In today’s fast-changing business environment, Revenue Operations are becoming increasingly important as companies seek new ways to sustain predictable growth.
The responsibilities of a RevOps leader are constantly evolving to meet the needs of a growing business. At their core, Revenue Operators have served as agents of change within an organization – taking their companies from a world of siloed Go To Market teams to being aligned towards the ultimate goal of revenue optimization.
But that change begins in how a company thinks about how they can deliver a consistent customer experience across the entire lifecycle. The move towards a RevOps model can be gradual, but it always involves a shift in the mindset of a company and how it thinks about its Go Market teams.
Revenue Operations can’t be seen as merely a tactical position; it is a mindset that must be embraced across the entire company to be successful.
Conceptually, Revenue Operations is a natural evolution in the mind of many sales and marketing operations folks.
While each function is tied to its own metrics, they are all revenue-focused in one way or another.
The challenge of Revenue Operations, at its core, is about the alignment of processes and measurements that span across sales, marketing, and customer success. Many people with sales operations or marketing operations in their title are already faced with these challenges; Revenue Operations is just an easier way to conceptualize it.
Even within companies that do not have a Revenue Operations function, Sales Operations teams are already being looked at as the source of truth when it comes to revenue. Sales Operations' data, analysis, and strategy become a valuable resource for customer success and marketing teams.
Revenue Operations is more than a job title; it is a driver of organizational change. The ability to look horizontally across the funnel enables a company to be more effective at driving success in the organizations that each operations team is supporting.
This mindset provides many additional opportunities to help drive scalable growth than the siloed approach of the past. SiriusDecisions found that this kind of organizational alignment between sales and marketing can increase growth by nearly 40%.
More important than job titles or reporting structures, being aligned on the mindset of working together to achieve efficiencies across the funnel defines Revenue Operations.
Having a unified Revenue Operations function reporting up to the same leader is helpful, but not all companies operate this way. In some companies, Revenue Operations reports up to the Chief Customer Officer or Chief Sales Officer – and it works perfectly fine.
Teams must be aligned from a synergistic perspective, working together to accomplish the shared objectives.
Revenue Operations can just be thought of tactically; it’s a methodology and mindset.
For some, focusing on alignment between teams can be jarring. It requires a shift in the way sales, marketing, and customer success teams view their organizations and goals. To shift from a silo mentality to a Revenue Operations mindset, organizational leadership must also be involved.
From the CEO on down, this requires leaders to prioritize alignment across teams and lead by example in terms of company culture.
According to a report released by LeanData earlier this year, while 31% of sales and marketing professionals said that their company already had a Revenue Operations function, 27% stated that it was in the process of being built.
In new research released by InsideView, over half of respondents felt that their companies would merge sales and Marketing Operations under a single team.
In many organizations, the transition to Revenue Operations begins with the Sales Operations function. These companies often find that Sales Operations, along with supporting the sales function, cross the line into customer success and marketing.
When this is done with a vertical, siloed mindset, many Sales Operators will realize that they need a horizontal, full-funnel approach to succeed.
These companies realize that they need to see the flow of the entire customer lifecycle, both pre and post-sale.
Clari defines three major structures of RevOps that could be considered:
Whichever one of these models a company chooses depends entirely on their needs – there are no hard and fast rules.
In a transition period, as a company is moving closer to a Revenue Operations model, there could be a situation in which Sales Ops still reports to sales and Marketing Ops reports to marketing. Still, they meet regularly to create full alignment. This can be the model for a transition into a more evolved form of Revenue Operations until a full-fledged Revenue Operations manager or leader is found.
As a company goes through this transition, it’s important to get buy-in from all stakeholders. Change is hard, and there may be some hesitancy, but it’s critical to have everyone aligned as you go through the transition.
This is a journey for everyone. If Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support are truly aligned operationally, and on metrics, then you are well on your way. There is no need for a company to move faster than they can towards implementing a full-blown Revenue Operations model.
A company can move into Revenue Operations by taking these concepts and implementing them into the organizational structure as it exists today.
In preparation for a full change-over, some steps can be taken along the way to ease the transition:
