In the past, organizations operated in siloed departments, each with its own mission, customer experience, and data. Since no department shared information with the other, the customer experience wasn't unified, and businesses weren't realizing their full revenue potential.
As customer needs evolved over the years, it became no longer financially viable to keep departments such as sales and finance apart. The need to unify marketing, sales, service, and finance departments gave rise to revenue operations, or RevOps. This post details what RevOps is, why it's vital to businesses, and how to implement it in your organization.
What RevOps Means
In simple terms, revenue operations is a business-to-business (B2B) function organizations use to bring key departments from marketing to sales, service, and finance together for the purpose of:
- Creating better prices for higher margins and conversions
- Minimizing revenue loss
- Using shared data to identify new revenue-generating opportunities
The alignment of crucial departments in the revenue cycle brings transparency and accountability throughout the company's processes. In return, internal operations improve, and organizations can maximize their revenue potential.
Why RevOps is Important to Businesses
While RevOps is still a relatively new concept, it directly addresses the most pertinent customer need - a positive digital experience. Unlike in the past, today's consumers expect a business to know about their needs based on previous interactions rather than having to repeat themselves during the same process over time.
Revenue operations shift an organization's revenue cycle, including how they market, sell and serve customers, to help meet customer expectations today through the following ways:
New Revenue Channels
The RevOps funnel allows businesses to set up automatic channels that customers can purchase from. These channels include:
- E-commerce
- Service
- Direct sales
- In Product selling
- Channel sales
- Retail
- Third-party marketplace
Most businesses use a maximum of three channels.
New Revenue Models
RevOps creates new buying opportunities for customers at different revenue cycle stages. As a result, this helps businesses maximize their revenue potential. Some of the models businesses can leverage using RevOps are:
- Subscriptions
- One-time sales
- Consumption and usage-based pricing
- Milestone-based billing
Introducing these new revenue channels and models helps businesses solve three key issues. These include:
Disconnected Processes and Teams
When your marketing team isn't converting clients as you want them, the sales team isn't selling products and services like they're supposed to, or finance is complaining about low-profit margins, it creates disunity in the customer experience.
RevOps brings together critical stakeholders in the revenue lifecycle to help them develop a long-term growth plan. RevOps also builds processes to help teams in these departments develop a consistent, successful customer experience for long-term revenue growth.
Disorganized Data and Tools
Overlapping tools and messy data can make it hard to oversee the revenue cycle from start to finish. It's frustrating to go through poorly reported data on a dashboard or find that you can't locate key analytical data.
A significant benefit of revenue operations is that it creates a platform where all data and tools in the quote-to-cash process are available at a glance—as such, analyzing data and overseeing tools used in the revenue flow cycle in business is more effortless.
Untracked Revenue Streams
Due to disorganized processes, teams, and data, companies left a lot of revenue untapped. This made organizations grow slower than they should, eventually taking longer to meet their bottom lines.
RevOps streamlines processes to give your department teams greater visibility over the flow of revenue in your business. When you know where your revenue is coming from and going, you can be in a better position to take strategic steps to ensure your company meets its goal.
How to Begin Implementing RevOps
B2B organizations that take the initiative to implement revenue operations put themselves in the best position to thrive in the coming five to ten years. Luckily, it doesn't take much to implement RevOps. All you need is to take three key actions. These are:
Audit Revenue Processes
Processes are a significant part of revenue operations. Therefore, it would be best if you audited the processes involved in the revenue cycle to ensure they align with your goal of a unified revenue flow system. This includes all the existing content in the buyer's lifecycle, the technology used in marketing, service, and sales departments, and even your website.
With uniform, repetitive processes in place, customers will always transact with you as they know what to expect every time. Your team can also easily measure the value of these processes and the impact they have on your business.
Find a Suitable Platform
The success of the whole RevOps strategy is dependent on the type of platform used to store data. Naturally, you want a single source of data that makes it easy to collect and interpret the data. There are numerous CRM platforms, such as HubSpot, dedicated to capturing data on behalf of marketing, service, sales, and finance departments. These platforms also clearly elaborate on how RevOps is transforming your business revenue pipeline.
Select a Team Dedicated to RevOps
A RevOps initiative requires a team of people to oversee its successful implementation and execution across various departments in the revenue lifecycle. While all employees in these departments play a crucial role in the success of RevOps, having a selected RevOps team is the surest way to succeed.
Understandably, it can be difficult for large and small organizations to find extra staff to put behind a RevOps operation. This is where an external RevOps team comes in handy.
Outsource Your Revenue Operations for the Best Result
For years, marketing, sales, service, and finance departments had a rocky relationship that made businesses lose a lot of money. RevOps clarifies an otherwise distorted revenue flow cycle by rallying key departments around a similar goal. It also makes it easy to track progress through data over time, so you can know whether you're headed in the right direction.
At The Gist, we can provide all the resources you need to deploy successful revenue operations across crucial revenue departments. Our RevOps team can help you maximize your revenue potential and meet your bottom line faster. Contact us today to discuss a RevOps strategy for your business.
