What Is RevOps? Aligning Teams to Grow Revenue

Have you come across RevOps (revenue operations), an idea that has been attracting attention very quickly of late?

This article covers RevOps in full, from the basics through the key points of adopting it to the benefits it brings a company.

▽Recommended for
・Executives and managers who feel their teams do not work together well enough
・Business leaders whose revenue has plateaued and who are looking for a growth strategy
・Sales and marketing staff frustrated by inefficient work that crosses departments

1. What is RevOps (revenue operations)?

RevOps (revenue operations) is an organisational strategy that connects the processes, technology and data of every revenue-facing department — marketing, sales and customer service or customer success — across boundaries, and manages and optimises them as a whole.

Traditionally each of these departments has worked to its own KPIs with its own tools.
The result, though, has been information siloed department by department, bringing inefficiency, a poorer customer experience and lost opportunities — a headache for many companies.

RevOps has drawn attention in recent years as a way of breaking down that fragmentation of information and work, shifting to a structure where departments work across boundaries, and delivering both a consistent customer experience and continuous revenue.

2. Why adopting RevOps matters

The single biggest reason to adopt RevOps is that it tackles the problem of silos inside a company at the root.
As noted in the previous section, a silo is a state where information, goals and processes are split up department by department and no one can work together.
Once silos form, all kinds of harm follows that holds back the growth of the company as a whole.

◆Typical examples of the harm

●It damages the culture
When departments have different goals and different measures of success, co-operation becomes awkward and both collaboration and trust thin out. Each department then pushes ahead on its own, producing inefficient activity that is far from the best outcome for the business.

●Data-driven decisions become difficult
When information is scattered across departments rather than brought together, executives and managers struggle to decide quickly and accurately. With different data sources and different ways of cutting the numbers, there is no shared basis for the discussion in the first place.

●The customer experience loses consistency
It becomes easy for what sales said and what customer support does to contradict each other.
The customer then comes away thinking the company does not talk to itself, or that they keep explaining the same thing. In B2B especially, where the relationship continues long after the contract, losing trust is a serious loss.

●Work becomes less efficient
A common misconception is that adopting AI or the latest tools will lift productivity at a stroke. What needs looking at first is the structure of the organisation and the state of its processes. If those are fragmented and unstable, no tool, however good, will deliver.

RevOps is the approach you need to resolve the problems silos cause across the board and to achieve co-operation and consistency beyond departmental lines.
If only to deliver customer-centred value across the whole organisation, more and more companies will adopt RevOps from here on.

3. The four roles within RevOps

At the heart of RevOps is always the question of how to create the best possible experience for the customer.
RevOps is made up of the following four roles.

①Operations management
②Revenue enablement
③RevTech management (revenue technology management)
④Data management and insight

Let us look at each of the four main roles that make up RevOps in turn.

3.1 Operations management (process optimisation and productivity)

The first role within RevOps is operations management.
Operations management optimises the processes in sales, marketing and customer success, removing unnecessary work and automating what remains to maximise productivity。
If the process for handing over sales leads is inefficient, for example, leads are not followed up properly and fewer of them turn into meetings.

RevOps redesigns these flows into something consistent and uses a CRM such as HubSpot to automate them, so the work no longer depends on individuals and can be repeated reliably.
As a result you can concentrate your people on strategic work and aim for higher performance.

3.2 Revenue enablement (developing people and building training)

The second role within RevOps is revenue enablement.
Revenue enablement raises the capability of the people in the organisation and builds the internal training and the systems behind it, in order to grow revenue.

For the sales department, the emphasis is on supporting people so they can deliver consistently.
Specifically,

• Making sales training systematic
• Organising sales material and knowledge
• Defining the sales process
• Putting an onboarding process in place

are among the things it covers.
The aim is not to rely on individual sales technique but to create an environment where anyone can produce results.

Revenue enablement should be built with marketing and support as well as sales, so it has to be tackled across departments.

3.3 RevTech management (optimising the data platform and integrating data)

The third role within RevOps is RevTech management, or revenue technology management.
RevTech management selects, introduces, integrates and runs the technology involved in generating revenue。

That technology means CRM, MA (marketing automation), chatbots, sales enablement tools and the like. The more tools you adopt, the more the design of how they are run and how well they fit together matters.

If you adopt a CRM and an MA tool but each department follows its own rules, you can end up with duplicate data, input errors and reports still built by hand — more work rather than less.
RevTech management removes that waste and aims not merely to adopt tools but to optimise how they are run.

Adopting tools and optimising how they are run has to be designed backwards from your go-to-market strategy.

3.4 Data management and insight (analysing revenue across the organisation)

The fourth role within RevOps is data management and insight.
Data management and insight brings together the data gathered across sales, marketing and customer service or customer success, and uses analysis and visualisation to inform decisions。
The single most important point of this role is how accurate the data is that you base your strategy on.
If the customer data gathered across the flow from lead acquisition to meeting to order to support is visible on a dashboard, for example, you can identify bottlenecks: which activity contributes most to lifetime value, or which stage loses the most deals.
Fixing the bottlenecks you identify lets you update your activity and make investment decisions quickly.
Data management and insight is therefore not about adding up numbers but about drawing out strategies from the data that have an impact on revenue.

4. What you gain by adopting RevOps

What you gain by adopting RevOps is more than efficiency.
It leads to concrete results: departments working together better, a better customer experience, and faster revenue growth.
Here we look at three typical benefits of adopting RevOps.

①Departments work together better
②A better customer experience and higher satisfaction
③Faster problem solving and revenue growth

4.1 ①Departments work together better

In most companies, departments such as sales, marketing and customer service or customer success operate independently and each is optimised on its own.
Working independently leaves many companies with problems, though: information is not shared, departments do not co-operate enough, and strategy lacks consistency.
Silos like this make the quality of customer handling uneven and produce inefficiency and lost opportunities.

Adopt RevOps and…

Because you can oversee every department across the organisation, KPIs, processes, data and operating rules can all be managed in one place.

The various pieces of information held by each department connect up, and co-operation between them is strengthened considerably.

4.2 ②A better customer experience and higher satisfaction

What customers care about through the buying process is whether they were looked after consistently, according to their needs, from start to finish. Whether you manage that or not makes a large difference to their satisfaction.

Adopt RevOps and…

You can connect every point of contact between the company and the customer, bring each department’s handling together, and present it to the customer as a single experience.

A customer problem known to the sales owner, for example, can be known in advance to customer service or customer success and handled accordingly, as a matter of course.

The relationship with the customer deepens as a result, which makes long-term outcomes such as repeat business and upsell more likely.

4.3 ③Faster problem solving and revenue growth

When revenue dips or customers leave, finding the cause takes time and effort. Many readers will have been through this.

Adopt RevOps and…

Because operational and customer data is held in one place, you can analyse it and find the problem.

If marketing is performing well but few deals become meetings, for example, it is immediately clear that the problem lies in the sales flow.
Looking at the correlation between customer success contact history and satisfaction scores also lets you consider changing how you handle customers.

Because improvement based on data becomes an everyday habit, your cycle of planning and review speeds up, and revenue grows faster as a result.

5. What you need in place to adopt RevOps

Adopting RevOps takes more than lining up tools and people.
You have to revisit how the organisation thinks and how it works, and build a new structure for co-operation and shared understanding across departments.
Here we explain the three elements RevOps cannot do without.

5.1 A clear vision, shared across the company

RevOps is something like a framework for moving different departments — marketing, sales, customer service or customer success — as one.

The first step, then, is for the leadership to set out a clear medium- to long-term revenue strategy and share it across the company.

Telling the whole organisation why RevOps is needed now and what you want to achieve by adopting it, and getting that purpose understood and shared, makes it far easier for each department to treat the work as its own.

5.2 Making processes and data visible

Next, adopting and running RevOps requires you to see how the processes in marketing, sales and customer service or customer success connect to one another.
Draw out where work overlaps or is wasted between teams and where it depends on particular individuals, and judge what needs improving.

If departments set different KPIs and different data measures, you cannot build a shared basis for judgement across the organisation. Review these once and put in place the data foundation the whole organisation should be looking at.

5.3 The right tools and the right structure

RevOps also needs an integrated platform that connects tools such as the following.

• CRM (customer relationship management) tools
• MA (marketing automation) tools
• SFA (sales force automation) tools
• Customer service tools

In some cases you will also need a dedicated team driving RevOps, or someone accountable for it — a chief revenue officer, for instance. Without people and a structure able to lead decisions across departments, the work is left to whoever is on the ground and risks becoming a formality.

Adopting RevOps therefore asks you to get three things in balance: the vision, the state of your processes and data, and the placing of tools and people.

6. Using RevOps to drive customer satisfaction and revenue growth

We hope that was useful.
We have explained that RevOps is a way of thinking that connects marketing, sales and customer success and optimises the whole organisation around the customer experience, along with the benefits of adopting it and what you need in place to do so.

As information flows better across the organisation, you cut waste out of processes company-wide and can give customers a consistent service.

Satisfaction rises as a result, and so does the company’s continuous revenue growth.

Why not start RevOps by putting the customer experience at the centre of your thinking, and begin by setting out a vision for the organisation

Talk to us about adopting RevOps