Alright, so what is RevOps?

The simple way to think about this is to see it as a framework with the goal to align marketing, sales, customer success, and other teams around a common goal – that goal being? Well, to drive sustainable revenue for your business.

How did I become an expert at RevOps overnight, you ask?

Well, short answer is I didn’t. I have been toying around with RevOps for a while now. The thing is I cannot stand still, I always need something to work on, project, task, anything to keep me from staying still and recently one of the things that I have noticed is how much each department in every company operates on an individual level.

By that I mean, if you look at a typical SaaS, Sales has it’s CRM in which they are tracking metrics, Customer Success got their own tool, Support probably have their own ticketing system and Marketing probably is stitching data together from multiple different sources.

In the absence of a robust RevOps function, your company will most likely encounter bringing harmony amongst the sales and the marketing endeavors. If your teams and your strategy is out of sync, resources are squandered, then inevitably revenue starts to fall through the cracks due to ineffective lead sources, campaigns, that not only increase the cost of acquiring new customers (CAC), it also creates tension between the teams.

So think of RevOps as the connective tissue between all the teams, essentially guaranteeing that everyone is paddling in the same direction, looking at the same dataset, in-sync regarding how to go about generating demand and addressing the gaps in the market.

Now, i’m not saying that every SaaS company out there don’t have their shit together, kudos to you if you do, you can stop reading and skip the blogpost altogether. I’m also not saying that you should drop everything and start focusing on RevOps today. Having said that, the fact that there are data silos in your company is a massive issue that sooner or later (better sooner) needs to be addressed, because it will cause massive headaches down the line and waste a ton of resources.

When should you start thinking about RevOps?

If you are a large enough company (>$5M ARR), it’s a good time to start thinking about setting up a RevOps function that structures your data and most importantly aligns your teams.

It’s not an arbitrary number, but typically around that revenue point things start to get a little bit more serious, more structured and its the perfect time to start perfecting your processes and data.

Alternatively, you should start contemplating RevOps when you begin to notice discrepancies or inefficiencies between sales, marketing, and customer success departments.

These inefficiencies can be disjointed strategies, misaligned objectives, or difficulties in tracking and optimizing the customer journey. Additionally, as you scale your operations and things become more and more complex, the need for RevOps will become increasingly apparent.

Essentially, the ideal time to start thinking about RevOps is when your business recognizes the importance of integrating these functions to drive revenue growth, improve customer experience, and enhance operational efficiency.

Look, if your teams are not all looking at the same data or don’t have the same numbers at hand, it will be extremely hard to hit any common goal let alone the revenue numbers you might put up for quarter or year.

Good thing is that RevOps was specifically designed to break down organizational silos. To help improve the internal processes, and foster a more customer-centric culture across all your revenue generating teams.

Think of a funnel that starts from when a visitor enters the funnel, converts into a paying customer, to the time they churn out, all of that should and needs to be aligned in order to make sure your team is not missing the mark.

I hope this helps put things in perspective in regards to what RevOps is and when it should kick in. Now, that we got the problem out of the way, let’s discuss how can you go about implementing RevOps without breaking the bank, or turning things upside down.

Ok, so before I go into this and start listing out the solution. I want to first point out what the job of RevOps is in bullet points. This will work as the guide for everything that comes after this.

• Investing in data to always be predictable – This is done by building Dashboards, reports, forecasts that act as a single source of truth

• Commoditizing neat processes – Goal here is to work on setting up workflows that do not need constant tinkering and stitching.

• Investing in an infrastructure to scale – Investing in tools to solve today’s problem; and infra to scale.

That’s it. The end. On to the next blogpost.

I really gotta work on my jokes….

So back to implementation. Alright, I will let ChatGPT take it from here.

Again with the darn jokes. I digress. AI getting way too smart.

No it’s not AI, I promise. Alright alright, focusing…

Back to the topic at hand.

The best way to implement anything new is to first realize there is an issue or problem that requires fixing or a change is needed to be implemented. I assume if you’re reading this then you’ve already figured out this is the path you want to follow.

So let’s start off then, shall we?

Tech Stack Eval

First off, if you don’t already have this in place, list out all the tools used by your sales, marketing, and customer success teams. The goal here is to evaluate whether these tools effectively track and manage leads throughout the customer journey.

Identify any overlaps they might have or redundancies. Consolidate tools where possible to streamline operations and reduce costs. You’d be surprised how much money you can save just by doing this audit and optimizing the processes.

While you’re trying to optimize the process, make sue that the updated tech stack facilitates seamless data flow and integration between different departments. You don’t want to drop the ball on this one, and you most certainly don’t want to make your life complicated by making holes in the data.

The goal behind this audit is to not only consolidate the tools, save money, but also to take a more of a holistic approach to data. A well-evaluated tech stack ensures that all tools and platforms that your sales, marketing and customer success teams are using are optimized for performance and integrated with each other.

The added benefit of this is as your company will grow, your needs most definitely will evolve. Evaluating the tech stack means that the tools in use scale alongside the business, supporting larger teams and accommodating a large amount of data.

Tools that are outdated, cumbersome, or difficult to use can hinder team performance and morale. By evaluating and updating the tech stack, RevOps can ensure that teams have access to modern, user-friendly tools that enhance their work experience and effectiveness.

Next up:

Assessing the Revenue Pipeline

Not gonna lie this one is one of my favorites. Yes, i’m a nerd at heart.

The goal here is to map out your revenue pipeline from lead generation to conversion and beyond. You do that by identifying key stages in the pipeline and evaluate the effectiveness of the current processes and each stage.

Figuring out where the bottlenecks exist or gaps for that matter in the pipeline that may be hindering revenue growth.

Look in depth how each department contributes to moving leads through the pipeline and where the handoffs occur between them. Think visitor to a demo request, lead to customer and customer to expansion etc.

You don’t stop there. No. Like we established this isn’t spring cleaning, we coming for everything, right? So, evaluate the criteria and processes that are in place to qualify the leads and determine if they are a good fit for the product or service that you are offering.

Analyze the leads and how they are converted into opportunities and whether the handoff between marketing and sales is frictionless and smooth.

Your goal again is to find as many road blockers as you can. Right, I know i know, if you go looking for cancer, all you will see is the symptoms for cancer. Right. But the goal here is to be objective and ask yourself is that the best and most efficient process we have in place? If the answer is no, improve. Do better.

The good thing behind assessing everything as well as the revenue pipeline is that it will ensure the data in the pipeline is accurate and consistent. That is vital for reliable forecasting, and decision making.

Just a tip here, make sure that the data is consistently updated and standardized across all tools. This is a good time to take a look at the verbiage of things, and how you classify MQLs, SQLs, Opps, etc.

By thoroughly assessing these aspects of the revenue pipeline, RevOps can ensure that the pipeline is efficient, effective, and aligned with the company’s strategic objectives, ultimately driving revenue growth and business success.

To hire a team or not

Ok so this can go one of two ways, because in the next step of your RevOps, you need to establish clear responsibilities for managing the initiative. The approach you take will depend on your company’s size, maturity and resources available to you.

Shared responsibilities among team members

That’s option 1. Obviously the one with low barrier to entry as well as cheap. For smaller companies, dividing RevOps responsibilities among existing team members is a cost-effective and quick way to get started.

In this model, the sales reps, customer success managers (CSMs), and managers will take on multiple roles as you build your RevOps framework. While this approach allows for flexibility and rapid implementation, it also means there are a lot of people involved and the more people are involved, the higher the chance of things going awry, as no one person is fully responsible for data hygiene and making sure that everything is hunky dory.

This approach is good for small teams, but as your company grows you will want to transition these shared responsibilities into dedicated RevOps roles.

Hiring a dedicated RevOps specialist

For larger companies that have a more complex need for standardization and operating at a larger scale, say 100+ employees, hiring a dedicated Revenue Operations specialist is often more effective.

The goal of the RevOps specialist is to oversee the entire implementation process and work to dismantle any existing silos that may exist in your company. While this approach will be more costly and time-consuming, it is beneficial for larger orgs that typically have more entrenched data silos and complex processes.

By choosing the approach that best suits your organizations size and needs, you can lay a very strong foundation for implementing RevOps and drive better alignment and efficiency across your revenue generating teams.

Which tool to buy?

Hold your horses, young Horatio! no need to go guns blazing with your credit card. Well, not yet at least. Again, take a step back and see where you are at the moment and what the needs of the company are.

Don’t be like my buddy who bought all the fishing gear, spend $100s of dollars only to fish once in his life, smh.

As I mentioned earlier, the path you choose, in this case the tool that you choose to go ahead with, will become the single source of truth for your organization. So this one will require a lot of thinking on your end and planning to ensure that the approach you take is scalable.

Do I have a recommendation in this case? Yes sir!

Excel.

Yup, you read it correctly. A spreadsheet will do the trick just fine. Let me explain. No matter which tool you go ahead with, there will be things you will not be able to do with it. Period.

You will not be able to bend it to your will, no matter how much you try, you just won’t, because with tools come limitations, well until and unless we are talking about Notion, in that case no limitations, haha.

The reason I chose excel or Google Sheets is that they are extremely powerful. Better yet, if you connect them with Coefficient, you make it a powerhouse, because Coefficient makes it easier for you pull in all the live data in to your spreadsheet.

That way, you can slice and dice the data in any way shape or form you like. No tool will give you the flexibility that a spreadsheet provides, and the use cases are a dime a dozen. If you’re looking for inspiration, do check out the templates already created and just plug and play.

Really useful if you are stuck and are in need of inspiration or simply don’t know where to start.

I mean look at it, it looks beautiful don’t it?

Not gonna lie, going this route is going to take a long time to get everything right. But once you get it up and running, sky is the limit with what you can do with it. It will not cost you a $ other than the time you will spend perfecting it, and perfect you will.

The last thing that I want to share on this matter is that you can go ahead with the spreadsheet, most large orgs do that. But make sure you’re not pulling in data from multiple different sources e.g. your sales data coming in from Hubspot, while the success data is coming in from stripe or Vitally, and marketing data coming in from Woopra. This will simply not work.

It’s good to have all your data be sent to a tool like Amazon Redshift ensuring the resource can be used as a single source for fueling all of your data needs. That will not require you to stitch together data on a single spreadsheet from multiple different sources.

Evolution over revolution. Words to live by. Start small, build it up and go from there.

Establish your workflows

Now that you got your tool setup and ready to go, and the foundation is built, you need to optimize the workflows accordingly or create new ones.

Here are some of the processes and workflows that you’ll need to optimize for RevOps and how you can do that:

• GTM strategy: Design multiple GTM strategies for different customer segments based on company size, business model, industry etc.
• Revenue process: Create a tailored process for each iteration of your GTM strategy and set up trackable milestones for each customer.
• Handoff process: Create a unified workflow for handoffs between your SDRs, Account Execs, and CSMs.
• Inbound follow-ups & outbound outreach: Craft valuable content for your prospects and create a cohesive experience with your brand from the first contact.
• Reporting and metrics: Align on standardized metrics across your revenue process and set up a unified dashboard for key data elements.

What if your RevOps strategy doesn’t work as expected?

When implementing a new process, it can be challenging to predict the outcome, and it’s easy to abandon your efforts if you don’t see immediate results.

However, it’s crucial to recognize that significant strategies like RevOps require time to settle in and gain traction. Your team won’t become experts overnight, and you may need to invest in new tools. It could take several months or even years to start seeing substantial results, and that’s perfectly normal. Additionally, industry changes or shifts within your company may necessitate periodic realignments.

What’s essential is to remain patient and focused on your goals. Many organizations have already reaped the benefits of RevOps, and with persistence, you could too.

If you made it this far. Be sure to check out this blogpost about the PLG motion and Growth.