How to Pick a RevOps Agency: According to 4 Successful Pros

In this How to Pick a RevOps Agency guide, we'll look at the the four core skills of a first-rate RevOps partner and the three questions you should ask during your evaluation. 

When John Ross met his revenue operations (RevOps) agency’s team lead for the first time, he was surprised by how much he understood the EdTech space.

The CEO of Test Prep Insight shares with Breadcrumbs: 

“I started explaining our customer lifecycle when the team lead interrupted me and proceeded to explain in great detail how a typical revenue model and customer lifecycle in our industry works.” 

It was at that moment Ross realized he had found the right RevOps agency.

“The interruption and straightforwardness of the team lead might have shocked some people,” admits Ross. “But I loved it. He knew exactly where I was going and what was going on in my mind.”

This brings us to the gazillion-dollar question: 

How do you choose a partner with deep and relevant experience to unlock revenue growth in the shortest time possible?

Let’s find that out today.

How to Pick a RevOps Agency: The 4 Core Skills to Look For

Recap: A revenue operations (RevOps) agency is a specialized partner that maximizes an organization's revenue potential. It accomplishes this by aligning marketing, sales, and customer service operations.

Revenue operations require an end-to-end approach for sustainable growth—from prospects to customers to repeat customers.  

With the right infrastructure, says Rosalyn Santa Elena, founder and chief revenue officer (CRO) of The RevOps Collective, you’re much more equipped to identify what’s working (and not) and iterate to ensure better outcomes.

Jason Reichl, Breadcrumbs’ advisor and Trustlayer’s CRO, agrees. He says:

“The agency must be proficient in all four skills of RevOps: Strategy, Tools, Enablement, and Insights. These skills are critical for a RevOps program to stick and for your business to get that 26% improved revenue.”

Perry Zheng, CEO and founder of Cash Flow Portal, shares the same view. 

He says, “These four skills are the epitome of success for any RevOps agency. Unless it has an equally strong hold on all four of them, it may not deliver the expected results for you.”

Let’s unpack what these four core skills look like.

(i) Strategy

At the essence of strategy is people.

Ideally, your RevOps agency should know how to keep all revenue-centric departments in close coordination. 

Structuring people by specialty is the way to go, according to Camela Thompson, a fractional marketing advisor. Your odds of success are much higher when your cross-departmental specialists know how to work together efficiently. 

In Pandio‘s case, its RevOps agency formed specialized teams and gathered singular-source information before strategizing. 

Gideon Rubin, CEO and founder of Pandio, shares with Breadcrumbs, “Our RevOps agency emphasized the need to work together, so that we can turn potential sales and customers into something more concrete and beneficial for the sales department.”

TL;DR of How to Pick a RevOps Agency (Strategy): Exceptional RevOps agencies align all departments in a holistic strategy. 

(ii) Tools

The best RevOps agencies will customize your tech stack according to your business’s unique needs.

Suppose you have a goal of increasing upsells. 

One thing a competent RevOps agency might do is implement a customer relationship management tool (CRM) that supports upsell opportunities, and not a basic lead scoring tool that only identifies sales-qualified leads.

Here’s how your upsell scoring model might look on a fully featured contact scoring platform like Breadcrumbs:

1. Connect your data sources with Breadcrumbs
2. Define what makes a customer with upsell potential (e.g., visits pricing page + exceeds current plan usage)
3. Set the upsell scoring model live

Breadcrumbs will send all scoring information back to your data source, alerting you whenever a customer is ready for an upsell pitch.

With a full-on contact scoring CRM, both marketers and sales reps will have complete visibility in the pipeline and better context when closing them. 

You don’t need to worry about high-quality leads slipping through the cracks, because your optimized revenue engine will attract leads and customers—on repeat.

Sign up for your free Breadcrumbs account to get a head start on contact scoring and close deals quickly in your business today.

TL;DR of How to Pick a RevOps Agency (Tools): Great RevOps agencies understand that there's no one-size-fits-all tool stack. These RevOps specialists will customize your tech stack across the entire company according to your unique needs.

(iii) Enablement

75% of B2B buyers prefer a sales rep-free experience.

This means a good chunk of your B2B buyers will also interact with marketers, support, and Kyle from IT. We kid’, but you get the idea!

This also means sales enablement is no longer enough to optimize your customers’ experience and accelerate revenue across the funnel.

That’s where revenue enablement comes in.

Unlike sales enablement that supports only the sales team, revenue enablement empowers every revenue-driven and customer-facing department with valuable assets to maximize every buyer interaction (fun fact: there’s a similar concept called “partner enablement,” but that’s another story for another post).

The ideal RevOps agency won’t just implement sales enablement to support your sales team. It’ll also create revenue enablement to optimize every stage of the buyer’s journey.

TL;DR in How to Pick a RevOps Agency (Enablement): A competent RevOps agency empowers beyond the sales department. It understands the crucial important of revenue enablement for the entire organization.

(iv) Insights

As your revenue operations program progresses, the RevOps agency will guide you on how to move forward with the insights gathered.

Here’s how it might look on a micro-level. 

If…

• …no one knows how to report on conversions…the marketing operations manager might create processes and data reports and oversee KPI monitoring.
• …there’s a drop in customer satisfaction score…the customer success operations manager will analyze in-app activity (e.g., drop-off rate) customer churn metrics.
• …CRM adoption is at an all-time low…the sales operations manager might develop an in-app training program and assign internal champions to promote usage.

RevOps involves not only your monthly targets. These numbers are cool, but it’s only one small part of the process. 🙂

With revenue acceleration at the operational level, we want to focus on metrics that provide accurate forecasts and complete visibility into your entire pipeline. 

With these insights, you’ll know which specific stage to focus on and optimize your operational departments.

TL;DR in How to Pick a RevOps Agency (Insights): A first-rate RevOps agency supports data-driven insights, collaboration, and decision-making across all revenue-centric departments on an operational level.  

How to Pick a RevOps Agency Using These 3 Quickfire Questions

Alignment across strategy, tools, enablement, and insights, ensures every revenue-focused department is looking at the business the same way.

However, identifying a RevOps agency that can hit the mark across these areas is pretty tricky.

The reason? 

Many of those so-called RevOps agencies tend to recommend non-holistic strategies.

“These technology-specific firms are actually only sales or marketing operations,” reveals Reichl. “They’re using revenue operations to market their agencies. Their strategies will usually focus on tactics that only touch one part of your RevOps teams.”

So how do you ensure you’re working with a reliable RevOps agency?

Zheng recommends asking the following questions.

1. “What are the Qualifications of Your Team Members?”

Revenue operations revolve around varied departments, particularly marketing operations, sales operations, and customer success operations. 

Every member in your RevOps agency should be an expert in their respective fields:

• Chief Marketing Officer: Designing strategic sales marketing frameworks
• Director of Content: Creating content touchpoints in the customer’s journey
• Director of Paid Advertising: Running omnichannel ad campaigns

This is an oversimplified version, but the point still stands.

These team leads should work together and execute a RevOps strategy within the ecosystem.

Ross prioritizes “deep, narrow expertise in his vertical,” as he doesn’t need to invest a lot of time educating the RevOps agency about his customer lifecycle or the ins and outs of his industry. 

“It was clear from Day 1 that our RevOps agency had a deep knowledge of the online education space. Within just a couple weeks, the teams were able to assess our revenue operations and recommend changes and digital tools that they had used with other EdTech clients.”

John Ross, CEO of Test Prep Insights

TL;DR: Besides these four core skills (strategy, tools, enablement, and insights), look for a RevOps agency with clients in the same or a closely adjacent space.

2. “Do You Have Enough Sources to Manage Another Project Efficiently, or Are You Already Overworked?”

Self-explanatory.

You don’t want to work with a RevOps agency dealing with a heavy workload and run the risk of missing important deadlines.

3. “What Do You Think is Your Best Project So Far?”

This best project or achievement will help you gauge “the limit of the RevOps agency’s success” and whether it meets your requirements for the work you’re looking to get done.

“When you’re choosing a RevOps agency, you want to know their capabilities and what they think is their best work,” Zheng explains.

“I can’t expect them to undertake the same project in my company for the first time if their best work does not meet my expectations.”

Wrapping Up: How to Pick a RevOps Agency

If you’re not ready to hire an in-house RevOps leader, partnering with a RevOps agency is the way to go.

Watch out for the four core skills—strategy, tools, enablement, and insights—and ask these questions as you evaluate the t RevOps agencies.

It’ll help you identify the right partner in the shortest time possible.

Breadcrumbs is a revenue acceleration platform based on a co-dynamic lead scoring and routing engine living at the intersection of marketing and sales. Start your free plan to optimize the entire funnel and achieve your revenue goals today.