The pandemic and our current economic instability revealed that our assumptions about how to run a business weren’t so black and white. Before, revenue leaders had plenty of capital and could predict their annual revenue down to the percentage. Today, information changes fast and executives must embrace a more flexible approach to running a business.
Inflation, layoffs, and a labor shortage mean that companies have to operate with less resources. They also need a way to mitigate their risks and make agile decisions on how to use their limited capital. Technology and business processes can fill the gap when you have a smaller workforce but the same workload. Is it time for your business to outsource stability?
The many moving parts of revenue operations
Revenue operations is a business function that oversees all revenue generating teams and systems. This includes marketing, sales, and customer support, as well as their support and operation teams.
“RevOps” aligns the processes, platforms, and people at your company and is now mission critical for all industries. That’s because we need a centralized function to choose the best technology, create a more efficient revenue system, and to take the customer experience very seriously.
RevOps platforms
Many businesses suffer from sunk cost fallacy. Their technology solutions are only sufficient enough to justify not making any changes. The fallout is siloed sales and marketing teams who are frustrated by poor quality leads and decision making based on data from totally separate tools and platforms. All of these disconnects result in misaligned goals and KPIs across the go-to-market teams.
Revenue operations platforms can handle the entire buyer journey from start to finish and automate processes and workflows to save time. This lets all revenue generating teams make decisions based on the same data so they can increase efficiency and improve collaboration.
In 2022, there are almost 10,000 Martech solutions. That’s an increase of 24% from 2020, according to the popular Martech Map. These tools cover every part of the revenue engine, including:
- Sales productivity tools like Outreach or Salesloft
- Marketing automation tools like Hubspot or Marketo
- Customer support tools like Zendesk or ServiceMax
- CRM tools like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics
- Client success tools like ChurnZero or Gainsight
- Billing tools like Zuora or Netsuite
- Plus integrations with dozens of other tools
This massive amount of choice makes it hard for businesses to decide which tools are right for their needs or how to integrate dozens of apps together into a technology stack that provides efficiency and flexibility.
RevOps is part of any successful GTM strategy
Revenue operations is a more cohesive operating model for managing all things revenue. As a function, RevOps oversees sales productivity, sales automation, understanding buyer preferences and journeys, and sales enablement. This function can even identify successful sales reps, allowing you to duplicate their processes across the entire sales department for increased performance.
Tools for this function fall into their own technology category called Revenue Operations and Intelligence Solutions. These are applications that leverage buyer signals and interactions in order to uncover insights into how go-to-market functions can continuously improve execution performance while optimizing revenue processes.
RevOps technologies are the foundation of a close partnership between RevOps and go-to-market teams. The right tools help teams reach their KPIs through high quality data.
Here are some of the benefits of RevOps technology:
- Unified management of key processes
- More tightly aligned technology stack
- And strategic use of technology
How your systems can help you navigate
Systems shouldn’t be viewed as a cost, even during economic downturns with limited budgets. Because without the right systems in place, you won’t have accurate information to make decisions, both big and small. Make investing in your RevOps technology a top priority.
Here are three ways ways that revenue operations can make a difference:
- Revenue intelligence: Engagement and productivity optimization tools can help improve customer engagement, resulting in increased deal conversions and deal size.
- RevOps cadence and forecast optimization: These tools help with forecasting, pipeline management, and sales analytics.
- Revenue and engine analysis and optimization: These tools are intended to improve key revenue processes across all business units, allowing for experimentation and the refinement of go-to-market strategies.
High quality data means that your business can measure and understand the state of your sales performance through detailed reports and dashboards. Using this data, you can improve and change sales rep behavior through sales engagement and by aligning KPIs across functions and with company goals. A single source of truth helps marketing, sales, and customer support agree on which KPIs and metrics to track and how to measure success.
Outsourcing revenue operations for increased stability
Organizations can’t spend the way they used to. Access to quick cash and a growth-at-all-costs attitude is not on the table anymore. Revenue operations specialists can help your company identify what works and what doesn’t, so you can narrow your mandate for employees.
RevOps systems can help you understand your buyers and sellers, plus identify strengths and weaknesses in your revenue approach. If you don’t have the people in-house to get the most out of your tools, Delegate can provide outsourced support and access to technology experts for all major platforms.
Hiring in-house takes months to find, onboard, and ramp an employee who fully understands your systems and how they work. Instead, consider hiring Delegate to tap into our community of technology and operations experts. All while staying within your cash reserves. Outsourced support is especially helpful for projects that need to be completed right now.
At Delegate, we know that your priorities will change over time. We continually assess your requirements and match you with the right expert when you need them. You get the flexibility of hiring people for short or long term projects without having to commit to hiring full time employees (with the risk of layoffs months later). It’s an affordable and flexible way to manage your technology systems.
Embrace a new operating model
Make the most out of the cash you have today, because large funding rounds will be rare in the near future. Use outsourced partners to maintain stability and flexibility, save money, and improve your RevOps function without expensive full time staff, rigid professional services companies, or low commitment freelancers. Subscribe to our blog to learn more.