Bridging the Gap Between RevOps & IT

Revenue Operations (RevOps) teams execute upon the end-to-end process of driving revenue growth, and they’re primarily responsible for delivering lead, customer and account data across the entire revenue team, along the way improving the efficiency of go-to-market flow, developing a healthy revenue pipeline and achieving revenue growth. 

RevOps teams are driven by the requirements of more leads, more accounts and more deals, all done faster, and the key enabler of RevOps teams is the tech stack that facilitates their work. Of course, RevOps is dependent on the Information Technology (IT) group to deliver those tech stack tools.

IT teams, though, have a different perspective. Their primary accountability is to ensure the company’s network operates efficiently. For them, standardization, maintainability and security are key.

There’s clearly a gap between RevOps and IT, and for your GTM motions to work both efficiently and effectively, bridging this gap is critical. 

A technology gap, operational debt & “Shadow IT”

RevOps is indispensable for any organization attempting to grow and scale, but they’re only as effective as their tech stack empowers. The bad news is that most tech tools today still very much … well, let’s say they’re insufficient.

In the report, “The State of Business Operations in 2021,” compiled from a survey conducted by Tonkean and Lucid of 500 operations and IT professionals, only 24 percent of respondents believed their current toolset satisfies all their operation workflow needs. The impact of that reality is the creation of operational debt, or the inefficiencies, bottlenecks and tech gaps that hinder goal achievement. 

RevOps professionals tend to not have a lot of patience for operational debt, as they are evaluated and compensated for finishing first, ahead of the competition, in chasing deals. They also tend to not have technical personnel on staff – usually the Salesforce administrator is about as technical as they come. According to the Tonkean report, 25 percent of Sales Ops and 37 percent of Customer Service Ops teams reported having no access to engineers or developers for support. Naturally, lacking sufficient technical support, RevOps groups often seek solutions elsewhere.

“Shadow IT” is created when groups other than IT build, buy or implement technology solutions completely independently of the IT group. RevOps teams rationalize the move with thoughts of moving more quickly toward its goals, with less reliance on scarce IT resources, while freeing up the IT group and its developers to focus on their highest-priority projects. 

But, there’s a downside. Remarkably, Tonkean states that the average enterprise reports using around 1,295 separate SaaS apps or services. The unintended consequences of deploying all these solutions without strategic intent are that over time they create vulnerabilities, break processes and layer even more troublesome operational debt. Far from efficient, stretched personnel spend more and more time on non-value-added activities. 

Once created, Shadow IT becomes difficult to eliminate. Recall the needs listed above. RevOps demands speed and agility; IT demands leak-proof governance and oversight of the tech infrastructure. Fortunately, the marketplace is increasingly delivering solutions to create a more strategic alignment between RevOps and IT. 

Adaptive software bridges the gap

The newest generation of adaptive software is becoming the remedy in bridging the gap between RevOps and IT, providing a cohesiveness that more effectively drives the organization forward.

Adaptive software enables teams to quickly and effectively respond to changing requirements. For non-technical users like RevOps professionals, these adaptive features include application programming interfaces (APIs), process automation, and no-code and low-code software.

A great example of no-code software is LeanData’s lead routing and assignment solution, which empowers RevOps users to create GTM motions, and modify them when they determine it to be necessary, completely autonomously from IT engineers and developers. Within the user interface (UI), the user simply drags and drops various nodes to create flows in a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) manner. 

Adaptive software usually sits atop the tech stack’s foundation pieces, or as in the case of LeanData, a Salesforce native application, within the stack’s foundational pieces. It provides an easy-to-use, enterprise-grade, no-code solution to RevOps while importantly remaining under the purview of IT. 

No-code and low-code adaptive software empowers RevOps to move swiftly and operate self-sufficiently without compromising the security and integrity of the tech stack. They provide their own technical support without creating a disjointed shadow IT infrastructure or any additional operational debt. 

A solution that’s here today

The Tonkean report states 78 percent of respondents reported they are already using no-code/low-code technologies or are actively seeking these tools out, a number that increases to 95 percent when adding respondents who plan to explore such technologies in the coming year. Bridging the gap between RevOps and IT is enabling companies to not only meet the divergent needs of their internal constituents, but also more effectively meet the demanding needs of their prospects and customers.