A revenue operations culture keeps all teams in your organisation accountable to revenue, but there are steps you must take to ensure an effective strategy, especially if you want to maintain high-growth targets (+100% in revenue year-over-year).
To achieve that, I’ve compiled 7 practical steps for optimising your business operations that I’ve seen work time and time again. My goal? To help you maximise your revenue potential ASAP.
(P.s. If you need a quick refresher on RevOps, check out our introductory article)
What is a revenue operations strategy anyway?
The strategy part of revenue operations answers how you’re going to achieve the specific objectives set forth by your organisation—whether those be revenue targets, product growth KPIs, better retention rates, etc.
Download RevOps Automated’s annual report for inspiration on real-world RevOps strategies.
Strategy sits at the core of RevOps performance. Without one, you’re often flailing around aimlessly.
Some of the key components of a RevOps strategy are:
- Setting 2-3 business objectives (this is fundamental to any strategy)
- Understanding team composition and gathering requirements from each department
- Pinpointing siloed processes and designing an action plan to break them down
- Implementing CRM and integration workflows to match the action plan
- Documenting and measuring the impact of your implementation
A common misconception is that RevOps is just about developing automated workflows. That’s certainly one of the bigger areas of added value but—without the right business objectives and go-to-market alignment behind them—it won’t do much for you.
Step #1: Optimise what already brings in revenue
RevOps is as much about radical change as it is about steady optimisation. If you already have a sales channel that works, it’s probably leaking revenue in a number of ways:
Overburdened sales reps
When lead volume increases, sales reps are often overwhelmed; there are only so many hours in a day after all. That means manually having to choose who to speak to and who to skip. This is solved by lead routing workflows which only send qualified leads to sales reps.
Bad qualification scale
Lead scoring is plain hard, most firms don’t know where to start or use the wrong formula, leading to completely irrelevant numbers that aren’t useful to the sales team. RevOps Automated developed its own “RevZet” lead scoring framework to solve this recurring issue.
Inefficient follow-ups
Even if the sales process is set up well, consistently following up with leads can be a slog, especially if your CRM is filled with leads of different nature. The best way to approach this is setting up automated sequences for leads that aren’t immediately served by sales.
Technical hiccups
This one happens more often than you think. You’ve got your process set up, and it’s actually quite robust. But you don’t monitor it, and don’t realise it’s been stuck for weeks due to a faulty workflow (*revops pro screeching in the distance*.) Solution? You need a dedicated RevOps professional.
These are some of the exact issues RevOps Automated solved for Insurwave, a risk management platform for insurance teams that experienced high lead volume but significant revenue slippage due to an unstructured sales process.
They ended up increasing their revenue by a whopping 30% once those gaps were filled.
Start your RevOps strategy where you can extract the most value quickly!
Step #2: Eliminate process inefficiencies at the root
You can’t unlock wild growth if you have bottlenecks bogging you down every other day.
Great revenue operations strategies demand cultural shifts, from teams that communicate cross-function on a daily basis to automated workflows that remove 90%+ of the admin work (i.e. busywork that eats into your net profits).
A good RevOps strategy leverages technology as the primary efficiency booster, as long as each tool has its place and largely reduces manual tasks like qualifying leads, moving them through the sales process, sending quotes, etc.
Above image: CRM workflows are some of the best ways to reduce inefficiencies.
Remember, RevOps is all about bringing sales, marketing, and customer success together.
That means using technology in a way that removes almost all friction, e.g.:
- Allowing prospects to calculate their quote on your website
- Feeding that data directly into your lead qualification process
- Escalating highly-qualified leads to your sales reps for urgent follow-up
- Automating outreach via email for lower-priority leads
This is just one example of many.
Processes within your company will be different from the next. The key is to eliminate any reason why the prospect shouldn’t act in your favour and reduce the time it takes for your team to turn them into happy, long-lasting customers.
Step #3: Obsess over 2 to 3 core objectives maximum
Imagine trying to solve global warming, raw material shortages, and commercial space flight all at the same time… They are some of the most daunting issues of the 21st century, and each of them requires an inane amount of focus.
Thankfully, your business likely doesn’t have to deal with the above (phew!). But the principle still applies, you can’t solve for everything or grow in every direction.
Instead, you need to focus on 2 - 3 growth KPIs that will yield the most value to your business and set ambitious quarterly targets. But not aimless targets—you need to pair each individual KPI with the action plans to actually hit them!
That’s where things get tricky:
» Most businesses list 20+ random metrics and * hope * they’ll increase somehow
High-growth companies think deeply about the 2 - 3 that matter and then pour money and resources into consistently fueling them quarter after quarter. Who cares about the 17 other metrics when you know those 3 will yield you wild growth?
Use this mentality and RevOps will support you every step of the way.
Step #4: Empower your team to act quickly or hire specialists
Once you have the right business objectives in place and growth targets to hit, you’re off to the races. It’s important that you act quickly and decisively at this stage; that momentum will trickle onto the next stage of your business.
If you don’t know where to start, RevOps providers like RevOps Automated can guide your team in the right direction and even provide an entirely managed solution—from driving RevOps transformation at your company to optimising your CRM.
Step #5: Make your CRM software work for you 24/7
There’s a lot to say about making the most of your CRM. In a RevOps strategy, the CRM is the foundational platform that everything else revolves around.
You can’t achieve almost any of the business objectives we’ve discussed above without a proper CRM implementation. It’s just impossible to keep up with increasing growth challenges if you don’t have software to support you.
Above image: Getting a clear view of your sales performance across stages is fundamental to an effective RevOps strategy.
To make the most of it, change your mindset from a technical one:
» What CRM is the most advanced at solving X or Y? Is Salesforce better than HubSpot?
To a people-driven one:
» How do we implement our CRM to better service marketing, sales and customer success?
In fact, your CRM should help primarily with 3 things:
- Eliminating operational bottlenecks
- Accelerating time to market
- Increasing sales velocity
All of these should go in the name of revenue growth and profit optimization. If your CRM still acts as a glorified contact database or feels like you still have to manually update everything, consider hiring RevOps professionals for an audit.
Step #6: Aim to keep margins steady as you grow
Not every company can afford to act like tech unicorns. While raising capital to enable accelerated growth is absolutely a sound strategy, RevOps can help you keep a steady growth momentum without sacrificing valuable shares or profit margins. What that means for you is more money in your pockets to keep growing.
To maximise impact, learn your way around growth frameworks like SLG (Sales-Led Growth), PLG (Product-Led Growth), and the importance of customer success in ensuring that customers are happy post-sale.
Also, look for ways to:
- Delegate functions that don’t contribute directly to revenue and can’t be easily automated.
- Automate sales and marketing processes to decrease Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
- Hire team members who are keen on quickly testing and adopting new technology.
- Continuously enrich CRM data and set new growth targets based on it.
As a rule of thumb, if your company can’t spend at least 30 - 40% of its time actively selling, it’s likely going to start incurring significant operational and administrative burden (which will ultimately eat into your net profits).
Step #7: Diversify your go-to-market “motions”
In 2018, inbound marketing was all that mattered to make waves with your product.
But over the years, the practice on its own experienced diminishing returns. So I went on a bit of a tour talking about an “all-bound” approach to marketing in the past few months, you can watch a 30-minute workshop I did with Dooly below:
tl;dr All-bound selling is about putting the customer at the centre, and appearing all around them, e.g. thinking about all the different touch points around your ideal customer and being present for them in those places with the right message.
The goal? For your company to be top of mind when the customer gets to the negotiating table.
Marketing’s been traditionally very focused on where leads spend time:
- Events
- Webinars
… and so forth.
But really, people are in multiple places at multiple times during their week. Vertically focusing on one channel leaves you blind to how most people operate today.
Here’s another way to look at it:
See how inbound marketing only makes one part of the overall RevOps strategy? Structure your operations around people, not channels!
Hit revenue targets with a winning RevOps strategy
Revenue operations benefits everyone at your organisation; from department heads to new hires. But you must be willing to act quickly against specific growth targets.
Setting an effective RevOps strategy is how you go from +50% growth in revenue year-over-year to +150% without sacrificing profit margins. That last bit is what RevOps is all about, 360-degree alignment so that the business grows healthy.
You hear about high-growth companies sacrificing profits for revenue all the time. But it doesn’t have to be that way…
RevOps Automated helps you understand exactly what strategy to apply so you can maximise revenue quickly. To get started, download our free RevOps Roadmap template, fill in the blanks, and you’ll get a Gantt chart auto-populated in no time!
P.s. By the way, we just launched our first podcast episode where we touch on how to grow your sales pipeline using the latest RevOps techniques and even some traditional sales! It’s packed with useful insights, check it out:
This article was written in collaboration with Sagewill, a product marketing studio focused on helping you build, launch and grow successful software products.