Guide
Apr 19, 2022
What is RevOps and how can it transform your revenue growth potential? Read on for the must-knows on RevOps and why your company needs it in today’s market.
There’s no doubt about it: technology has transformed the way we do business. From data-driven everything to smart sales forecasting to automation and more, the way companies operate today looks drastically different than just 5 or 10 years ago.
Most of technology’s impact has been for the better. We make smarter decisions, execute more quickly, and connect with customers in new and exciting ways. At the same time, however, it has potential to create more silos and increase complexity when it’s not optimized appropriately.
To compound this challenge, sales — the primary source of revenue for most companies — now requires more tools, teams and touchpoints than it has in the past.
Companies today need a more holistic approach to revenue — one that focuses on more than just keeping the engine running and aims to drive continual innovation and growth.
The solution? Revenue operations (RevOps).
Read on to learn what RevOps is, what it looks like in practice, and why it’s more important than ever for companies to adopt it.
Quick Takeaways
- RevOps aligns all of an organization’s go-to-market teams to accelerate revenue growth.
- Companies are best able to implement RevOps with a Chief Revenue Officer leading the effort.
- RevOps creates intelligent organizations with the capability to make smart, data-informed decisions.
- The three pillars of RevOps are people, process, and technology.
- Companies can use Xactly’s four-level RevOps maturity model as a guide through their RevOps transformation.
What is RevOps?
RevOps combines sales, marketing, customer success, and finance to align go-to-market (GTM) activities to accelerate revenue growth. It systematically optimizes every part of your revenue strategy and streamlines the people, processes, and technologies that impact it.
Ideally led by a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), RevOps places your revenue-impacting resources under one leader with growth as their top priority. It establishes a culture focused on the shared goal of driving revenue.
In practice, RevOps is characterized by:
- Informed and collaborative GTM teams
- Lean, agile, efficient processes
- Data-driven decision making and reporting
- Optimized technology tools
- Seamless customer experience across the lifecycle
When implemented the right way, RevOps creates a healthy and predictable revenue stream for your company and continually uncovers new opportunities for growth.
Why is RevOps so important?
The importance of RevOps lies in its ability to create intelligent organizations. Business intelligence, specifically, leverages internal and external data to inform smart business decisions at every step of the revenue cycle.
Business intelligence data then drives intelligent revenue — a deep, detailed view into the way your business generates revenue and the resources it takes to do it. By looking at past revenue performance, competitor data, current market trends, and forecasts, you can achieve the most comprehensive and accurate understanding of revenue opportunities for your business.
RevOps is what makes intelligent revenue possible. Without it, business intelligence data would live in siloed departments and unoptimized technology tools, never leveraged to its full potential. RevOps integrates the people, processes, and technologies necessary to maximize ROI and business intelligence tools and turn it into an intelligent revenue strategy that drives continual growth.
Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these three pillars of RevOps.
3 Pillars of RevOps
People
Key to successful RevOps is the recruitment and retention of top talent in your organization. RevOps can help you do this in two important ways: equipping your GTM teams with the data they need to be successful, and eliminating tedious busywork that cuts into revenue-driving activities.
Marketing, sales, and customer success teams need data insights in order to take informed action. Otherwise, they’re taking a shot-in-the-dark approach to prospect and customer engagement, and at no fault of their own.
Sales reps, for example, need access to a good CRM system in order to assess the health of potential deals. Marketing teams need software tools that give them insight into the performance of their campaigns. Customer success teams need customer feedback data to understand how they can optimize retention efforts.
They also need time to dedicate to their strategic responsibilities. With a RevOps model in place, tedious work is automated or eliminated, and company time (i.e. meetings, professional development, etc.) is intentionally managed to optimize performance.
In RevOps organizations, then, sales reps focus on selling rather than data entry or excessive meetings. Sales managers focus on coaching their teams rather than acting as administrators. Best practices are shared and scaled to improve performance. People are seen and valued as the company’s most important revenue-driving asset.
Process
The past two years have taught us more than ever that organizational agility is critical in today’s business environment. Companies must be able to withstand unpredictable markets and changing economic conditions. To do it, they need to have lean and efficient processes in place.
RevOps can help you accomplish this in two specific ways:
- Automation - elimination of slow, labor-intensive tasks from business processes
- Alignment - ability to streamline and focus the efforts of all GTM teams towards a common goal
Optimized processes are at the core of the RevOps model. The efficiency of your processes truly determines the level to which you can implement a RevOps strategy that will succeed.
Technology
There’s no getting around it: RevOps is impossible without technology tools to drive its implementation at scale. A revenue performance management platform, specifically, can set revenue leaders and their organizations ahead of the competition with optimized insights focused on revenue growth.
When data is spread across multiple tools and systems, it leads to siloed teams and fragmented strategies. Revenue performance management platforms provide a single source of truth for GTM teams that drives the most informed, intelligent decision making possible across the entire revenue cycle.
Achieving Intelligent Revenue with RevOps
Reaching true RevOps maturity doesn’t happen overnight. So where do you start?
Our RevOps Maturity Model provides a roadmap you can follow to initiate RevOps capabilities at your organization, advancing key capabilities and building on success over time.
- Level 1: Manual - The organization has no visibility or analytical capability.
- Level 2: Automation - Many processes are still siloed but the organization has begun investing in automation, starting with a core process.
- Level 3: Integration - The organization now has multiple sources of revenue data integrated, though there are still silos. Cross-functional teams work together regularly and are somewhat aligned on strategic plans for revenue growth.
- Level 4: Optimization - The fully optimized organization is predictable, profitable and resilient.
The first step to RevOps transformation is to conduct a maturity assessment to understand where your organization currently stands. Then, create a unified solution and implementation plan, rolling out solutions iteratively and building on incremental success.
Throughout the process, know and prioritize important KPIs, track your progress, and perform regular value assessments before and after each solution is implemented.
With a strong plan in place, consistent effort, and a capable leader, your organization can achieve RevOps success.
The Xactly Intelligent Revenue Platform brings Revenue Operation teams together to support salespeople with precise plans, better incentives, and data-informed insights to give them more confidence in their pipeline. Learn more about how we can help you transform your revenue strategy.
