Does your sales and marketing team get along? Is everyone amicably aligned when it comes to the business goals, particularly revenue metrics?
The role behind revenue operations (RevOps) is to eliminate the disconnect between marketing, sales, and customer success teams. If these teams in your organization are disconnected or they are not working like a well-oiled machine, you will be seeing customer dissatisfaction.
Whether you have a dedicated RevOps manager in place or functional team leaders, revenue operations are designed to align your teams and the needs of the business, so you can focus on what counts. Just ask our 80+ clients.
From creating more meaningful experiences for prospects to satisfied customers, revenue operations are a great lever and it is a strong process to help ensure efficiency across teams – and more importantly the business.
As RevOps gains massive traction across B2B companies, worldwide strategy with the right resources in place is key to cross-functional team alignment. While there is not a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach for revenue operations, following the 3-step plan below can get you started on the right footing.
- Know Your Business’ Systems & Capabilities
Begin with your go-to-market tech stack – and look under the hood. Consider a thorough assessment of your tools, from what’s working to what’s not working. If it helps, make a list of your current state versus your desired state. You’ll be able to see what kind of tools you have in place, including processes and how you can make them more efficient. This can be time-consuming, which you don’t have a lot of bandwidth for, especially in your already fully packed day. So, consider a team augmentation with a dedicated resource, who can get to know and understand your business and grow with you.
Make time to connect with each system end-user across cross-functional teams. Understand their challenges and wishlists, which will inform how you prioritize your tactical plan later on in the tactical planning section of this article.
2. Put Together Your Team
Once you understand the best practices for beginning your revenue operations plan, you can begin putting together your team. Learn what the roles are for each team member and what will be required of them, and based on capabilities, select the team. There are different roles you can expect to fill:
- Operations Management– The operations management will learn which resources are available and distribute them in accordance with your mission’s goals. Some of the responsibilities and roles in operations management will include:
– Process improvements
-Sales and marketing operations
– Project management
-Sales planning
– Collaboration between the teams
- Enablement– Your enablement team will make sure efficiency prevails throughout sales, marketing, and customer success. They will teach your employees how to perform their jobs more effectively, and attain better performance rates. The enablement team will also reach out to new clients and teammates, perform training and learning sessions, and contribute to the professional creation of your organization. Delegate, can provide you with further technical expertise on how to set up your enablement team, and advise you what each member’s role should include.
- Insights- Data is important for revenue operations. The data and insights you collect will help your make the right decisions, and ensure you are on track toward your company’s goals. This team will include data scientists, business analysts who will manage data quality, develop strategic insights for your goals, and monitor your operations.
- Tools- Your company most likely uses different tools to run your business. These tools are commonly called, tech stacks and they have lasting impacts on how efficiently your business will run. By creating the right tech stack, you will reach your RevOps goals. Some of the responsibilities of your tool team will include evaluating tools, developing software, upkeep the computer systems, and confirming integration capabilities.
If your hyper-growth company is an early-mid-stage with less than 500 employees, you can get away with only having a champion in place to drive the strategy. For larger organizations with more than 500 employees, you can still augment your team with highly technical resources that don’t require a lot of your investment to recruit, ramp up, and train. The champion is critical to managing the operations and surfacing any critical insights that may impact the bottom line such as revenue growth.
3. Conduct a Comprehensive Audit & Create a Tactical Plan
Once you understand the roles of the different teams and decide who would best fill those roles, you need to align the teams. Have them conduct a more comprehensive audit of your business system. Make a note of your current processes across internal teams so you can learn of any gaps and inefficiencies.
When you find the right products/services to suit your needs, run with them. For example, consider how we began our work with feature management platform, LaunchDarkly. “We needed a team who could take the challenge and run with it,” said Matt Sansone from Sales Operations. “It was a no-brainer to work with Delegate.”
Where to Learn More About Revenue Operations Success
Delegate has a unique technology platform and on-demand model to help your business eliminate restrictive engagements. We will help your teams stay agile, and provide them the help they need to make your business a success. We are here to help you create a revenue operations plan and close the gap between what you have and what your business needs to succeed.