More business leaders are realizing that revenue operations is the sturdy foundation to every successful business, no matter what the sector or business model may be. Focusing on your company’s revenue operations will help overcome common business challenges, achieve profitability and effectively scale your business to new heights. Revenue operations brings the functions of sales, marketing and customer experience together to operate more collaboratively.
Today’s savvy executives are increasingly building out their expertise and capabilities for revenue operations to empower their sales, marketing and customer success teams, making their business more successful.
As your business evolves and efforts are made to achieve organizational alignment, there are areas within revenue operations where common pitfalls can hurt your bottom line. Here are three business challenges and how to solve for them:
1) Lousy Customer Experiences
Today’s customers are won or lost by the experiences they have with your company, and these experiences are happening more through digital means. From researching the company, to their experience as a customer, a cohesive experience takes coordination across multiple teams. Without coordination, leads either can’t find the information they need to evaluate the company, have to repeat their requests and needs throughout the sales cycle, or have a delayed or subpar new customer experience. Revenue operations can make sure each team—sales, marketing and customer service—share data and work together for a better end-to-end customer journey.
2) Lack of Sales Cycle Mapping
Your sales team needs the right data to understand where a lead falls in the sales journey in order to apply the right approach to advance or close them. As this data is collected, revenue operations can ensure it’s shared with the sales team so they can take action. The sales team’s experience can be shared with marketing to create the collateral they need to convert leads and build marketing strategies that drive more high-quality leads.
3) Low Return on Spend
Inaccurate marketing attribution means wasted or inefficient marketing campaign spend. In addition, disconnected datasets in your CRM can cost your business lost sales opportunities. In order to make your marketing spend or customer acquisition costs as effective as possible, you need a revenue operations focus to ensure accurate marketing attribution and robust data collection. As revenue operations spans sales and marketing, this team will be able to oversee all systems and processes to ensure you are working together to provide an accurate picture of campaign effectiveness.
The Big Picture: Achieve Profitability and Growth With Revenue Operations
Revenue Operations = Profitability
End-to-end ownership means optimization of costs, spend and tools leveraged across the entire operations chain of your business. A centralized team is best equipped to pair different people and technologies together for improved efficiencies. This will help a business make the most of the talent and technology they already have, and will help them do more, thereby increasing productivity and sales activity.
Revenue operations can turn analysis into revenue by making greater use of customer data to improve sales. A revenue operations team can also develop superior customer profiles to better serve current customers and attract the best-suited leads through analyzing what makes top customers so loyal. Creating more loyal customers increases your customers’ average long term value. Improved sales cycles, lower customer acquisition costs and higher long-term value all equate superior margins and more profitability.
Revenue Operations = Growth
With a revenue operations focus, you’ll be better equipped to scale your business. Without seamless data sharing across sales, marketing and customer service, scaling a business would be impossible. To improve your customer acquisition costs and attract more leads per month, a business needs a solid foundation and efficient spending. With all teams working as efficiently and collaboratively as possible, and key benchmarks focusing on driving more revenue, your teams will be aligned and working towards growth. Sirius Decisions and HubSpot found that such alignment of sales, marketing and customer service can drive up 36%-38% more growth.
Getting Started
Ready to focus on revenue operations and get this new process up and running? Here are the key areas of focus for a revenue operations team:
- Select and optimize martech and sales tech applications across sales, marketing and customer service.
- Gather deeper data and insights on customers and prospects, ensuring data is available to all teams.
- Create reporting and attribution modeling that captures marketing impact, success of individual marketing campaigns, and develop insights on improving performance at key funnel stages.
Every business’ experience will be different, so measure and weigh your own company culture and then take action. Good luck!