Do you Value your RevOps Team?
- Management & Leadership, Sales
- Simone McNichols-Thomas
- Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a relatively new term that covers a wide range of disciplines in the go-to-market environment. It can be an incredibly powerful engine of delivery for marketing and sales when it is truly valued. The problem is, sales leaders and marketers on occasion don’t invest enough time into supporting their RevOps team.
Ben Miller, Partner at Miller Growth Advisory －told us how we change this trend.
A relatively large number of SaaS companies are now acquiring customers purely through marketing, bringing data analysis to the forefront of marketing activities. Ben in his live event, Revenue Operations — What, Why, Who, When? , discusses the different aspects of RevOps, and the vital part it plays in building the right structure for your organisation. Generally, it provides proactive and reactive data insights that help you manage your business better and develop tech tools to run your marketing and sales functions.
So, what can you rely on a RevOps team to do for your business?
- A good RevOps team offers an analytical approach from lead generation and throughout the deal flow which can caution your marketing team against a particular plan of action or give you confidence in your approach. Their decisions are data-driven, unlike sales teams which have to rely partly on opinions and gut instinct. For example, RevOps can give you realistic outcomes for your new campaigns which are similar to previous ones you’ve used.
- An environment of data-driven testing keeps you up to speed in each quarter so you are more prepared for change.
- Good RevOps team has a process oriented mindset and the technical expertise to create systems that allow you to run your sales and marketing functions and gather helpful user data.
- RevOps break down silos between departments and grow accountability of conversion rates through the pipeline.
These benefits, however, are not guaranteed. Effective management of RevOps is needed for them to have this kind of impact. They also have to be listened to and included at multiple stages of the pipeline. As sales leaders, there are a few ways you can support your RevOps team and get the results you desire…
- Start by knowing the value of RevOps. 👌
They can give you invaluable data to help you with sales and marketing forecasts.
Picture this…It’s the first of July and you’ve sat down with all of your AE’s to run through their pipeline with them. Having heard their analysis of opportunities and applied your judgement, you say: “We’ve got 12.2M in the pipeline and I forecast we will likely close 3.1M this quarter.”
However, your RevOps could say: “We had 12.2M in the pipeline this time three months ago but we only closed 2M. The 2M we closed previously was generated from existing customers, whereas in today’s pipeline, only half as many have previous experience with us. It may be harder to close this quarter.”
This example shows how important data is in enabling accurate and reliable forecasting. RevOps teams can provide data from the very first moment marketing invests money into lead generation activity, all the way through to the closure. It’s important to learn what you can from them.
2. As a commercial leader, engage with new tools early on. 🎯
In order to have a really effective tech stack, which is both technically integrated, usable and useful and allows extraction of insights, you need to really engage with the development of the user experience. It is not enough to just review the end result. For example, if someone is going to integrate your marketing automation tools with your CRM tools, make sure your teams have actually used the new tool in the flow where it is being implemented and take responsibility for the user experience.
How much time do you spend defining how a new tool needs to work with your sales flow? This isn’t just a job for RevOps. Engineers will build what we want them to, so make sure you set comprehensive targets for your new tool. This will be a great help to whoever you have chosen to build it.
3. Involve the RevOps team when proposing a change.🤝
Whether it’s launching a campaign, reducing your sales stages, or adapting the way in which your target ads, be sure to engage with RevOps. They will be able to ensure that the testing you do tells you whether the change has made a positive difference.
In This Together is delivered in partnership with Outreach, who have seen fit to sing the praises of Revenue Operations too! In their blog, they specifically focus on how SaaS companies need RevOps in order to ‘take off’.
It is well worth catching up on Ben Miller’s brilliant broadcast on-demand, through our on-deamand Events page! He touches on forecasting and pipeline management; analytical approaches to lead generation and deal flow; and how to learn from sales operations data. What he has to say may be the key to unlocking your company’s full potential.
Revenue Operations are a key bit of the sales and marketing mix and can help your teams meet their targets through smart data-driven analysis. Our Sales Impact Academy Demand Generation course touches on this and what else you should be doing.
