For businesses, these are not the best economic conditions and many leaders are expecting that things will only get worse. For many early stage ventures, growth entrepreneurs who recently “got funded” are scrambling to grow revenues and cut costs to ensure they “stay funded”. Times have changed and now early stage ventures will be challenged to build a viable path to break even in order to continue to raise capital. With uncontrolled cash burn rates, many companies will likely face lay-offs, down-rounds, or unwanted M&A activity. These worsening economic conditions - demanding that customers tighten their belts - are making it harder to drive optimized, predictable revenue.
Delivering your venture’s growth goals requires a combination of accurate revenue forecasting and optimized revenue processes. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurial ventures lack both, as many current marketing automation platforms (MAP), customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, business intelligence (BI) tools, and manual spreadsheets lack the visibility, automation, real-time data, and insights needed to optimize their revenue engine.
To address these problems, sales, marketing, and customer success functions are morphing into a new category of solutions, RevOps, to help companies optimize the performance of revenue teams, platforms, process and performance measurement. RevOps achieves this by leveraging data, signals, and interactions between buyers and sellers to analyze and then optimize revenue workflows such as forecasting, pipeline management, and sales performance.
Many companies struggle to transform their sales, marketing and customer success functions into a fully-integrated, lean and more capital efficient RevOps engine. The biggest points of friction are fragmented business applications, technical incompetence, bad analytics, and poor revenue process and behaviors.
Take a moment to evaluate your own company’s RevOps readiness by determining how well you can answer the following questions:
Industry RevOps experts now offer services subscriptions - think, RevOps-as-a-Service (RaaS) - to help companies maximize the potential of their revenue engine, delivering reliable and predictable revenue streams. These outsourced solutions offer industry leading business expertise, comprehensive sales and marketing analytics, real-time reporting, and ongoing consultative services to help companies accelerate revenue traction with lower execution risk. Best of all, these solutions are often offered at a fraction of the cost of in-house SaleOps and Marketing Ops FTEs.
A robust RevOps strategy will create reliable and predictable revenue streams during these uncertain times and uncover new opportunities for revenue traction. Here are five key benefits of RevOps-as-a-Service:
By purposeful design, consistent with your company’s goals, RevOps aligns your revenue-facing teams from sales, marketing, and customer success with one clear vision. In doing so, teams begin to align on 1) a unified and optimal revenue strategy; 2) a purposeful and consistent customer journey; 3) a common set of tools, systems and operations; 4) a uniform and standard data model; 5) a unified set of metrics and key analytic insights; and 6) access to accurate and near real-time reporting.
This alignment ensures your team is focused on a clear set of priorities that is centered on maximizing the value your company brings to its customers.
Companies who optimize their organization with RevOps-as-a-Service functions often experience dramatic improvements in their ability to make better decisions with access to real time analytic reporting and dashboards. This should not surprise us. This notion was recognized by the management theorist, Peter Drucker, the famous management theorist, famously quipped, “What gets measured gets improved.”. The secret, though, lies in your company's ability to understand the value of data, measure the right things and then make sense of it all to inform decisions. With clean data and a shared vantage point of how to analyze that data, your team can begin to make data-based decisions you can trust.
"What gets measured gets improved."
– Peter Drucker
Standard, repeatable and integrated processes across your marketing, sales, and customer success functions will shift the mindset of your business organization from competing teams to integral parts of a unified RevOps team. RevOps-as-a-Service can also help you bulletproof your forecast with accurate and complete data and metrics to predict the future. For example, RevOps can help you understand your company’s pipeline coverage and quota capacity this and next quarter, relative to the last four to eight quarters, so you can better predict headwinds you may encounter. Focusing on the right metrics, when powered by strong data hygiene, is also much easier. Answers to these types of questions are now at your fingertips: What has been my historical average starting pipeline position? How fast and well can my revenue team build new sales pipeline? What’s my average selling price (ASP)? How much coverage do you need with each territory/segment? What are the historical conversion rates (i.e., MQL to SQL; SQL to Opportunity; opportunity to customer). How much quota capacity do you need to deliver your pipeline? The result? More accurate, trusted revenue forecasts and improved pipeline management.
In three words, RevOps can simplify, streamline and automate your technology tools and processes. With literally hundreds of technology platforms to support a company’s ability to drive revenue, the risk of fragmentation and inefficiency is high. We all know that platforms don’t deliver revenue – people do. As such, your technology and tools must be used within best demonstrated business processes and calibrated to deliver real-time, data-driven performance measurement. Without it, business intelligence data lives in siloed departments and unoptimized technology tools are never leveraged to their full potential. A strong RevOps-as-a-Service team can help ensure your marketing, sales, customer success and finance activities are simplified, streamlined and automated to maximize and drive continual growth.
As stated earlier, RevOps is focused on streamlining your marketing, sales and customer success team around a common goal - driving predictable and reliable revenue growth. This unified focus creates a healthier, more collaborative, and stable environment that fosters highly functional teams. With the implementation of a strong RevOps-as-a-Service solution, your business teams will ultimately deliver better, faster, and more efficient service to your customers. It's truly a win-win.
The benefits of a robust RevOps-as-a-Service solution is exciting to most companies. While this checklist is not exhaustive, we are confident that a robust RevOps strategy will create reliable and predictable revenue streams during these uncertain times and uncover new opportunities for revenue traction. If you’d like to learn more about a RevOps-as-a-Service solution tailored to your organization, please feel free to reach out to us and schedule a consultation.
