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Why Revenue Operations Is Essential to Sales Success

A relatively new concept, Revenue Operations or ‘RevOps’, is gaining traction. More businesses are investing in the function and the skills needed to execute it successfully.

But what is revenue operations, and why are so many businesses building their sales and marketing functions around it?

In this article, we guide you through what RevOps is, how it works, and why it is becoming increasingly popular with ambitious businesses.

What is Revenue Operations?

When it comes to sales and marketing, businesses traditionally build two separate teams to execute on each. Siloing your sales and marketing team makes sense to an extent, allowing each team to focus on achieving results based on their skills.

However, siloing your teams can lead to challenges such as duplicated effort, poor communication, and even potential conflicts of interest. These challenges are usually caused by a lack of coordinated direction, whether from differing goals and objectives or differences in opinion of team leadership.

RevOps seeks to remedy these issues by providing an overarching systems approach to supporting sales and marketing operations. By delivering a central point for decision making and implementation of key processes, tools, systems, and data, it is the job of RevOps o close the gaps between sales and marketing and provide a coherent approach to generating revenue.

RevOps is different from traditional operations as it does not sit within a specific team such as sales operations or marketing operations, but sits above these functions, controlling their overarching direction.

Why is Revenue Operations Popular?

RevOps is growing in popularity at an increasing rate. As businesses understand how sales and marketing are changing, they also understand the need and the benefit of developing a joint approach across all revenue-generating operations.

Developments in SaaS and the associated tools have been the main driver for implementing a RevOps approach. Many tools such as CRMs, account, and inbound based marketing platforms now offer an all-encompassing approach to sales and marketing, resulting in a clear cross over between the two.

As markets develop, the speed at which things happen is always increasing. Taking a holistic approach to operations is becoming crucial as sales and marketing become more reactive. RevOps provides a consistent point of reference and direction, ensuring a joint effort in achieving success.

How is Revenue Operations Beneficial?

Revenue Operations is popular due to its ability to help businesses navigate the new tools, solutions, and pipelines that modern markets demand. But what specific benefits does RevOps bring to the table?

It Provides Focus

When sales and marketing teams operate in general autonomy there is a high risk of duplicated effort and general inefficiency across the board.

RevOps takes control of process development, documentation, and tool implementation, which means individual teams can focus on their roles. RevOps also works to improve tools and processes to increase collaboration and efficiency.

This combination means that sales and marketing teams can stop wasting time using poorly functioning tools or looking for ‘quick hacks’ to speed up processes. Instead, they can channel their focus and effort on developing market share, letting RevOps deal with the rest.

How Revenue Operations Allows Specialization

As a general rule marketers are often hired based on their creative skills and ability to read market trends, while sales professionals are hired based on their ability to build strong relationships, develop trust, and close sales.

Creating a RevOps function within your business allows you to build a team that specializes and provides the best service when it comes to processes, tools, and documentation.

Dedicating resources to revenue operations facilitates its continuous development. Sales and marketing operations can often be completely reactive and tactical in rolling out solutions to their own specific, unforeseen problems. An established RevOps team can take the time to be strategic in their approach, identifying potential challenges or opportunities ahead of time and then addressing them in the best way at the best time.

Limiting Conflicts of Interest

When decision making, teams are likely to act with their own best interests at heart. For example, a sales team may seek to roll out a new CRM which enables them to do their job more quickly but considerably increases process times for the marketing team. Similarly, the marketing team may seek to implement a new content collection process that involves more cost than the business can sustain.

Separating RevOps from any individual team ensures an unbiased approach ito decision making on an operational level. As the team does not stand to benefit from favoring any specific function, they can also take a comprehensive and impartial approach to develop solutions, acting in the best interests of the business as a whole rather than focusing on benefitting one function.

RevOps: Essential to Sales Success

Revenue Operations can help businesses take their sales and marketing to the next level. By detaching the operations aspect of these processes, you allow these teams to focus on applying their skills and talents where they are best spent.

It also ensures that your business is positioned to navigate the inevitable challenges of rapidly developing markets. As tools, processes, and markets continue to change, we are likely to see more businesses investing and reaping the benefits of a dedicated RevOps function.

Do you take a RevOps approach in your business?