Are you sick of not having full visibility of your sales pipeline? Are you struggling to make confident hiring and investment decisions? Or are you worried that your marketing leads are left hanging by your sales team? Worry no more with a RevOps strategy: your golden ticket to predictable and sustainable revenue growth.
Revenue Operations - or, as the cool kids call it - RevOps uses automation to provide data and insights that fuel revenue growth. A RevOps strategy aims to enhance communication and bridge gaps between marketing and sales. This breaks down informational and departmental silos to ensure all customer-facing functions (marketing, sales and service) are fuelled by centralised customer data and a unified playbook for attracting and optimising revenue. But critically, it also helps you be more intentional about your entire customer experience.
What impact can a RevOps strategy have on your business?
A RevOps strategy can guide you through the turbulent seas of revenue generation by synchronising the data and activities of marketing, sales and service. And for good reason. Companies that have deployed RevOps have grown their revenue 3x faster than those that haven't. And this makes perfect sense, particularly for b2b organisations. You see, you might implement a successful marketing and sales campaign to sell a particular product to a segment of customers. But unless you can see how these customers were serviced, how profitable that product was in that customer segment, and whether your product actually delivered high satisfaction, you're at risk of sinking further marketing and sales resources into an unprofitable or unsatisfactory product.
With Rev-Ops, data is centralised right across functions, with a single customer record showing all the customer's interactions with your brand. Revenue numbers can be pulled from the same pool of clean data, and so can satisfaction benchmarks, NPS and other metrics of customer happiness. No wonder a b2b RevOps approach improves planning and forecasting, product development, customer service processes, and of course - marketing and sales planning too.
How do you deliver an effective RevOps strategy?
1. Clearly define your goals
Do you want to improve customer satisfaction? Or want greater visibility into the sales cycle timeline? Or both? Either way, the first step is clearly defining what you want to achieve with a RevOps strategy. Your goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) and resonate with your sales and marketing teams.
2. Establish your RevOps metrics
Ensure that the metrics you choose to measure the success of your RevOps strategy align with your goals. These are some of the key metrics:
- Annual recurring revenue: This metric reflects the anticipated recurring revenue from yearly subscriptions.
- Customer lifetime value: This signifies the total value a customer brings to a business throughout the entire relationship.
- Customer churn rate: This metric is the percentage of customers an organisation loses during a specific time frame.
- Sales cycle duration: This is the total number of days it takes to close a deal, divided by the number of closed deals.
- Win rate: This measures the success rate achieved by a sales team within a specified period.
3. Analyse your data
Most growth specialists will revel in the kind of analysis that RevOps data offers. You can do so much more than analysing how a particular channel like paid search is performing. You can see how paid search channel is converting, and then how profitable those customers are to service . Of these contacts, how long is the sales cycle? What's the churn rate? What is the average customer lifetime? And how does it compare to organic search-sourced leads? Capturing these insights will help you make smarter decisions about where to invest your marketing budget and which leads your sales team should prioritise.
4. Map the customer journey
The crux of RevOps is visibility. It's all about gaining insight into what triggers your customer’s initial engagement with your business and what sparks their subsequent interactions. Understanding the customer journey helps unify customer-facing teams to enhance customer experience and capitalise on growth opportunities.
Getting this level of visibility actually pretty simple. First, map the key touch points or interactions you want to report on, then set up your tech to track behaviours throughout those moments. Then you'll see how key moments of the customer's journey are landing. e.g. How are your prospects engaging with different content? What product messaging is resonating? Where are sales conversations getting stuck? Where are your customers struggling with our service or product? At what stage are we receiving complaints or issues? The insights you gain from your RevOps data should help you improve your marketing, sales and customer service processes - and ultimately your bottom line.
5. Choose your RevOps tools
We commonly come across b2b organisations that have invested in a plethora of technologies, many of which do not work together, or are not being used at all. The aim of RevOps is to get a single, centralised view of the customer throughout their journey. This sometimes requires consolidation - that is, moving more operations onto a single platform. Other times, it may require integration. Whatever your strategy, review how each tech tool aligns with your requirement and whether it is helping or hindering you delivering a top-notch customer experience.
To that end, it’s necessary to involve your customer-facing teams in your RevOps strategy development. This ensures that each department has a stake in the process, understands the why behind it, and can proactively collaborate to grow revenue. It's a holistic approach that transforms how you serve your customers before and after deal closure, empowering your organisation to be a revenue-rousing powerhouse. Plus - working with other smart leaders is simply more fun!
To learn more about how to develop an effective, dollar-boosting RevOps strategy for your b2b organisation, get in touch with us here.
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