By definition, revenue operations is the convergence of marketing, sales and service operations to drive accountability, efficiency and adoption across platforms. In simpler terms, it’s the alignment of the people, processes and platforms at your company.
Think about all the platforms and software that your marketing, sales and services teams use. It’s probably a long list. Now, ask yourself who owns all of those platforms? Who is responsible for making sure they are helping your employees do their jobs more efficiently and not bogging them down with issues? How integrated are those platforms and the team members who use them?
Revenue operations (RevOps) is one of the most overlooked and undervalued functions at any company, and the benefits you get from having a solid RevOps team in place will impact your entire company from bottom to top.
Here are the six areas that will benefit from your company having solid revenue operations in place.
Technology Ownership and Expertise
One of the largest benefits of having a RevOps team at your company is the ability to designate ownership of things like troubleshooting, data management and process documentation.
Most companies are doing some level of these tasks, but they are usually falling onto the plate of someone who should be spending their time focusing on other things. When these types of tasks are a side responsibility of someone who is already overburdened, they don’t get done properly. There’s also a good chance that the individual trying to fix the problem at the time isn’t an expert on these things.
The responsibilities that RevOps takes on are critical to both the day-to-day functions of your teams and the entire company’s success, things like:
- Data reporting
- New hire onboarding
- Documenting processes
- Assessing and onboarding new platforms
- Troubleshooting
- Ticket management
- Integrating your tech stack
Those tasks all need to be kept up with and managed by the same individual or group of individuals to make sure they are done efficiently and periodically.
Documentation and Processes
Documentation is one of those tasks that we tend to overlook or push off until later. But, effective documentation can improve how your business operates. The way you use the platforms at your company is probably unique to your own systems and processes. It’s for this reason that they need to be documented and recorded for fellow team members and new hires down the line.
If people implement new processes and methods as they come across them but don’t document them, then those systems only live in the mind of that individual. What if that individual leaves your company, or what if someone else needs to repeat that task later on?
When there is someone owning your platforms, it’s that team’s responsibility to document everything they change or implement so that it can be replicated down the road and doesn't live with one person alone.
Tech Stack Adoption
Software is constantly being updated and expanded. For instance, we use HubSpot and are constantly adapting to the new tools and additional features that they launch.
Our own revenue operations team is responsible for monitoring those tools. But if our RevOps team didn’t own that process, we would probably have a few marketers trying to add things to our account, and maybe a few sales members would be tinkering with features as well. This would lead to wasted time and a large confusion inside the platform itself.
You need a dedicated team whose job is to stay on top of the platforms your company uses, as well as continue to ensure you have the best tech stack possible for your processes and company size.
As your company grows, you may need to add more seats to your software packages or even change software altogether. RevOps will make implementing or learning new software a faster and more efficient process for your company.
It will also reduce the friction you may have if one team is owning your operations while trying to identify what platforms the rest of the company needs. That outside lens from a third party will be able to make the best decisions on behalf of the entire company, not just one team.
New Hire Onboarding
When bringing new people onto your team, it can be a lengthy process to teach them to understand and use your company’s tech stack properly.
With revenue operations, your new hires have a dedicated team that they go to for onboarding and platform adoption. Not only will they have someone to go to for questions, but your RevOps team will be responsible for building out the documentation required for bringing someone onto the team, whether that is the marketing, sales or service side of the company.
This doesn’t mean they are the ones onboarding employees, but rather making sure the new hires have the proper access and documentation.
Better onboarding means your new employees will be able to hit the ground running once joining your company. They will feel comfortable inside all of your technology, from your email automation to your CRM to your time tracking software to your internal payroll program. They will also be learning things correctly, according to documentation, the first time around, instead of getting misdirected from all different team members or individuals.
Improving the onboarding process means that managers, team members and execs will see a return on investment from bringing on new team members faster.
Unbiased Reporting
If you are doing any goal setting or tracking (which you probably should be) at your company, then you already know how important data and reporting is to managing and measuring those goals.
Typically, each of your marketing, sales and service teams do their own reporting and measuring. The problem with this method is that each team can only look at the reports through their own lens. This can lead to unintentionally skewed data or one-sided thinking.
It’s easy as a marketer to only care about your own portion of the funnel, like lead generation or email open rates. But the truth is for an entire company to track toward the same goals, you have to think outside your own touchpoints. Marketing also needs to have goals around how many of their marketing qualified leads turn into sales qualified leads once they are passed off down the funnel. But, it’s much easier for someone outside the marketing team to read and interpret all of that data.
If it were up to each team to pull their own reports, they may pull the data that makes them look the best and leave out key information for the whole picture. Being close to the data, you are pulling, is also naturally going to make you interpret it differently.
Your marketing, sales and service teams should all be heading toward the same North Star — revenue. That’s why having your revenue operations team be in charge of all the data and reporting for your company will benefit everyone.
Having your RevOps team build reports and manage the information passed back and forth will give an unbiased lens to those reports and help your entire company reach their goals together.
Integrations and Data
All of the platforms that make up your company’s tech stack should be interconnected. If your teams are truly working together toward the same goals, then so should their tech stack. Your marketing automation software has to be connected to your CRM, and your customer service or success team needs to be able to access all of that data once a prospect converts and becomes part of their portfolio.
All of those teams will most likely be referring to your CRM for shared data. For us, our CRM is our single source of truth. Everything that we use to speak to prospects, from marketing to sales to long term customer service, gets tracked and logged inside our CRM.
But all of those platforms and tools won’t magically connect themselves, and sometimes integrations need to be manually set up. Integrations also often need to be maintained or updated. Putting this type of task on your marketing or sales team members the first time won’t be a long-term solution. What if the connected platforms update or break and need fixed, then who is responsible?
The Takeaway
Revenue operations will align your people, platforms, and processes.
Your tech stack is essential for running your business and serving your customers and prospects. You need to have a team in place whose sole responsibility is the alignment of those platforms, the people who use them and the documentation and adoption around them.
Technology is there to help your team members do their jobs better. But when your marketers, sales reps and service reps can’t focus on their job and their customers because of tech issues, your customers, and your employees suffer.
Overlooking these responsibilities as a serious department, and not giving them the attention they deserve, will only hinder your teams from hitting their revenue goals and working together in the best way possible. The first step to anything related to revenue operations starts with your tech stack! Make sure your tech stack is set up for success with our webinar.
