing, let’s move to our third problem.
3. Sales are down, and departments are pointing fingers at one another to place blame.
Decreased sales are a problem, but squabbling teams and inter-departmental discord is a much bigger one. RevOps requires that everyone in your organization relies on a single source of easily accessed, unified data. If each department relies on different records or data, how can you accurately measure performance or gain insights from your setbacks? How can you identify problems and solutions if two departments are working with different sets of numbers?
We know that organizations that promote data sharing will outperform their peers on most business metrics. Improved visibility into customer data also fosters better working relationships between departments.
For these reasons, a RevOps professional will work to get as many of a company’s software programs as possible integrated with one another. Integrating your tech stack is a key component for implementing a successful RevOps strategy. Departments can’t unite in the service of revenue goals unless they’re working from a single source of truth.
A RevOps mindset unites departments in pursuit of shared goals, and unifies data to make that pursuit more streamlined and accessible. It sounds wonky and MBA-ish—but it’s really about common sense ways of reducing friction and promoting flow when it comes to data, KPIs and your company culture.
Want to learn more about how a RevOps strategy could transform your business? Let’s talk!
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