Most revenue-driven businesses have wrestled with the idea of alignment. Namely, aligning internal sales and marketing teams to work together towards a common goal to succeed as a business unit rather than siloed departments. You may be familiar with sales operations and marketing operations, but within the last year, companies have introduced a new player to the field of operations to further emphasize interdepartmental alignment.
The Rise of Revenue Operations
As mentioned earlier, your company probably has already taken steps towards aligning your sales and marketing teams. You may have even involved your customer service team in this discussion as well. Each of these groups has important processes and strategies that are valuable to bring to the table. However, many organizations have noticed a new gap that needs to be filled.
Defining Rev Ops
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is a methodology that prioritizes the unification of the various departments or systems to work together as one high-performing, revenue-driven, growth machine. In order to tell the entire story of the business, you need to understand the subsets of data that make up the pieces of the story.
RevOps is an all-encompassing role that tells the stories of the sales, marketing, and customer service teams in a way that drives performance across each business unit, with the organization’s big picture in mind. To help you understand the role of revenue operations better, let’s unpack the differences between rev ops and sales ops.
What is Sales Ops?
Sales Operations teams are often siloed, or seen as separate entities in a company. Marketing teams have their own goals, and the same is true of sales teams. At its core, sales operations is about supporting the sales teams to sell more efficiently. This department would handle anything and everything necessary to help internal sales teams optimize and maintain sustainable growth.
A common misconception is that revenue operations is just another word for sales operations, which is not the case. Sales ops is just one facet of a multi-faceted approach to sales, with revenue operations being the overarching umbrella. Underneath revenue ops, you may find sales ops, marketing ops, and customer service teams. Sales operations can be a tactical part of RevOps, but is more exclusively focused on creating specific efficiencies within the sales department.
Why is Revenue Operations Important?
Revenue Operations is foundational in creating and maintaining a central focus on revenue growth through streamlining all departments of a company to collaborate and problem solve efficiently and effectively on all fronts. Just as a sales department would have a sales operations team dedicated to the success of the sales team, a company would have a revenue operations team dedicated to the success of the company in its entirety.
The analytical and collaborative nature of a strong RevOps team creates an operating landscape that is able to ebb and flow with market changes successfully. The overarching goal of a revenue operations team is to increase revenue by streamlining, improving, and connecting the processes and departments within a company that generates revenue.
RevOps not only improves the internal processes but also improves customer-facing initiatives as the team and company improvements overflow into the enhancement of the end-to-end customer experience.
What is RevOps Responsible For?
RevOps is responsible for creating, implementing, and maintaining four key areas of alignment within a company:
- Operations Management - Through operations management, RevOps is responsible for delivering, implementing, maintaining a strategy that is designed and aligned with business growth objectives. Essentially, managing all resources to ensure that the outcome of each department’s efforts are unified on the needs of the business.
- Enablement - Through enablement, RevOps gives sales, marketing, and customer success teams the tools and training needed to improve communication for efficiency and effectiveness amongst them. Structured enablement practices will have a compounding effect on your entire organization.
- Insights - Through insights, RevOps aligns all departments with data-driven strategies that pave the way for customer success and business growth. This role helps foster confident decisions based on trustworthy data.
- Tools - RevOps is also responsible for improving and maintaining the use of internal systems and programs that allow for efficient communication between sales, marketing, and customer success teams. This individual will have a strong understanding of your CRM and business processes.
Some metrics that individuals in revenue operation roles may pay attention to in order to determine success may include: Annual Recurring Revenue, Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Turnover Rate, Sales Cycle Time, and Win Rate. When was the last time you were looking at these numbers?
Deciding Between Sales Ops & Rev Ops: Which One is Best for Your Company?
While sales operations falls under the umbrella of revenue operations, there are a few distinguishing features of each that may make one more suitable for your company’s operations. Sales ops seeks to create efficiency within the sales team, where Rev Ops seeks to create efficiency among departments, shifting focus on revenue, business, and customer growth.
As revenue operation initiatives are, by nature, company-wide, it may not be within your current bandwidth or capacities to hire for a new Rev Ops role, as it can be a very focused and highly tactical role or set of roles needed to implement strategies within.
If you have amazing sales, marketing, and customer success leads already in place it could be as simple as taking baby steps in shifting their focus more towards departmental communication that can seek to benefit all key players, internally and externally. Furthermore, this kind of talent can be somewhat difficult to find and often more expensive.
A Bigger Picture Aspect
With the goal of growing revenue, the cost of a RevOps hire will be mediated by revenue growth once teams are working more effectively. If your company has a very strong focus on sales but is needing more efficiency within, you may need to hire for Sales Operations.
RevOps can be an incredible addition to any company that is nearing the glass ceiling with its current processes within each department. If there is a need to shift focus and drive predictable growth, gain a deeper understanding of how departmental operations can be improved, hiring for Revenue Operations will set the various frameworks within and between each department for success.
Ignite Your Revenue Engine With LAIRE Digital
When it comes to generating reliable revenue to grow your business, our team is committed to helping you get to where you need to be through the use of digital marketing strategies and sales enablement efforts. We understand the frustrations surrounding misalignment between departments and have a team of inbound marketing experts who are armed and ready to help bridge the gap for you. If this sounds like music to your ears, drop us a line. As a first step, go ahead and schedule a free 20-minute marketing assessment right now to understand where you are today - and where you need to be. Let’s do this together!
