What is Revenue Operations?
In 2022, it is absolutely necessary for B2B companies to have a formal, structured Go to Market strategy and a team that helps unify decision making across Sales, Marketing, Support, and Finance teams. In order to achieve this, a company must have the right operational processes in place and the correct Sales & Marketing Tools implemented - this is the primary role of Revenue Operations.
Rev Ops - as it's commonly referred - has become a central function within almost every B2B startup today. It is a cross-functional role that creates a unified view of your customers and helps to increase collaboration across every team that has direct customer interactions.
Creating a seamless customer journey helps to get prospective buyers through the Marketing funnel and into the Sales process as quickly as possible. It reduces friction at each step in the buying process and ensures that everyone within your organization is aware of prior touchpoints and next steps needed for each prospect. Additionally, it helps a company understand the source of their deals, so they can easily replicate a successful Sales process and develop a Go-to-Market playbook.
An established Revenue Operations team has several key components:
Sales Operations
Sales Operations is the data analytics and insights engine that directs the activities of Sales.
They make sure Account Executives and Sales Reps have a clear understanding of the steps they need to follow to produce a successful sales pursuit. In the simplest form, Sales Ops looks at the data from all Closed Won opportunities in a business and finds similarities - they use this Sales metrics to identify trends that uncover how Reps can produce more deals.
For example, perhaps opportunities are won 60% of the time when a technical demo is the first step in the Sales process but only 45% of the time when the first step is a call and the second step is a demo. It's the job of Sales Ops to identify this trend and inform Reps of what the data says.
Essentially, they provide Sales teams with both a roadmap to success and the tools to get there.
Marketing Operations
A Marketing Operations team drives the Marketing Automation and Demand Generation strategy within a B2B org.
Any successful SaaS startup will tell you that the fastest way to increase revenue and deal volume is for Marketing to play a critical role in lead generation for the Sales team. The Marketing team will setup a variety of lead generation engines - events, webinars, traffic from SEO, white papers etc - and move the inbound, cold leads into the Marketing funnel, which is largely nurtured by E-mail Marketing campaigns in a tool like Pardot, Hubspot, or Marketo.
Marketing Ops will categorize the quality of their leads using various scoring mechanisms with the goal being to drive a high number of MQLs - or Marketing Qualified Leads. As a lead becomes more interested in your product or service, the nurturing sequences will move them closer to the Sales processes. When it is determined that a prospect is interested enough that it is worth engaging an Account Executive, it will become an SQL - Sales Qualified Lead - and be handed off to an Account Executive to begin building the relationships. This is where the Sales process begins.
Go-to-Market Systems
The third element of Revenue Operations is Go-to-Market Systems.
In order for Sales Operations and Marketing Operations to do their job, they need an ecosystem of Tools and Systems to help with external communication, internal collaboration, and workflow automation.
These platforms include Sales Automation platforms like Outreach or Salesloft, Marketing Automation tools for lead nurturing like Pardot, scheduling tools like Calendly to increase Rep Productivity, data enrichment platforms like Zoominfo or Clearbit to automate prospect identification, and more.
The Salesforce AppExchange features thousands of apps that Go-to-Market Systems teams can integrate to an existing Sales Cloud instance to supercharge functionality.
It is a big part of the Rev Ops team's responsibility to select the right tools, manage the end-to-end deployment of these platforms, train users on how to use them properly, and oversee the daily administrator and support.
