Has your business-to-business (B2B) company adopted a revenue operations (RevOps) framework?
If not, you’re falling behind.
According to Revenue.io, nearly half (48%) of companies have a RevOps function (up from 33% in 2021)—and an additional 11% plan to invest in revenue operations by 2024. Gartner agrees, predicting that by 2025, 75% of the world’s highest growth companies will adopt a RevOps model.
But what these numbers don’t reveal is that there’s a right way to implement RevOps—and a wrong one. RevOps is a significant undertaking, and you can’t wing it. To see the full benefits of revenue operations, your B2B company must set itself up for success by following a well-researched and strategic RevOps implementation process.
Revenue operations is designed to optimize revenue generation by aligning customer-facing teams (marketing, sales, and customer success), streamlining internal processes, centralizing your technology stack, and providing the data you need to improve revenue-impacting decision-making.
We’ve seen consistent RevOps growth across the B2B landscape, but that’s not surprising when you consider the many benefits revenue operations can provide:
RevOps has already paid off for many organizations. Revenue.io found that companies experienced increases in revenue growth (13%), performance (15%), revenue productivity (21%), and marketing and sales alignment (21%) after introducing RevOps.
Your B2B company can experience these benefits (and more) by implementing RevOps.
Is it too late? Has the revenue operations train already left the station for your organization?
Of course not.
It’s never too late to introduce RevOps into your B2B company. However, we’ve found that implementing RevOps early has significant benefits.
The numbers agree: Most companies (37%) adopt revenue operations when they reach the $5–20M ARR (annual recurring revenue) stage, and the benefits of RevOps start to emerge at $5M ARR.
In other words, when it comes to establishing a RevOps function at your business, the earlier the better.
We’ve detailed the steps you will need to take in order to successfully implement RevOps at your B2B company. Use this checklist as a guide along the path to revenue operations.
Setting goals is essential for a successful RevOps implementation. Clearly articulate the objectives of introducing revenue operations into your organization and set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals to clarify expectations of the implementation process.
Later, these goals and objectives will motivate your RevOps team and help them meet expectations.
Create a cross-functional RevOps team comprising representatives from marketing, sales, and customer success. You should also assign a leader to oversee the implementation process.
The size, budget, and needs of your business will dictate the structure of your revenue operations team. Your RevOps department may include roles such as a chief revenue officer (CRO), marketing operations (MarketingOps) and sales operations (SalesOps) leaders, data analysts, project managers, technology specialists, and more.
Building your RevOps team may involve reassigning the roles of existing employees and/or hiring dedicated revenue operations experts, depending on your needs.
A revenue process audit will help your RevOps team identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement in your existing revenue processes.
First, outline all the roles, processes, and workflows for your customer-facing departments, including marketing, sales, and customer success. Then, analyze these processes and note where there might be structural flaws, functional gaps, or misaligned priorities. These are the areas your RevOps crew will work to improve, optimize, and streamline as part of your revenue operations strategy.
RevOps relies on a specialized technology stack and centralized database. In the early stages of revenue operations implementation, you will need to determine what tools your customer-facing teams are already using, decide which software to keep (and the ones you can discard), and identify new platforms that can enhance your company’s revenue operations.
Most organizations will start with finding and implementing the right customer relationship management (CRM) program, marketing automation tools, sales enablement platforms, and customer success software.
It’s also essential to integrate these systems to facilitate the seamless flow of data across teams—an important part of eliminating organizational silos.
Successful revenue operations requires high-quality, consistent, shared data. Your RevOps department will define your organization’s data strategy and establish data governance across all teams.
Develop data management policies and data quality standards to ensure data accuracy, consistency, and security. Start by collecting data from marketing, sales, and customer success; enriching existing data and removing duplicates; and integrating data into a centralized location that is available to the entire organization (as needed). Then, create a plan to regularly audit data sources to confirm that analytical insights remain accurate.
Understanding the customer journey is critically important to enhancing the customer experience and achieving revenue growth. Create a detailed roadmap of the customer journey from initial contact to post-sales support and the lifetime customer relationship, ideally using the bow tie funnel as a guide. This process should include documenting all possible touchpoints and discovering tools used throughout the journey.
With this customer journey roadmap in hand, you can identify interactions with each department, find possible roadblocks, and look for opportunities to improve customer satisfaction.
Your marketing, sales, and customer success teams have a wide range of knowledge about your customers. While marketing is interacting with your audience on social media and learning the best ways to catch their attention, sales is interacting with prospects one-on-one to close the deal, and customer success is conducting surveys and gathering feedback to define the post-sale experience. Together, this valuable customer information from different departments creates a complete customer profile; the challenge is that when teams are siloed, they are not sharing these insights. RevOps breaks through these silos and unifies insights to achieve the ideal customer profile.
Consolidate customer data from various sources to build a single, comprehensive customer profile. This profile should be accessible to all teams so marketing, sales, and customer success can use it to guide their decision-making.
Regularly review and update this profile based on new insights to ensure your messaging, sales tactics, and customer support approaches are targeting your ideal audience.
Performance metrics and KPIs guide your RevOps team and keep your entire organization on target to reach your revenue goals.
Define common revenue KPIs and metrics for all departments. There are several key RevOps metrics that your business may want to track:
Whatever metrics and KPIs your RevOps team establishes, be sure they are aligned with your B2B company’s overall revenue goals.
Ensure your marketing and sales teams are aligned and working to achieve common revenue goals.
Coordinate sales and marketing processes to avoid duplication and ensure a smooth customer experience. Provide a framework for regular feedback and reporting to improve lead quality and optimize efforts. Clarify handoff points and communication channels to prevent prospects from getting lost in the shuffle.
Additionally, consider establishing service level agreements (SLAs) between sales and marketing to define lead handoff processes. SLAs will outline each team’s responsibilities and expectations so that these departments can work together successfully, efficiently, and effectively—which is key to revenue growth.
Customer experience must be a team effort. Both sales representatives and the customer success staff play an important role in ensuring the customer journey is positive and streamlined. When these teams are aligned and work closely together, your customers will see the difference and know they are in good hands.
To achieve this alignment, define handoff processes between sales and customer success to establish a smooth transition after the deal is closed. Your RevOps team should also create a customer onboarding process that sets the stage for long-term success and encourages first-time customers to become loyal advocates and ambassadors of your brand.
Your RevOps team should offer training, education, and development opportunities for employees across your B2B organization—especially those in your customer-facing departments—to ensure they understand the power of revenue operations and have the tools they need to achieve organizational revenue goals.
Invest in ongoing training for all revenue-generating teams to enhance skills and knowledge, such as training employees on new technologies and creating leadership development programs for promising talent. Additionally, offer cross-functional training opportunities that foster a deeper understanding of each team’s role, which helps promote further alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success.
Once you have established RevOps goals and objectives as well as defined organizational revenue metrics and KPIs, your RevOps team can analyze revenue data and identify areas for improvement.
Establish a centralized reporting system that provides real-time visibility into revenue performance and customer data. Using this database, conduct regular analysis and share insights with relevant stakeholders to drive data-driven decision-making. This ongoing cycle of tracking, analyzing, and reporting data makes it easier than ever to monitor the progress of your revenue goals and adjust your strategy as necessary to stay on target.
Revenue operations isn’t going anywhere. To stay ahead of the competition, streamline processes, increase revenues, align customer-facing teams, and achieve sustainable growth, your B2B company needs to invest in RevOps.
At OneIMS, our team of RevOps experts is ready to help your organization design and implement a revenue operations strategy that maximizes your growth potential and transforms your business into a revenue-generating machine. With a RevOps strategy in place, your company will optimize operations, create an effortless customer experience, and function more efficiently.
We have a long history of working with companies in a variety of industries to develop innovative and data-driven marketing solutions, and we pride ourselves on producing measurable and sustainable results that lead to long-term growth.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. View testimonials from our clients and read our blog to get an idea of our training, experience, and track record of success.
Are you ready to achieve revenue growth? Schedule a consultation with us today to get started.