Revenue Operations is a hot topic in B2B companies right now - everyone is talking about it, they know it is important to the future of their business, but no-one has a clear definition of it.

In the book “Revenue Operations” by Stephen Diorio and Chris Hummel they note:

“While most [leaders] agree that Revenue Operations is a good thing...more than 90% of the senior executives we spoke with were not clear on what a Revenue Operations model meant - or how exactly it will pay off.”

— Revenue Operations - Diorio & Hummel

What is a RevOps strategy?

Revenue Operations is the strategy of aligning your marketing, sales and customer success functions into one revenue team.

By removing the siloes between these teams you are able to remove friction from the process, improve your customer’s experience as they interact with your company, resulting in increased revenues and increased firm value.

When did Revenue Operations (RevOps) become popular?

As a term, RevOps is pretty new, only really gathering pace over the last five years.

Prior to this companies had segregated operations teams:

Marketing Operations looked after the marketing systems and processes
Sales Operations looked after the sales systems and processes
Customer Operations looked after the customer systems and processes

Why is RevOps popular now?

The way that customers buy changed forever during the COVID pandemic.

Prior to 2019 B2B purchases tended to involve vendors conducting a number of in-person meetings - buyers felt that the vendors had the information they needed and wanted them to visit in person to share their proposals.

But the pandemic forced everyone to go onto video - and buyers realised they liked it.

They could include more people from their teams in different locations and timezones.
They could talk amongst themselves while vendors were presenting.
They didn’t need to travel to their own offices.
They didn’t need to shake hands with hundreds of vendor teams during a health crisis.

Buyers learned that they wanted to be in control of their own buying process rather than being sold to.

They wanted to do their own research, spend more time speaking with peers, analysts, product review platforms and only speak to a vendor when they knew what they wanted to buy and how much they wanted to pay.

Today, buyers spend only a fraction of their buying process in front of vendors.

What does a CEO need to know about Revenue Operations (RevOps)?

RevOps is not SalesOps rebranded. RevOps is a strategic, externally facing function that guides you as a leader in your decisions of what to sell, who to sell to, and how to sell it.

Revenue Operations will help you to build out your Go To Market strategy, including defining your revenue leadership structure, your ideal customer profile, your value proposition and the playbooks that your sellers will use to engage with customers.

Revenue Operations will learn from your existing customers - understanding how they use your product, where they do or do not see value in your proposition, and take this information to feed back into your marketing team to further improve your pipeline generation.

*The Revenue Acceleration Flywheel describes the internal and external tasks that drive revenue*

The trap for a CEO is to think that RevOps is just a tactical internal support function that generates spreadsheets for forecasting and compensation models.

How RevOps helps CEOs with forecasting

Revenue Operations ties all your revenue systems together, removing the siloes between your marketing automation, sales engagement and customer success platforms.

This makes it much simpler for you to have a clear view of the end to end customer journey and determine where friction exists in the process.

By understanding the blockers, and using revenue intelligence platforms like Ebsta or Clari, you can have an accurate forecast of where your sales bookings will end up this month, this quarter, and further out.

This gives you the confidence you need when speaking with your board and investors about the direction the company is headed in, so that you can make better informed decisions on spending.

How RevOps helps CEOs with reducing costs

In 2023 the tech and VC community moved from ‘growth at all costs’ to ‘profitable growth’ overnight.

It was no longer acceptable to just throw more sales heads at a revenue plan as a strategy for growth.

Instead, a focus on revenue per head has become important, with Series A companies aiming for above $100k per head, and at scale public SaaS businesses at $350k per head.

One of the ways CEOs have delivered more efficiency is by reducing the denominator - the number of people in the business - with lower performing sellers being a key target.

Revenue Operations helps you to automate a lot of the manual tasks that exist in the seller workflow.

Use tools like 6Sense to prioritise which accounts to contact based on intent
Use Gong to record calls and prioritise next steps
Use Outreach or Salesloft to generate sequences of follow ups
Use Reveal to find profitable partnerships
Use Gainsight to uncover at-risk customer relationships
Use Vertice to strip out wasted spend on SaaS

These tools help your revenue team to do more with less people - breaking the linearity between headcount and revenue growth.

How RevOps helps improve your customer experience

In many companies being a customer feels like being on a conveyor belt.

You get passed from one team to another, with different systems, different branding, different language and a different pace.

At each of these handovers there is an awkward exchange of information and relationship that introduces friction and reinforces the idea you are in ‘a funnel’.

This happens because each team (marketing, sales and customer success) has built their own systems, data and processes to support their own needs.

I call it the Marina Bay effect. You might recognise this building Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

This is what most revenue teams look like. Three independent siloes connected at the top by their leadership.

With Revenue Operations you break those siloes down and look at the world from your buyer’s perspective.

You learn that they want frameworks, templates and lessons from your Customer Success team at the very start of their journey.
You learn that they go to specific Slack communities to learn from their peers.
You learn that they laugh at your Challenge, Solution, Results formulaic customer stories.
You learn that when they do put their hand up for help, being forced to speak to a young SDR to get ‘qualified’ just frustrates them.

RevOps helps you build a new process without this friction that accelerates your buyer’s journey and in turn delivers a much higher quality of opportunity to your sellers.

How RevOps helps with remote teams

Your revenue team is more distributed than it was pre-pandemic. You have team members that live far away from an office, and those that do live near offices only come in on a flex or hybrid basis.

You can’t keep that team aligned on the core mission in the same way as you used to - with face to face meetings and office screens and whiteboards.

Revenue Operations helps you to build a better marketer, seller and customer success manager experience by aligning the data, systems and processes into a single revenue engine.

We talk about providing sellers with a ‘single pane of glass’ (typically CRM) into which the other data, content, engagement and analytics tools are integrated.

How does RevOps help a company to scale

Growing a business is hard, what got you here won’t get you there.

“Every time your company doubles in size, you have to think of it as a new company”

— Job Van der Voort, CEO Remote

Revenue Operations gives you the foundation to predictably scale the business as you double, treble, quadruple the number of people in the organisation and the complexity increases exponentially.

Revenue Operations prevents siloes creeping in as you hire in new leaders who have not come from a unified revenue team.

As a CEO you need confidence that what your revenue team tell you is going to happen, does happen.

You need that confidence so that you can place bets on where to invest and when. A missed quarter or a failed leadership hire can derail that confidence and hold you back a year in your plans.

Revenue Operations is your strategic partner to help you scale on your schedule.