What you need to know about RevOps

A transformative, revenue-focused business model that accelerates success through synergy – is it right for your organisation?

Revenue Operations – RevOps – could completely change your business success. But you may not even have heard of it. Here’s why you should read on.

RevOps is for you if your organisation is on a journey of growth and you want to achieve revenue objectives more quickly and with more focus. It’s for organisations in all sectors and of all sizes, from small to large.

Our RevOps leads have written this blog to give you the key facts about RevOps so you can decide if you need to give it more attention. It’s a five-minute read designed to give you a clear understanding of the concept so you can consider and discuss RevOps with authority.

RevOps in a nutshell

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a powerful model for rapid revenue growth. RevOps embeds cross-functional collaboration by unifying data, measures and dashboards and applying common goals and incentives. It guides a cross-functional team to work together in a continuous cycle, sharing accountability for revenue generation, maintenance and growth. By doing this, organisations can move prospects through the pipeline faster and increase loyalty and lifetime value through enhanced customer experiences.

RevOps vs conventional commercial models

Business leaders know they need a structure to deliver sales systematically. Traditionally, they establish functional units, roles, activities, and processes that support the sales team. Separate teams deliver outputs like compensation and incentive plans, territory structuring and alignment, lead management, process optimisation and sales technology. It’s quite effective… but it has limits. That’s because it’s a siloed system that focuses strictly on converting customers through a step-by-step, function-specific sales process, with hand-offs between teams or roles.

Types of business that benefit most from RevOps

All businesses and organisations can benefit from RevOps. It’s not a one-size-fits-all prescription – it’s an approach that leaders can apply to suit their resources, market and maturity. It’s about asserting equal accountability for revenue and customer growth amongst all its contributing functions.

Adopting RevOps – critical elements

Whatever the size and nature of the organisation, there are key areas that need to be addressed before leaders can apply RevOps effectively:

1. Culture – senior leaders need to persuade teams of the value of the approach, so everyone is bought in to the concept of sharing rather than guarding information
2. Data strategy – the organisation must have good data governance and data literacy to enable effective data-sharing throughout the business
3. Unified data – one version of the truth is key. That means integrating all your data into a single Cloud platform, for an unbiased 360-degree view.
4. Data access – secure access to data, analytics and dashboards for people in a wide range of roles is vital for shared accountability and understanding of collective impact on revenue goals
5. Common language – organisations need to agree on the terminology and metrics they’ll use, so everyone can understand what’s important

What RevOps looks like in practice

Organisations that are thriving through RevOps share three common characteristics, in our experience:

• People – there’s an enlightened attitude to data-sharing and collaboration, with teams and roles liberated from ingrained beliefs about what traditional functions own and should do

• Technology – users have determined the design of technology, tools and unified data by sharing their experiences and needs for accessible intelligence and insights

• Processes – RevOps team members understand exactly how they should work together, with agreed KPIs, operating procedures, training and reporting formats. They’re not tempted to revert to silo thinking, because they know the new ways are better

Benefits: what RevOps delivers to the bottom line

By streamlining and aligning the most powerful roles and functions in an organisation through RevOps, you can go beyond even a good team culture where there’s a willingness to work together across functional boundaries. Leaders reap the rewards of intrinsically revenue-focused collaboration that demolishes silos.

Creating lifetime value for the whole business through customer loyalty and advocacy is front and centre for everyone, instead of hitting individual sales targets at all costs or making reactive, short-term decisions. People in every key role and function see the big picture; they’re empowered to take the decisions and actions that deliver most overall benefit.

Excellent customer experience

In competitive markets where customers have more choice than ever before, seamless experiences count. RevOps brings together resources from marketing, sales, customer success, finance and operations behind every touchpoint, making the customer experience human and effortless.

Transparency and accountability

RevOps breaks down barriers by mapping and aligning the hand-off points between all parties. This opens up visibility of what each party is doing and shows how members of all functions are collectively accountable for revenue attainment. They can see blockages and missed opportunities that are impacting revenue and take collegiate action to accelerate revenue growth.

Accuracy and predictability

With RevOps, teams can identify key data points that influence the next set of actions and help to predict pipeline growth more accurately. Traditionally, organisations end up with a sales plan, a marketing plan, a customer success plan and a finance plan. RevOps delivers one plan that encompasses them all.

Simplicity

A purposeful RevOps team supported with the right tools and consolidated data can use one dashboard and one set of indicators to help improve close rates, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and the overall customer experience. Managers spend less time battling over the perceived status and value of competing activities. By reducing friction and improving cross-functional processes, deal cycles are accelerated.

RevOps Summary

RevOps offers a game-changing opportunity for outperformance and revenue optimisation in organisations of all sizes and sectors.

That’s why Xpedition has developed and tested a RevOps framework based on key principles proposed by leading consultancies and revenue growth experts. It’s designed to move businesses quickly and effectively through a process of discovery, transformation and deployment across people, technology and processes. 

If you’d like to find out more about applying the model in your organisation, get in touch with an Xpedition RevOps specialist.