How to Fix Revenue Pipeline with RevOps (5 Effective Ways Discussed)

Key Takeaways:

This is the second installment in our 2-part series on RevOps and its game-changing impact on business growth.

In Part 1, we deep-dived into how RevOps can help businesses focus on the bigger picture while streamlining workflows. Do give it a read, if you haven’t, till now!

With cross-functional tools, GTM-wide metrics, and deeper account management coming up in a big way, companies are embracing Revenue Operations or RevOps like never before.

An increasing number of organizations are realizing that modern businesses require a greater degree of alignment between various BUs–Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Finance. Only then can they rise above the competition.

But the term has grown to be so much more than just a binding agent between different teams.

This alignment is just a by-product of RevOps and not its ultimate goal.

By breaking silos and bringing cohesion between people, processes, and data, RevOps creates a great customer experience that feeds back to your recurring revenue.

What differentiates RevOps from sales operations is that sales ops is all about sales-related activities, limiting an organization’s total revenue strategy.

RevOps, on the other hand, presents a holistic view of business practices across every revenue-generating team.

While Sales Ops focuses on deal management, territory planning, CRM, and sales forecasting among others, RevOps looks at the customer’s journey. It shines the spotlight on the various revenue funnels, GTM executions, and ultimately, customer experience.

More importantly, RevOps is the approach you should be taking to analyze the Return on Investment (ROI) in your organization’s various departments. And with the increasing use of analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the RevOps team can find more trends that drive revenue streams.

A report by the Boston Consulting Group states that top B2B IT businesses that made use of RevOps have benefitted from increased sales productivity by about 10-20%.

Why Should You Even Care About Revenue Ops?

Companies that are utilizing the RevOps platform have several points working for them, all of them critical for running a modern-day sales organization.

• They are collating customer engagement data from sales, marketing, and service to help managers make better decisions about growth investments

• RevOps solutions provide revenue intelligence to the senior growth leaders of such organizations. They have better visibility into seller performance and an in-depth understanding of the pipeline
• These organizations are also connecting third party marketing, sales, and service data to glean out valuable consumer insight that supplements in the decision-making process for frontline sellers

How to Fix Your Pipeline Problems with RevOps?

As a starting point, RevOps helps in creating a robust foundation focusing on accelerating growth by acting on the growth levers.

But RevOps can be the much-needed solution to a myriad of challenges that companies face today, especially in sales pipeline management.

#1. Enabling Growth with an Agile GTM

According to a McKinsey research, centralizing all GTMs and crafting agile operating models have a domino effect, helping businesses to achieve more than 20% ROI in sales.

With revenue operations, this centralization is possible.

RevOps can enable all GTM teams to move towards a collective goal while keeping these teams accountable to revenue. Such an approach has an immediate and measurable impact on the full-funnel, from awareness to expansion.

#2. Revenue Strategy

RevOps enables businesses to co-create a revenue strategy with all department leaders, often in the form of Objective Key Results (OKR).

OKRs are goal-setting tools that go a long way in ensuring that businesses have alignment between departments. They are an excellent way to infuse operational focus and agility while encouraging the creation of growth-based initiatives.

#3. Measuring Every Detail

Reports, analytics, and dashboards help you to better understand your company’s current performance and gaps in the process.

When you are able to measure what your customers are expecting, you get a deeper insight into their purchasing intent.

RevOps helps in operationalizing this data.

This data also gives you a glimpse into how your product is faring. For instance, if there are specific features that are generating more revenue, you know you should push more of those features aggressively.

Similarly, you would pull back on features that are contributing to little or no revenue generation.

#4. Customer-centric Processes

Customer Lifetime Value or CLV is the total revenue a business can expect to bring in from a customer.

It is also a critical metric for the RevOps team to measure customer success.

Essentially, CLV determines how valuable a customer is to your organization throughout the buyer’s journey.

Your RevOps team can help your sales and marketing units to gain a deeper understanding of your customer’s diverse experiences. They can measure feedback at every touchpoint.

When your teams understand what is making a customer stick around, they can adjust or continue to align their processes accordingly.

It also paves the way for a customer-centric mindset.

Data by Bain & Company shows that companies excelling at customer experience drive 4-6% higher revenue than their counterparts.

#5. Sales Automation

It is no secret that sales automation boosts revenue.

According to HubSpot, 61% of businesses leveraging automation exceeded their revenue targets in 2020. The data highlights how automating manual processes can be beneficial for revenue generation.

At its core, automating processes is not about replacing employees or automating individual tasks.

Since RevOps sits at the cusp of people, systems, and procedures, they have a unique grasp at deploying automation technologies that supplements these three areas successfully.

Implementing RevOps

According to a study by Forrester, B2B companies that have aligned their structure with RevOps will be better positioned to thrive in the next three to five years, compared to their competitors.

But how do you make it happen? These five key steps will help you in getting started with revenue operations.

1. The first key step is to audit your customer journey. Find out the areas where there is a disconnect between departments. One way to go about this is to align your existing content with your customer’s lifecycle. Similarly, audit the technologies you use for sales, marketing, and service. Lastly, audit all your digital footprints, such as your website and social media handles. These steps will ensure that you have the best practices in place.

2. The second step of the process is to align your lifecycle stage definitions. Start with a thorough evaluation of your revenue pipeline. Identify the gaps in your technology stack for quick redressal. And finally, supplement your teams’ efforts with well-defined and streamlined RevOps processes.

3. The third step is to accelerate your momentum to realize your revenue potential. You can build your GTM strategy for customer acquisition. Additionally, create a RevOps dashboard that will show your bottlenecks.

4. Pave the way for optimized processes by prioritizing regular RevOps meetings with heads of GTM teams. This will go a long way to keeping teams aligned with the common vision. It is also equally important to keep updating your RevOps strategy for better revenue growth and organizational change.
5. The last step is to include five main revenue operations KPIs in your implementation plan. These include Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Annual Recurring Revenue, Customer Lifetime Value, Win Rate, and Customer Churn.

Succeeding with Revenue Operations

As more and more departments mesh together and become cross-functional, the more data-driven it will be.

While every organization functions differently, investing in revenue operations can accelerate their growth and maturity, allowing them to invest more and reduce their pain points.

But to truly see where RevOps can have a positive impact, leadership should start by diagnosing the state of their GTM strategies and processes.

Such efforts should include the planning processes along with the cross-functional execution of tools, data, and people.

Ready to make RevOps a reality for your business?

Take a look at our CxO Guide: The Definitive Guide to RevOps and discover how you can join the very best teams at the front edge!

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