What Does RevOps Do? Maximize Your Revenue Potential

Five years ago, no one used the term “RevOps.” Now, it’s impossible to scroll through your LinkedIn feed without seeing it everywhere. Why and how has it become so popular?

In this article, we’ll discuss what RevOps is and how to do RevOps correctly. We’ll also look at various tips on how to scale your RevOps strategy and optimize for success. With this information, you can start creating your own successful RevOps program and take full advantage of its benefits.

Let’s dive in!

The Rise of RevOps

Although organizations have been doing revenue operations for countless numbers of years, the term itself, Revenue Operations, sounds like something your grandfather did while wearing a business suit and shiny shoes.   

RevOps, on the other hand, sounds cool. It sounds fresh. It sounds like something you can do in fashionably ripped skinny jeans and a graphic tee while wearing custom earbuds.  

The term has become so popular, in fact, that it has caused a change in the titles of company executives:

• No one wants to be a Chief Sales Officer; they want to be a Chief Revenue Officer.
• VP Sales Operations? Nah. VP Revenue Operations.
• Good luck finding a Director of Sales Operations. Overwhelmingly, they are now Directors of Revenue Operations.

Businesses have certainly become aware of the importance of aligning their operating functions of sales, marketing, and service and finding ways to replicate and repeat revenue growth. But while almost every (successful) company on the planet recognizes the need for prioritizing revenue operations, there is a marked difference in how they choose to address it.

Part of the reason for this is the lack of a common definition and framework. 

Want proof? 

Just ask anyone in the RevOps field how they answer the inevitable “So what do you do for a living?” question. It’s literally easier to split an atom than to define RevOps for someone outside of the marketing world when the people inside of it often struggle to come to a consensus definition.

So What is RevOps?  

While defining and describing RevOps accurately is important, understanding why there’s a need to define and describe it correctly is also highly beneficial. The mission of RevPartners, for example, is to democratize revenue operations. When RevOps is accessible to everyone, more people will understand and execute it well. For this to happen, it is crucial to have a universally accepted and adopted definition of RevOps.

Here’s a fun exercise: Type “RevOps” into Google and continue clicking each search hit until you find a repeated definition.  

Spoiler: this is going to take a while. You’re going to see lots of “alignment”, “silos are bad”, “it’s a business function,” and “getting sales, marketing, and customer success on the same page”, just never in the same order and often worded in an increasingly intricate manner.  

Although many of these definitions touch on common pain points and therefore have a tendency to resonate positively in one way or another with many RevOps professionals, they are simply not accurate. 

The problem with nearly every one of these “definitions” is that they are describing a desired outcome; they are explaining what revenue operations done well looks like. The actual meaning of the term RevOps is never fully fleshed out in these interpretations of the word. 

So what is a good RevOps definition, then? Very simply, RevOps is the science of sustainable revenue growth. It is the collection, synthesization, and dissemination of revenue data information. Broken down further, revenue is a product of connected events that work in tandem across several departments.  

Your ability to track conversions, time and volume between key events dictates your ability to test, pivot, and iterate. Silos greatly hinder this process and affect your ability to track, measure, and manage. What you don’t track, you can’t measure. What you can’t measure, you can’t manage. What you don’t manage…fails.  

RevOps seeks to accomplish the following:

• Replicate and repeat revenue growth
• Uncover the process of how revenue teams can teach, measure, repeat, improve, explain and apply growth strategies to the full revenue cycle
• Identify tools and behaviors that show how you’re collecting, synthesizing, and disseminating revenue data     

The above definition works because it:

• Is rooted in science, not jargon
• Treats RevOps as something that can be studied, repeated, and properly leveraged
• Can take RevOps from theory to action

This is RevOps.

How to do RevOps to Help your Company

How to do RevOps: Collection

If RevOps is the collection, synthesization, and dissemination of revenue data, then it stands to reason that the collection stage is perhaps the most important one. Without proper collection, there can be no proper synthesization and, subsequently, no proper dissemination. Determining and properly implementing your collection mechanisms are key. 

Track all marketing activity in a CRM

You can manage interactions and relationships with customers by organizing data in a centralized, easily accessible database. This makes it easy for sales reps to find the information they need to keep every interaction with a customer meaningful and personalized.

Track all sales activity in a CRM and/or sales enablement platform

You can predict future revenue based on the stage and likelihood-to-close of each deal in your pipeline and make effective use of your sales team’s time by automating workflows with personalized outreach based on custom lead-scoring data. Additionally, you can keep track of the health of each prospect as they move through the sales process and identify bottlenecks in your sales funnel.

Track all customer success activity in a CRM

You can measure the following customer success metrics:  customer health score, net promoter score, qualitative customer feedback, customer churn rate, monthly recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, customer retention cost, first contact resolution rate, customer satisfaction score, and renewal rate.  

How to do RevOps:  Synthesization

Now you have your data, but what do you do with it? You need to put it together and make it mean something. Collecting data without properly synthesizing it is like ordering an expensive steak from a steakhouse and then throwing it on the floor. Great execution in step 1 can be canceled out by poor execution in step 2. 

Use automation to combine your data

It will reduce human error and make the entirety of the process much more efficient. Lead scoring, deal scoring, customer health score, and deal velocity are all examples of areas that benefit from an automated process.

How to start with lead scoring? Grab your free Breadcrumbs account and start scoring your leads for free!

Breadcrumbs’ plug-and-play lead scoring platform gives you and your team better visibility into the leads that are most likely to buy.

1. Design models around your conversion goals
2. Give sellers context around what makes a lead hot
3. Clone, tweak, and test models in minutes
4. Close better deals, faster
5. Leverage time decay to truly understand intent

Get started today!

Create unified data warehouses across all customer databases

Salespeople can utilize the data warehouse to compare their store’s performance based on consolidated data across the company. A unified data warehouse has the ability to refine data, eliminating redundant information while increasing overall data quality. Data manipulation is kept to a minimum. 

How to do RevOps: Dissemination

When you are able to identify the outcomes of sharing your data, you gain a much clearer picture of the overall health of your company. In this stage, you can take notice of areas of weakness and determine the best course to correct them.

Identify revenue leakage

You need to be aware of any unintended or unnoticed loss of revenue. This can help you decide if you are underbilling or relying too heavily on manual processing. 

Report on company health metrics

You can calculate the total cost of sales and marketing efforts needed to convince a customer to buy a product or service, predict the net profit attributed to an ongoing relationship between customer and product, and determine the portion of a company’s revenue that is expected to continue in the future.

Visualize your data performance

So that you can see patterns and trends, distill your data, emphasize your points to your stakeholders, and guide your strategy.

That all sounds great, but….

Are Most Companies Good at RevOps?

Some businesses have a Chief of RevOps who is a wizard with models and GTM motions coupled with a devoted set of employees who do nothing but eat, sleep, and breathe sweet RevOps air. But many do not. In fact, for most businesses, it can be difficult even to know what a RevOps person (or team) should even be doing.

The truth is, having a full-time, in-house professional RevOps team is expensive. Because of this, most companies don’t have a cadre of GTM wizards and model forecasting experts standing by.  This results in a lot of revenue operations-type functions being carried out by employees that may be ill-prepared for the job.     

The solution? RevOps as a service.

What is RevOps as a Service?

Let’s say you open up your refrigerator one day, and it’s not cold. That’s a problem and likely one you’re not equipped to fix on your own. Most people do not possess the technical know-how (and extra time) to figure out why their fridge isn’t doing its job. So what do you do?

You call an expert!  You outsource the task to someone who has more experience, more skills, and more resources to get the job done. If you try to take care of this problem on your own, you’ll most likely end up wasting valuable time and money.  

Now instead of a broken refrigerator, imagine it’s a company’s broken revenue engine. Instead of a refrigerator repair company to the rescue, it’s a company full of RevOps experts. That’s RevOps as a service!

To be more precise, it is partnering with a RevOps as a service provider and turning over everything from lead generation and nurturing to pricing strategy and data analysis processes.  The end result is an optimization of your customer-focused activities.

Benefits of RevOps as a Service

• Scalability:  As your business grows, your RevOps needs will likely change.  Easily scale up or down as needed without the hassle of hiring or laying off employees.
• Saves bandwidth:  Alleviate tasks from current employees who can reinvest that time in other company projects.
• Peace of mind:  Your RevOps operations are being handled by professionals.
• Cost-effective:  Much less expensive than hiring a full-time, in-house team of RevOps pros.  
• Bonus:  You only pay for the services you need, so you can customize a package that works for your business and your budget.

TL;DR:  RevOps as a service is a strategic partnership that provides businesses with a way of achieving sustainable revenue growth without having to hire an entirely new in-house team. 

At RevPartners, RevOps as a service is our bread and butter. We offer HubSpot guided activations (we like to call it “Do It With Me”) and HubSpot premium activations (we call this one “Do It For Me”). 

We complete a technical setup of your Sales, Service, and Marketing hubs, provide user and basic training, and SEO and SEM audits and recommendations (along with customer journey and property mapping at the premium level).

Here is a real example of how turning over your RevOps functions to professionals can make all the difference:

Problem: company duplicated in CRM
Individual contacts from the same company are often in different lifecycle stages, causing the company to appear in multiple progression stages.  Essentially, a duplicating company was giving the sales team false positives.

The RevPartners Solution
One of our strategists created a company list from contact lifecycle stage lists and filtered to select contact in the highest stage.  They then built a report showing contact conversion rates, count of company, and progression from MQL, SQL, and Opp week over week.

Let’s Review: How to do RevOps

Fact no. 1: RevOps is a hot, new term.

• Problem:  Because it’s new, there is no widely accepted common definition and framework. 

• Solution:  Do not define RevOps by its end state. Use a definition rooted in science and can take RevOps from theory to action.

Fact no. 2: Your ability to track conversions and time between key events dictates your ability to test, pivot, and iterate

• Problem:  What you don’t track, you can’t measure. What you can’t measure, you can’t manage.  What you don’t manage…fails.
• Solution:  RevOps can help you collect, synthesize, and disseminate your revenue data, including lead scoring. 

Fact no. 3: Every company does RevOps. That means you’re either doing it well or you’re doing it poorly. 

• Problem: If you don’t have a dedicated, in-house team of RevOps experts, then it’s probably the latter.
• Solution:  RevOps as a service!  Find a provider and leave your revenue operations to the pros.