Your Complete Guide to RevOps: 3 Things Every Leader Must Know When Scaling

The shift towards revenue operations, or RevOps for short, is more critical than ever, where alignment between cross-functional teams and revenue goals are becoming increasingly a priority.

With the right departments, companies can optimize its marketing and sales funnel more seamlessly and accelerate revenue growth.

In this article, I’ll guide you through the three things every RevOps leader must know when scaling.

How the Global Health Pandemic Impacted Hyper-Growth Companies

A quick search on LinkedIn for “revenue operations” in the United States brought back over 26,000+ open jobs. Revenue Operations job titles on LinkedIn are increasing across the board. In the past 18 months, VP of Revenue Operations titles increased by 300%. The demand is clear.

If there’s one that the global pandemic taught every hyper-growth company, it’s how to be extremely nimble. From reinventing the organization for speed and agility to wearing multiple hats, revenue operations leaders must adjust or fall behind.

In fact, go-to-market tech stacks left abandoned by previous owners were inherited by leaders who had experienced a role merge or new manager hires. This coupled with the pressures of strategic revenue generation demands was the perfect recipe for leaders who were pressed for time and felt underwater.

On top of a messy business system like Salesforce or HubSpot CRM, RevOps leaders must find a way to fix these challenges and create more operational efficiencies within their function.

Of note, metrics are spread across SaaS marketing, sales, and customer success as RevOps is ultimately accountable for all of ‘em. Revenue operations must have a deep understanding of the key data sources and tools that are needed to monitor performance. Revenue ops leaders need to be able to identify gaps or inefficiencies within your go-to-market stack, prioritize requests for additional resources, and make recommendations around investments that will foster productivity.

What is Revenue Operations & Why is it Important?

Revenue operations, or “RevOps” for short, is more critical than ever for modern businesses today. Specifically, the alignment between cross-functional teams and revenue goals as it becomes a priority for hyper-growth companies. With the right operational efficiencies in place, you can optimize your marketing and sales funnel seamlessly and accelerate growth.

According to Forrester, organizations who have a strong alignment between cross-functional teams achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability than those who are less aligned. How? Revenue operations make such a level of engagement possible.

How to implement a Revenue Operations Framework

In this article, you’ll learn how to implement your RevOps strategy to enable efficient workflows; generate data to drive insights, compile reports based on key performance metrics; take a value added approach to operations management by reviewing data from apps including the CRM; and track for trends and patterns across the tech stack.

RevOps is an increasingly popular strategy for hyper-growth companies who want to optimize their marketing and sales funnel. But what does RevOps mean, and how does it work?

Revenue Operations Defined

RevOps (revenue operations) is the operational arm of revenue-driven organizations responsible for the alignment across cross-functional teams to drive revenue growth. Often, early to mid-stage companies have a sales leader, who must wear multiple hats including Sales operations or revenue operations depending on their strategy.

The shift towards RevOps is happening for two reasons:

• Alignment between cross-functional teams and revenue goals is increasingly  becoming a priority.
• Companies have been struggling to optimize their marketing and sales funnel, so putting a leader or departments in place specifically to manage ops can accelerate growth.

What are the Key Components of a RevOps function?

In recent years, the shift towards RevOps as alignment between cross-functional teams and revenue goals is becoming increasingly important. Regardless of the company size, aligning the marketing and sales process will provide for an easier cycle time for gathering feedback and make it faster for product updates, changes to be communicated back to engineering and customer success.

How can you do that in your company? Focus on the following:

• People – Build a culture of collaboration and align teams around a single view of the business with shared revenue targets
• Data – Connect business activity and data across organizational silos and technology stacks to create a source of truth (or single view)
• Processes – Increase operational efficiency and end user productivity through strategic processes

What are the Three Things Every RevOps Leader Must Know?

A RevOps team is not just about technology; it’s also about execution excellence with strong leadership across all functional groups to make sure end users get what they want (i.e., more sales). RevOps teams must use their expertise from their CRM as well as tracking key metrics for trends and patterns in order to make recommendations around operational rules of engagement and functional coordination that enable further revenue growth. Here are three strategic steps to get you started.

1. Get the most out of your Revenue Ops team:

• Create a Revenue Operations Framework which outlines objectives, strategies and tactics.
• Execute with an alignment strategy that aligns cross functional teams around revenue goals by developing operational rules of engagement that includes clear roles and responsibilities for all parties involved.

In order to scale, you need strong leadership and stakeholder buy-in across functional groups who are knowledgeable about RevOps as well as other business functions, such as operations or IT, in order to make sure end users receive what they want (i.e., more sales). RevOps teams use their expertise from CRM data analysis along with tracking key metrics for trends in patterns in order to offer recommendations on how operational practices can be improved. Not only is the result greater operational efficiency but also data-driven decisions to fuel revenue growth. And yes — with the right workflows and reporting in place, it’s measurable!

2. Adopt an Agile Approach

If you’re building a waterfall strategy or you’re in a silo, you’re cutting yourself off. Take on an agile methodology, and see yourself as a product manager. Through this kind of lens, you can increase visibility into predictive insights. From there, you’re able to share valuable insights with stakeholders and strengthen your seat at the table.

Revenue operations is about helping others.

Ground-Level Revenue Operations – No one wants to work in an organization that doesn’t give them a clear opportunity for success. If you want your employees to be engaged, they need the right tools and training necessary for their role.

Engaged Employees – It all comes down to data quality: make sure there’s enough of it and have processes in place so that when something does happen, it gets tracked automatically and quickly addressed.

Alignment Across Teams & Revenue Goals – Because RevOps is about optimizing revenue generating activities as well as developing scalable marketing campaigns. And without alignment between cross functional teams, any growth will come at the expense of another department or group within the company.

3. Create a Leader Organization in RevOps

Apply a value-added approach to operations management. Here’s a checklist to get you started.

Implement the Right Technology Stack

• Create or review your RevOps roadmap
• Evaluate your go-to-market technology stack
• Identify the gaps in your roadmap and end user’s needs
• Consider the capabilities of each existing app/tool
• Consolidate apps/tools based on your roadmap and end users’ needs
• Implement or optimize the right apps/tools to deliver end-user productivity, creating more collaboration between teams

Generate Insights & Enablement

• Create processes within your CRM to enable workflows
• Generate data to drive insights
• Compile reports based on key performance metrics

Be Strategic Through a Value Added Approach to Operations Management

• Review data analytics from apps including CRM
• Track for trends and patterns across the tech stack including key metrics
• Determine and share recommendations surrounding operational rules of engagement, functional coordination to further accelerate revenue generation

When together, all of the steps above from 1 to 3 are your complete guide to revenue operations and increases overall end-user productivity — and accelerates growth results.

Key Takeaways: Revenue operations must be aligned with the company’s overall goals, including budgets and KPIs. RevOps is about an organizational culture shift across departments to align on different business objectives. Revenue Operations managers should take a value-added approach to their position which includes reviewing data analytics from apps like CRM as well as tracking key metrics for trends and patterns in order to make recommendations around operational rules of engagement and functional coordination that will further accelerate revenue generation. Revenue Operations leaders play a critical role in building out this framework by setting expectations and communicating successes while also involving executives at all levels within the organization when necessary.

Successful revenue ops leaders ensure that their teams have the necessary resources to succeed. This begins with an assessment of your go-to-market technology stack.

Revenue operations must have a deep understanding of the key data sources and tools that are needed to monitor performance. Revenue ops leaders need to be able-to identify gaps or inefficiencies within your go-to market stack, prioritize requests for additional resources, and make recommendations around investments that will foster productivity.