Revenue Operations refers to the team that sits behind the Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams to ensure that all eyes are on the same prize. From the strategic level down to the tactical day to day activity level, RevOps will drive intra-departmental success. With the rise of RevOps it has also become clear that common revenue goals trump team goals, trying to avoid the systemic risk of silos appearing and bringing everyone together.
It was back in 2015 that we saw a dramatic transformation of the marketing function. It went digital, and this is now happening to all revenue-generating functions in a business. This transformation brings a much tighter grasp on data and how to interpret that data. There are some great tools out there to help with this (Ebsta, Clari, Gong, etc.,), and moves you to understand not just activity in your revenue teams, but levels of engagement.
In terms of a RevOps framework, a good way of thinking about this is looking at the customer lifecycle and the different departments that would “touch” the customer from Marketing to Sales to Customer Success and then focus on what activities these three departments do. Put another way, Marketing is responsible for Engagement, Sales for Execution, and Customer Success for Expansion and your framework should drive accountability for all three of these.
Your framework could therefore take these three responsibilities, and then consider what KPIs that activity is driving towards:
- Engagement could be Qualified Pipeline
- Execution could be net new ARR
- Expansion is Retention and Renewal ARR
Then go a few steps further and then for each activity: consider the Inputs to hit this KPI, the metrics to judge effectiveness and the tech stack required to hit this KPI.
Revenue Operations is a data-driven function and, if you get it right, is absolutely critical to scaling success. The revenue intelligence you will possess from knowing your most profitable channels to acquire leads, to how to reduce your sales cycle, to churn reduction will (and should) impact every business decision because after all, data is king.