Revenue Operations: How Sales’ Newest Innovation Helps Your Organization

One of the newest trends I have seen arise in the sales world over the last few years is the creation of a team within organizations called Revenue Operations. Often abbreviated as RevOps, it isn’t just another buzzword for sales operations. Rather, it’s a whole new department that serves as the main information hub for sales, marketing, and customer service. The theory behind it is to create a centralized data collection, analysis, and distribution process that integrates those three departments, eliminates the silo effect that can sometimes occur, and frees up sales, marketing, and customer success to focus on the most important duties – interacting with clients and driving revenue.

Why RevOps and Why Now?
Sales, marketing, and customer service are increasingly digital and involve large amounts of information – much of which needs to be shared among more than one area – for example, sales and marketing often need to be aligned and work together. The problem is, there’s often a silo effect where, for instance, sales and marketing don’t know what the other is working on, and this can lead to lost, vital information, or unnecessary duplication that wastes time.

Because RevOps steps in and becomes the information and analysis center – often also responsible for devising large-scale strategy – there’s no repeat information, the departments receive the key data they need when they need it, and there’s considerable time savings.

Additionally, because the new department takes over many of the duties that were formerly housed in sales, marketing, and customer success, sales reps, marketing members, and customer success agents then have more time to devote to interacting with clients, which can potentially increase closing sales, marketing campaign effectiveness, and servicing accounts respectively – which in turn could lead to a rise in customer satisfaction and company revenue.

How RevOps Fits into the Organizational Structure
In the structural map of an organization, RevOps sits in the middle of a sales, marketing, and customer success cluster, and they commonly report directly to a C-level executive. The department is responsible for the capture, tracking, and analysis of customer, marketing, and sales information and data. They then distribute the gathered information and any appropriate analysis reports to the relevant members of the respective teams.

The Growth and Challenges of RevOps
According to SalesHacker, just 20.4% of businesses have a revenue operations team, but another 15.2% are in the process of building one – meaning just shy of 36% either have RevOps in place or are working on forming one.

The primary obstacle to greater adoption, according to the same research report, is that business leaders lack information: they aren’t sure how to develop a RevOps, structure the department, or create the right hierarchy within the team.

Building a RevOps Team
This isn’t necessarily a massive undertaking that involves a huge number of employees. In fact, for many businesses, it begins with a single employee – the Strategic Project Manager, who is responsible for overseeing the larger strategy and higher-level functions of the RevOps department – including coordinating with sales, marketing, and customer success to ensure data is sent to RevOps in a timely manner.

The second employee would be a Database Analyst, whose duties are to analyze and manage the incoming data from the attached departments and help distribute the reports that come out of the tracking and analysis.

For larger firms, or those managing complex amounts of data, Data Scientists enter the picture. These specialists excel at predictive statistics and data analysis and can also take on some of the strategic planning duties from the Strategic Project Manager.

Where Sales Training Enters the Picture
In a RevOps environment, sales reps will find themselves with more time and opportunity for improvement. Hence, there’s a space for more effective sales training, in which reps can acquire new selling skills to further bolster their ability to serve customers.

More to the point, the right training vendor – whether internal or external – and support from sales leadership can provide synthesis with RevOps during the training experience. The data provided from RevOps could be incorporated into the planning, customization, and execution of focused, nuanced sales training.

This makes for far better quality sales training events because it incorporates and involves existing information and departments. Getting RevOps input during the pre-training process allows for the customization to fit within the broader alignment of sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps, as opposed to sales training that primarily concerns itself with the daily duties and interactions of just the sales department.

The introduction of RevOps, while still a very new and emerging field, is an exciting development for businesses. It fills in gaps in today’s marketplace and allows for more effective integration and alignment of sales, marketing, and customer success. The creation of more time for the rank and file of respective departments – particularly sales – opens up opportunities for more effective sales training with even higher ROI than before.

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