Interim Services
18 October 2023
Written by: Robert Soffel
There’s a never-ending debate over the RevOps reporting line.
Is it the CEO? CRO? COO? CFO? Someone else?
The answer is complicated.
What’s undebatable, though, is the impact that RevOps can have across your entire business.
With the customer at the heart — whether internal or external — here are a few key areas, by role, where partnering with RevOps can make you and your department more effective (that go beyond the role of “system admin”).
GTM Alignment: RevOps underpins the GTM org and gets everyone pulling in the same direction. This manifests in the alignment of metrics and stage definitions, trust in the numbers, strengthening of feedback loops, and a universal understanding of where the GTM org is heading and how to get there.
GTM Insights: RevOps is the impartial steward of a company’s commercial data. That data is brought to life through insights that provide visibility of current performance and predictability of future performance.
Readiness for Scale: RevOps connects the dots between your GTM strategy and GTM execution. By methodically designing GTM processes and aligning with the right tools, RevOps ensures the foundations are set to scale, whether adding headcount, introducing new sales motions, launching new products or geographies, doubling volumes of “X” metric.
ICP Definition & Refinement: When you’re focused on everything you’re focused on nothing. RevOps can help define and regularly hone your ICP and target personas, using insights from pipeline and customer analysis, to steer messaging, content creation, and targeting further upstream.
Segmentation: Prospect and customer segmentation is mission-critical to optimising your revenue funnel. RevOps ensures that Marketing can harness the data that enables full-lifecycle marketing, no matter the data type or source (demographic, firmographic, technographic, product usage, commercial, and intent, etc.).
Attribution: Attribution is really, really hard (and often imperfect). RevOps can work with Marketing through the nuance to define and implement an attribution model to ensure leads, opportunities, and deals are attributed correctly.
Pipeline Generation: Not all pipeline is “good” pipeline. RevOps partners with leadership to identify which account segments make sense to go after. RevOps will also define a robust qualification framework to ensure the deals that are being worked are real, resulting in less time wasted, higher conversion rates, and increased trust in the pipeline numbers.
Rep Efficiency: Sales reps spend a ton of time not selling. RevOps leverages automation to eliminate repetitive tasks like activity logging, optimising the day-to-day workflow of sales reps. This maximises the time spent on high-value activities… like selling.
Performance Management: The ability to coach reps is a key difference between a manager and a leader. RevOps deploys the right tools and tracks the right metrics to zero in on problem areas, enabling leaders to coach or upskill accordingly.
Lifecycle Visibility: like a well-defined sales process, the post-sale journey should be rigorously defined and aligned with product adoption, from handover to renewal. RevOps makes sure you can identify where bottlenecks exist and what to do about them.
Customer Health Scoring: often the canary in the coal mine, the signals that make up your customer health score should inform you of potential churn risk well before churn takes place. RevOps can help define and monitor customer health to make sure you’re tracking leading indicators and can course correct.
Whitespace Opportunity: Identifying the revenue potential in your customer base is more important now than ever. RevOps can provide the tools and insights required for CS to identify and capitalise on whitespace opportunities, whether expansion or contract utilisation opportunities.
Trust in Upstream Data: Customer contracts are the tip of the revenue spear. RevOps validates the integrity of upstream processes and data, reducing the time spent on downstream activities like revenue forecasting, billing, and revenue recognition.
Budget Planning: Finance knows the numbers, but RevOps knows the processes driving the numbers. RevOps and Finance can partner to build a realistic operating model and set targets accordingly.
SaaS Utilisation: SaaS spend has a tendency to bloat (more licenses, more contacts, more consumption). RevOps helps Finance maintain control by driving (and regularly assessing) tooling adoption and usage, and renegotiating contracts to ensure maximum ROI.
Customer Feedback Loop: Through the implementation of call recording and transcription software, and by implementing a thorough deal Win/Loss framework, RevOps makes it easier for Product to get closer prospect and customer conversations.
Product-led-Growth (PLG): Whether running a pure PLG or a hybrid motion, RevOps’ main role in product-led growth is to ensure PQLs get in the hands of the right team at the right time. This means defining PQL-specific lead flows and ensuring end-to-end measurement of funnel, regardless of the origin of the lead.
Employee Onboarding: GTM orgs are complex (processes, procedures, playbooks… the list goes on). RevOps facilitates a successful onboarding experience by ensuring that vital knowledge is downloaded, documented, and made readily accessible for new employees.
Employee Retention: through ongoing training and enablement, RevOps fosters a culture of learning and development within the GTM team to give employees the best chance to succeed in their role.
Headcount Planning: How many reps should you hire? Good question. In today’s world, hiring decisions should not be made without first understanding the unit economics of the business. RevOps can partner with People to help shape a hiring plan that makes sense.
Ultimately, RevOps plays the role of facilitator. Without it, every GTM role, regardless of function, needs to do more operational heavy lifting… which means less time spent doing their actual job.
It’s not surprising that Revenue Operations was the fastest-growing job title on LinkedIn over the last five years; businesses are realising the impact and allocating RevOps resource earlier than ever.
