The Complete RevOps Guide for Growing B2B Companies
October 21, 2024
Scaling a B2B business and generating more profit involves a delicate balance of cultivating relationships with current customers and pursuing new opportunities. To manage both aspects of B2B development, companies must be able to create a holistic picture of their entire revenue engine, from marketing campaigns to client support.
The field of revenue operations (RevOps) has emerged as a solution to this problem, providing businesses with a fully integrated system for managing their revenue generation ecosystem.
With the right tools, techniques, and implementation planning, any B2B business can build a RevOps team that accelerates its development and turns disparate departments into a single, well-oiled machine. This RevOps guide is here to break down everything you need to know.
What Is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?
Revenue operations focus on aligning a business’s revenue-generating activities and seamlessly integrating sales, marketing, and customer success. The teams all have central, shared goals and use the same tools and processes to support their individual responsibilities.
Forty-four percent of B2B companies use five to 10 tools in the marketing department alone, and 6% use 21 or more tools. RevOps streamlines these tools, apps, workflows, and systems, interacting with them to ensure all team members are working towards the same goals with the most accurate, up-to-date information.
The Core Pillars of RevOps
The RevOps model strives to transform disconnected, inefficient teams into a unified, optimized revenue-generating system. To achieve this, it focuses on three central principles.
Process Optimization
Modern B2B organizations are bound to have a massive list of revenue-generating workflows, from client outreach systems to B2B sales processes. RevOps aims to streamline these processes to increase their effectiveness and allow for greater revenue generation.
RevOps acknowledges the interconnected nature of sales, marketing, and customer success and builds this connection into automated workflows. Using a RevOps model, businesses can introduce overarching processes to manage leads, create forecasts, and generate reports that account for the goals and activities of multiple interconnected departments.
Data and Analytics
Taking a data-driven approach is invaluable when scaling a business and implementing B2B growth strategies. Eighty percent of companies experience an increase in revenue after implementing real-time data analytics. Under a RevOps framework, tracking the right information and ensuring it’s available to the entire team with shared dashboards and centralized databases is critical.
A RevOps strategy focuses on how data from each team can be universally valuable. Sales teams can leverage marketing data to accurately predict incoming leads. Meanwhile, marketing professionals can review patterns from the client success teams to refine their approach when appealing to new and existing customers.
Cross-Functional Alignment
Companies that focus on cross-functional communication between sales, marketing, and customer success can enjoy a 36% increase in revenue growth. RevOps focuses on building that alignment into the foundation of how your revenue engine functions. It starts with involving multiple departments in revenue-generating strategies to enhance communication and encourage cross-functional collaboration.
For example, Envision Pharma Group struggled with inefficient sales processes and a fragmented team. Integrating systems across the revenue engine could unite their sales and finance teams to improve B2B revenue management and successfully capture leads from multiple verticals.
Implementing RevOps in Your Organization
Shifting your company from siloed departments to a thriving team involves implementing RevOps best practices that consider your current processes and ideal outcomes.
Getting Started With RevOps
A successful RevOps implementation begins with a thorough understanding of the landscape. You need to understand what tools and processes you already have in place and develop a roadmap to combine and streamline them for maximum operational efficiency. Ask your team about their main roadblocks and bottlenecks to seek buy-in. Then, consider them as you build integrated solutions.
Much of the RevOps philosophy focuses on designing revenue-supporting operations around shared goals. When building your RevOps team, designate RevOps leaders responsible for creating sales and marketing alignment, rallying their teams, and ensuring that these goals are implemented effectively across departments.
Tools and Technologies for RevOps
RevOps technology includes many standard platforms and tools for marketing, sales, and customer success. Sales process software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, revenue intelligence software, and forecasting tools play a role.
The key difference is that RevOps aims to fully integrate these tools, eliminating tedious manual workarounds and inconvenient data silos.
Any transition to new RevOps tools requires training and support to encourage team-wide adoption. Ensure you fully understand what tools your teams rely on, how they use them, and what manual processes they currently have in place; then assess your new systems to confirm they meet your team’s needs.
Measuring the Success of RevOps
RevOps is an ongoing philosophy that requires hands-on maintenance. Because it’s a growth-driven model, tracking key revenue operations metrics and driving continuous improvement is crucial for success.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
RevOps data includes financial data, customer information, and internal metrics. In addition to tracking customer behaviors and sales numbers, RevOps teams must have shared key performance indicators (KPIs) that hold all teams accountable to the same goals.
Examples of revenue-driven KPIs to track include:
- Customer acquisition cost
- Revenue growth rate
- Sales pipeline velocity
- Customer churn rate
- Conversion rate
Applying these metrics to all parts of the revenue engine can help teams understand how individual functions create ripples throughout the company. Based on KPI performance, your RevOps team can adjust their strategies and take a complementary approach to targeting new goals.
Continuous Improvement
RevOps requires pursuing growth to continue expanding revenue generation potential. Companies prioritizing continuous improvement can become up to 30% more efficient, tying continuous improvement initiatives directly to their profitability. Regular alignment meetings, audits, and technology reviews make it possible to constantly refine processes, enhance alignment, and maintain a fully optimized environment.
This mindset of constant adjustments and improvements also allows companies to scale effectively without sacrificing the customer experience. For instance, as Bloomfire sought to expand, they leveraged a RevOps as a service solution to overhaul their databases and implement new sales workflows, eventually launching an internal RevOps team. Embracing ongoing improvements as part of their RevOps model enabled them to keep their momentum going instead of falling backward into old inefficiencies.
Grow Your B2B Company With Operatus
The B2B sales landscape has evolved, and the need for an integrated approach has increased. We’ve already seen firsthand that the proper alignment of sales, marketing, and customer success through RevOps can completely transform a company’s aptitude for success.
By offering RevOps as a service, Operatus provides B2B companies with the insight and support they need to take control of their revenue ecosystem and achieve true optimization. Chat with the Operatus team today to learn how RevOps can overhaul your revenue engine and supercharge your growth.