The marketing and sales space is filled with buzzwords right now, but I’m about to throw another one at you, so brace yourself. Have you considered RevOps? RevOps is a new way to look at breaking down silos between sales, marketing, and tech. All three departments are key players in managing full funnel operations across the customer lifecycle, and alignment is key.
Revenue is a team sport. To maintain and increase revenue, you need alignment between those responsible for operations, enablement, tools, and insights. RevOps allows organizations to focus the resources, processes, and tech investments around customer revenue and lifetime value.
Alignment Is Key
When all teams responsible for affecting revenue are aligned, they generate more revenue in less time. Whether your teams accomplish that through demand generation or account-based marketing depends on the complexity of your business, vertical, revenue goals, sales cycle, etc. But what doesn’t change is that alignment between these key stakeholders will result in more revenue.
According to MarketingProfs, organizations with highly aligned sales and marketing have 36 percent higher customer retention rates and achieve 38 percent higher sales win rates. You can’t get those results, though, without putting in the work, and that involves aligning the processes and systems that enable change.
Many organizations have a sales and marketing VP who oversees both sales and marketing teams. However, they often operate in isolation. The IT team is managed by yet another executive altogether. Under the RevOps model, all three teams—even if managed by different leaders—are accountable to the same ultimate KPI: revenue growth.
“Revenue is a team sport. To maintain and increase revenue, you need alignment between those responsible for operations, enablement, tools, and insights.”
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Breaking Silos Is a Change Management Initiative
Breaking silos isn’t easy or fast, especially if you’re a larger or enterprise organization. You have to change thought processes and behaviors.
“Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get.”
– Kendall Lyman and Tony C. Daloisio, “Change the Way You Change”
The earlier these teams see each other as being on the same team and start operating as one, the more likely they’ll be successful. But like any change management initiative, the model and the initiatives need to be supported from the top down and carried through consistently by key leaders. The RevOps team needs the structure, sponsorship, support, and oversight necessary for this new model and supporting activities to receive the visibility, care, and attention they need to gain traction and maintain momentum.
Shared and Focused Goals
A key step toward getting the sales, marketing, and technology departments on the same team is defining and agreeing to shared goals. Focus the RevOps team on their revenue-based KPIs. A great degree of metrics can be measured and can define those KPIs in a more detailed manner, but ultimately their goals include generating leads, closing deals, and expanding accounts. The specifics around the number of leads, lead sources, deal size, specific contacts, and channels utilized all must be agreed on. However, this can get complicated quickly and the RevOps team can quickly get overwhelmed. Especially in the beginning, keep the goals simple, focused, and achievable so you can reinforce behavior and test what works. Operating as a RevOps team ensures KPIs can be defined and delivered into a single dashboard that aligns with all stakeholders.
Revenue acquisition and attribution has gotten increasingly complex due to technology and the amount of data and insights available. Year over year, an increasing number of technologies from an increasing number of companies are available to attract, retain, and track prospects and customers. There are now more than 7,000 martech solutions on the market to choose from. Do you want any single team to make this technology investment without consulting the other teams responsible for and measured by revenue? My advice: Don’t invest in martech platforms until you’ve clearly defined and agreed to shared goals, KPIs, and orchestration plans.
Be Patient
Change management takes time, as does building a repeatable revenue growing machine. Be patient. As researchers Kendall Lyman and Tony C. Daloisio put it in their book “Change the Way You Change,” “Fast and efficient works for about 30 percent of the change efforts that do not require behavior change and are not transformational to the business. But that approach doesn’t work for the 70 percent that require high engagement, clarity of behavior changes needed, and modeling and championing by key leaders.”
Holistic approaches take time and energy, but they’re ultimately worth the investment. When built right, they result in a model that can bring in more revenue quickly.
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