How advanced are revenue operations in your business? Navigating revenue operations successfully comes down to three core components: Process, technology, and data. When all three of these pieces are humming along, that’s when the magic happens. But, as you likely know, this is the continual work of a RevOps leader, and it can be hard to understand where your organization may need the most help.
Leaders are being forced to do more with less, with big goals only getting bigger. Add to that the many businesses that have outdated, complex, or inefficient tech stacks, and you can see why it can be difficult to figure out focus for your teams.
In our recent report, we uncovered the startling (and perhaps troubling) statistic that merely 7% of revenue leaders feel confident about hitting their growth targets.
What’s more, topping the list of challenges for revenue leaders today is Prioritizing. Our report named “Prioritizing and figuring out the most impactful marketing with limited resources” as the No. 1 challenge, followed by sales, marketing, and customer success alignment and how best to integrate AI.
But as RevOps leaders, where should you put that focus? Through our day-to-day work with our clients, we look at several ways to remove roadblocks and obstacles in the path to profitable growth. To help, we’ve broken down the top trends reshaping RevOps into this mini blog series so you can identify where your organization may need support.
In this blog, we’ll explore the first five trends reshaping RevOps in 2024:
Operational Efficiency as a Cornerstone
Efficient growth has come sharply into focus. Rather than spending money to drive growth at all costs, teams are making more intelligent investments into profitable growth.
While doing more with less is always top of mind, the “less” has shifted into streamlining costs and strategic tech stack consolidations.
The name of the game: Improving revenue and making operational efficiency a cornerstone of every successful business strategy.
Instead of being fearful of the familiar refrain of “do more with less,” operational efficiency has (and should) become more about optimizing processes, leveraging data, and employing intelligent automation to maximize ROI. It’s about strategically adding and leveraging your tech stack to make the most of what you have, without adding headcount or additional time on draining processes.
It’s part people, part systems, and part processes.
Many of our clients are using Hubspot as an efficiency catalyst, using specific features to enable efficiency such as automated workflows, advanced analytics, and seamless integration capabilities.
Notably, half of the revenue leaders we surveyed report driving profitable and efficient growth using HubSpot’s integration partners.
Cross-Functional Alignment: Sales, Marketing & Customer Success
Imagine this. You tell a group of people, all separately, that they have one goal: to cross a river as fast as possible.
You don’t say much else, but you leave a pile of objects on one side of the river and then leave. Quite frantically, everyone starts grabbing the object they think will help them the most. What ensues?
Jim from Sales puts on a floatie and starts swimming.
Jane from Marketing grabs Joe from Product so they can start making a raft from a pile of wood and wire.
Julie in Customer Success rolls her eyes, takes out her cell phone, and calls an Uber to get her to the other side.
Jeff starts screaming at everyone to JUST STOP FOR A MINUTE and winds up hoarding all the objects until people listen.
This is what happens when you don’t have alignment on the best ways to achieve your goal(s). When your teams, particularly Sales, Marketing and Customer Success, are working separately instead of together, things can fall apart very quickly.
In LinkedIn’s report “Moments of Trust,” it states “85% say sales and marketing alignment is the largest opportunity for improving business performance today.”
During a webinar with New Breed, Sid Kumar, SVP of RevOps at Hubspot, cited a report stating that within pre-sales, 30% of organizations lack joint accountability between Sales and Marketing for Demand Generation.
The secret behind alignment is to understand the source of truth that should drive most, if not all, of your decision-making: And that’s data.
Hubspot’s recent report, "The State of Partner-Led Growth 2023," discusses the importance of understanding revenue data from the top-down, putting this data in the hands of those on the front lines as well as a more holistic view of data at the executive level.
“When you connect the dots, you can see the whole picture, including where friction exists. You can then fix the friction.”
The report further explores the correlation between companies that had this data (revenue data, including lifetime value and retention) and those that didn’t, showing a clear, positive growth impact for businesses that gave access to revenue data versus those that didn’t.
As Sid says in the webinar, “We still need to focus on new customer acquisition, but how are you focusing on usage, outcomes, and customer value on the post-sale side as maniacally as you may be thinking of the new customer acquisition? The math doesn’t lie. It’s compounding growth on the right side of the customer journey - if your customers are getting value and will renew and expand with you, that’s where you’ll see the revenue.”
Using the Buyer Journey to Improve Alignment
In our State of HubSpot report, we saw that 87% of revenue leaders report facing alignment challenges between sales, marketing, and customer success departments, with 97% of respondents identifying “creating alignment” between these teams as a top challenge.
Creating cross-functional alignment doesn’t happen overnight. But there are two great starting points that are hard to argue with, and that’s your data and your buyer journey.
The best way to really build cross-functional alignment is to make your revenue model more customer-centric.
That means using data to observe and improve your customer journey through their entire lifecycle, from initial brand awareness to lifetime retention. This focus will naturally bring your stakeholders — and their siloed data and processes — into alignment.
As Sid mentions on the webinar, “How would our customers think about success at each of those different points of the journey? And how are we orchestrating and aligning our go-to-market teams to be able to go deliver those outcomes?”
A few ways you can improve alignment across your teams…
- Implement a customer-centric operating model such as the one that HubSpot operates with focusing on different stages of the customer journey
- Encourage a big-picture perspective in strategic planning — cut down the silos and get everyone in the room speaking together, and, more importantly, speaking the same language.
- Prioritize communication and project management. Open communication helps everyone understand what others are working on and have access to the communications they need to understand the context of their own projects, helping work get done faster and more efficiently.
- Maintain your focus on North Star metrics for alignment and look at the bigger picture. When determining these metrics, ask yourself, is that metric really moving the needle? What is it driving, overall? How does this one metric help support the overall revenue target? As Sid says, “Looking at the bigger picture changes you from moving inches to moving yard and moving miles, and even further.”
- Integrate your systems across all teams for better data and tool alignment, fostering teamwork and again, breaking down those silos!
CRM Optimization and Tech Stack Synergy
Hand-in-hand with alignment, as we’ve outlined, is the need for data. But not just any data, data that can drive business-oriented goals. Your CRM and other strategic investments in tech are key to gaining the right data.
Integrating a SmartCRM database into your team workflows isn't just about organizing your data — it's about turning your data into a strategic ally. By pulling your critical customer data in one place, your database will present a 360-degree view of customer interactions and behavior.
New Breed RevOps Strategist, Danae Ruiz says,
“With integrated systems, you can enable seamless communication, shared goals, and make sure you’re standardizing your metrics, which will boost efficiency and productivity. And, at the same time, the consistent customer information will enhance your customer experience.”
Creating integrations between the tools that contain your critical customer data, or consolidating your CRM into one integrated platform like HubSpot can add significant benefits and get you closer to your goals around customer engagement and increased sales.
A few ways this can come to life are:
Lead Scoring and Nurturing: Use your database to mine for data required for effective lead scoring to identify prospects that are most likely to convert on your product. You can even combine this with marketing automation to help you deliver resources to your most high-value leads.
Personalized Marketing Campaigns: Use the detailed (and secure) customer information from your CRM database to better align your marketing campaign tactics to make sure they’re addressing specific customer preferences and behavior. The result? More tailored marketing, which leads to better response rates and ultimately, more conversions.
Data Collection Strategies: You’ll want to determine how to input data into your CRM, whether that’s through forms or an integration, or maybe an offline import. standardized data entry processes will allow you to have that clean CRM data we all strive for. This can also help boost sales and marketing alignment by having one source of truth for training and creating reports.
And of course, all of this can be streamlined and automated through the right tech stack, whether teams are looking at AI solutions or other technological initiatives to help.
Enabling your systems to deliver and showcase the right, decision-driving data can be tricky, but that’s where a partner like New Breed can support you, helping with CRM migrations and HubSpot configurations to get the most out of your systems.
AI and Automation: The New Frontiers in RevOps
You can’t go 10 minutes into a meeting without someone asking, “how are we using AI in our business plans?”. This question can mean so many different things to different teams, but when it comes to RevOps leaders who are preparing for the future, the power of AI cannot be ignored.
That’s why leading systems like HubSpot are leaning into AI, developing new tools such as AI Chatbots, Content Assistants in your Inbox or Knowledge Base, and even AI forecasts to support your sales and marketing teams.
In fact, according to Hubspot’s State of AI Report, over 85% of marketers and sales professionals agree that AI enhances content quality and prospecting efforts.
Teams can look to leverage AI for efficiency and personalization and improve their sales productivity as well using AI-driven insights and strategies. Still, teams should be prioritizing outcomes like customer experience and productivity, even when using AI to speed up their processes.
Can AI do it all? Only time will tell. For now, leaders should look to incorporate AI into their readymade toolkit of nurturing, educating and informing their community. When it comes to content creation, for example, you may want your sales team to cure their writer’s block and start using an AI builder to craft compelling outbound emails that they can quickly edit, rather than staring at a blank screen.
Marketing technology is keeping pace with AI as well, with many technologies adding AI capabilities into their overall features. Take for example, the recent launch of HubSpot’s Content Hub, which is an all-in-one, AI-powered Content Marketing software that helps marketers create and manage content that fuels the entire customer journey.
At the end of the day, humans develop the business goals and set the strategy of a business. But AI, and other technology of the future, can and should be a valuable team member.
In our next blog, I’ll be handing the reins over to our Senior Revenue Operations Manager Jacque Turbett, who will explore the last revenue operations trends to keep an eye on for 2024.
Remember, if you're looking to improve your RevOps strategy or need extra support, my team and I are here to help. Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help you unlock meaningful growth.
