Five years ago you may only have seen a handful of folks with a revenue operations job title, and most of those were just sales operations roles dressed up in a shiny new outfit. Today, however, it’s hard to look at LinkedIn without seeing something about RevOps.
This is for many reasons, but the one that stands out most is the simple fact that, in today’s competitive market, it often comes down to margins and inches that separate the good from the great. As Al Pacino would surely appreciate if he were to be a RevOps professional and not a football coach in Any Given Sunday, it’s no longer good enough to be good. That extra effort is needed to stand out.
So what do margins and inches look like in the go-to-market (GTM) world, and what does RevOps have to do with it? Short answer: everything. Long answer: read on.
RevOps is the unification of people, process, technology and data to enable the three Rs of GTM:
- right person
- right time
- right way.
We believe that when combining these things, we create an experience that buyers love and businesses can thrive on. Buyers don’t want to know all the details of your company’s inner workings. They most certainly don’t want you to ship the org chart to them. And above all else, they don’t care about what fields you need to populate or the qualification steps you have.
What they need is to understand how to solve their problems and achieve their goals, and they needed it yesterday. Though there are many specialized parts of a business that help a buyer realize this, such as marketing and sales, it is RevOps that acts as the connective tissue between all teams involved with the GTM process.
Great RevOps makes the entire GTM process feel like one smooth experience for the buyer, where each next step feels natural and compelling for exactly what they need. RevOps also opens the door for the company to further understand its buyers and the ways that best serve them so it can accelerate that success over and over again.
So, back to our margins and inches. RevOps designs and implements technology that unlocks your team’s potential and makes serving your clients and prospects easier. It can make a small team feel like a big team and can even enable delightful customer experiences.
There are many technologies that drive a game-winning GTM strategy, including your CRM, marketing automation platform and sales engagement platform. And they can quickly overwhelm a team that knows they need to use them, but does not have the expertise to operate them. RevOps takes the stress off your specialized operators (sales, marketing and customer success people) and builds an environment in which they can thrive and focus on what they do best.
A GTM gameplan is nothing without the people and processes that can turn that strategy into a winning formula. RevOps focuses on bridging each position and developing the playbook for them to leverage their skills at each stage of the buyer and customer journey. RevOps helps design buyer-centric sales processes, seamless customer onboarding and retention plans and a lead generation strategy that will help the company continue to drive revenue and evolve throughout its various stages of growth.
This all works when it is built upon an adaptable and strong data foundation. Businesses naturally will change and adapt as they grow, so when your data is disorganized or lacks credibility, it’s directly holding you back and contributing to poor decisions. That’s why it has to be designed correctly and nurtured constantly from the start.
With access to similar technology, talent pools and databases, what separates the good from the great is how well a company can unify its people, process, technology and data to eke out those margins and inches that make all the difference between winning and losing.
