As businesses get more complicated, customer journeys with you also get more intricate. More than ever, companies are turning to Revenues Operations (RevOps) to combat this complexity to ensure that they have a unified business strategy that links together how a customer interacts with you.
In essence, RevOps is about having a strategy to link all of your revenue-generating activities across the customer life cycle. That means having a cohesive plan that connects sales, marketing, and customer service teams.
It’s designed to break down the barriers between teams and bring together processes so that your customers feel they have a seamless experience with you as they transition between departments.
In this article, we will delve into some of the trends in RevOps so you can find out what you need to know to stay ahead of the curve.
RevOps Trends You Need to Know About
RevOps is still pretty new as a concept, but it’s growing in popularity and evolving daily. Let’s look at some trends in RevOps today to figure out what to expect for 2024 so you can stay ahead of the curve.
1. RevOps is Becoming a Key Strategy
While RevOps used to be kept to the B2B SaaS realm, other industries are fast catching on to its usefulness as a tool for growing companies. Primarily, this comes as a recognition of the increasing need for interconnectivity between sales, marketing, and customer service teams, combined with the fact that more companies are opting for an omnichannel approach that requires significantly better inter-team communication.
Moreover, businesses adopting RevOps strategies are not just tweaking their operation modes; they’re entirely reimagining how their revenue engines can work, from customer services and lead management solutions to onboarding new customers.
This holistic approach is giving those organizations that use RevOps a considerable edge as they expand, as they can avoid silos between departments–which inevitably lead to poor communication between teams and duplicated effort. Additionally, RevOps strategies are driving sales performance, resulting in improved revenue generation.
As a result, marketing strategy integration and alignment with other departments have become a crucial component of this transformation.
So in 2024, we can expect RevOps strategies to be introduced across the board. In fact, according to research by Gartner, 75% of the highest-growth companies in the world will be implementing RevOps.
2. There’s an Increased Focus on Real-Time Data
There’s a saying, ‘May you live in interesting times,’ which was rumored to be a Chinese curse. The origin is probably apocryphal, but the last few years have taught us why people believe it.
In RevOps, there used to be a focus on using historical data to make forecasts. However, with the undeniably ‘interesting’ times we live in, where unprecedented occurrences are becoming a daily feature, businesses are moving away from this approach to become more agile.
Instead, organizations are moving towards utilizing real-time data, allowing them to react quickly to market changes and customer behavior. This enables organizations to maximize opportunities, mitigate risks, and ensure smooth, scalable growth.
3. Machine Learning, AI, and Automation are Playing a Greater Role
It wouldn’t be 2024 if we didn’t mention the use of AI and how it’s revolutionizing everything from medicine to bees (no, really). Well, RevOps is no different. AI’s capacity to handle and process vast amounts of data quickly changes how businesses make decisions.
Not only does it enable the advanced forecasting mentioned above, but machine learning predicts the outcomes of marketing strategies and enables individualized customer experiences for customers.
In short, AI is changing every aspect of revenue operations, starting with leveraging data in order to generate close sales leads, to enhanced post-sales service.
It’s even reducing workloads by automating repetitive tasks, freeing humans to focus on improving strategy and allowing people to focus on what they do best: interacting with others. Although the clever bots are getting better at that, too.
4. There’s a Push for Collaboration Between Remote Teams
Everyone who can work from home now–at least a bit. No commute, calls in your pajamas, sleeping until 3 minutes before the working day starts. You can see why it’s a hit. But it can also be a pain when you need to organize seamless revenue operations.
Now, not only are your customers spread across the globe and contacting you through a thousand different platforms, but your teams are also miles apart.
Unsurprisingly, RevOps is now turning its organizational eye to remote workers and adapting the framework to account for teams that may never meet in person but must work towards the same shared objective. After all, it’s about closer collaboration between teams. In this modern age, geography should not be a barrier to working together.
To enhance this sort of collaboration, businesses are increasingly relying on a variety of new tools and strategies. These include centralized communication platforms, integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, sales call scheduling software, and shared analytics dashboards that give all teams a unified view of every customer interaction and never miss a beat.
That means whoever the customer comes into contact with, they’ll pick right up from where the last team member left off. No one missed, no work duplicated.
5. The Emphasis is on Customer Experience
While the goal of RevOps is to create unity among your teams and drive revenue, there has been an increasing realization that the way to improve sales is through improved customer experience. People demand a higher level of service now and expect a smooth, seamless journey with a business.
As such, RevOps is now focusing more and more on a customer-centric model where customers are happy with their service at every touchpoint. With the number of ways customers can communicate with businesses, that’s not always an easy task–but then, that’s the point of RevOps.
Technology is also making the customer journey easier, with CRMs or using a cloud call center solution allowing members of all teams to work together seamlessly, without friction when transferring between touchpoints.
The good news is that the rewards are worth it. Prioritizing customer experience leads to stronger relationships. Stronger relationships mean customers that return, time and again. Returning customers means repeat business, driving sustainable growth.
6. There Will be More RevOps Positions
Perhaps this should go without saying, but as RevOps gains prominence, the job market will react accordingly. Next year, we will see an increased demand for RevOps professionals as more companies seek experienced professionals to set up and run RevOps teams.
Some organizations are even exploring collaborations with affiliate partners to strengthen their RevOps capabilities and expand their market presence.
That’s news for those already trained in the art of RevOps. However, you might have noticed a problem: RevOps is relatively new, and the market is growing. If you’re an employer looking to implement RevOps, now is the time to turn to your recruiting funnel, and you should expect to fight for people with the skills you need.
Alternatively, perhaps now is the time to invest in training to get some of your brightest stars up to speed. RevOps is new, but the skills required for it overlap considerably with other skills your existing managers should already have. Still, whatever route you choose, now is the time to prepare because finding new RevOps professionals won’t get any easier, at least not for a while.
7. There’s a Deeper Focus on Customer Acquisition Security & Privacy
We’ve talked a lot about the growth of RevOps and how more businesses are turning to it. However, there’s an industry whose growth dwarfs that of RevOps professionals. In fact, depressingly, its meteoric rise has seen it grow, year on year, seemingly without end. Unfortunately, that ‘industry’ is cybercrime.
On the other side of the cybersecurity coin, fines for data breaches are also rising, with the EU GDPR regulations allowing for penalties of up to €20 million ($22 million). That’s quite the incentive to ensure security is kept tight. What is enterprise risk management? In today’s world of data and data breaches, it’s investing in cyber security.
From the perspective of RevOps, a practice founded on sharing data, including personal data, security is paramount too. Now, with integrated systems such as company-wide CRMs that hold the details of thousands of individuals, companies have to be more vigilant than ever when it comes to protecting customer data.
It’s also the perfect area to fall under the remit of RevOps. Most people think data breaches come from hackers attacking computer systems through the internet and exploiting program weaknesses. However, the truth is that the users are the biggest weakness in any system. That means a unified endpoint management methodology for handling data is the best security feature a company can offer
Final Thoughts
As the world becomes more complex, so do businesses. That’s why RevOps is becoming more critical by the day; the need for a holistic approach to unify revenue engines becomes ever more paramount as companies continue to grow and diversify the roles of their sales, marketing, and customer experience teams.
However, RevOps is still relatively new, and many companies are just beginning to implement its strategies. That means systems and practices are still changing by the day as people explore different ways to solve problems.
It also means there are significant challenges on the horizon. Yet, if you want to stay ahead of the curve, now is the time to act and start implementing RevOps into your business strategy.
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