RevOps is the new, shiny concept in the business world and it appeals to every part of me that enjoys “perfecting efficiency.”
The marketing world is great at coming up with terms for trends in the industry, and Revenue Operations or ‘RevOps’ is one of them. It’s gaining popularity because companies are recognizing the value of initiatives that bridge gaps between traditionally siloed departments.
RevOps coordinates Sales, Marketing and Service efforts to maximize revenue and drive business growth for the organization.
Understanding the Need for RevOps
I spent the first few years of my career managing a team that sent out all the direct mail for a university. We printed addresses on countless pieces a year that went to prospective and current students, along with any other marketing material for donors, alumni and well, pretty much anyone getting mail from the university. Once I worked my way into management, all these little things started popping up that just didn’t make sense. Here’s the way information flowed:
- A department would request a piece of marketing material they needed mailed out to prospective students.
- The Marketing Department would work with that university department to write and design the piece.
- Once it was done, they would send that piece to the printer to get printed — often hundreds of thousands of copies.
- Then it would show up at our warehouse, and we’d print addresses on the piece, apply postage and send them.
When you’re mailing that many pieces, postage starts to add up. And what you might not know about the way postage works is that the size, weight and type of an item all factor into how much it costs to mail it. Stay with me, there’s a point to this.
For a long time, our department was siloed from the Marketing Department and the “client” departments developing those pieces. As a result, they couldn’t possibly know that reducing the size of some of the pieces they wanted mailed by half an inch would save them tens of thousands of dollars. All it took was a couple conversations between our departments and voila, a more cost effective process was born.
This situation isn’t rare. It’s common for most organizations to function in silos because too many cooks in the kitchen leads to delayed decision making and general frustrations. But no communication from the cooks to the waitstaff can cause problems too.
This, my loyal readers who have stayed with me this far, is why RevOps is a thing.
How RevOps Functions in an Organization
RevOps is relatively new as an official function in an organization. New job titles are starting to pop up on LinkedIn like RevOps VPs, Directors of RevOps, CROs and so on.
The key to an effective RevOps team is their ability to look at the big picture and optimize processes between multiple departments. It's bigger than sales operations and stretches further than customer success teams might regularly operate.
The main idea is that they work across departments to make the customer experience as seamless and delightful as possible, while also ensuring internal processes and products are set up to maximize revenue. They make sure the necessary data is collected and analyzed to improve and create processes that provide more visibility into revenue and opportunities to maximize profit.
What RevOps Means for Sales, Marketing and Service Departments
There is a natural tension between Sales and Marketing, even in healthy organizations. Marketing teams often think big picture and come up with strategies that look great on paper. Sales teams are the ‘boots on the ground’ and are concerned with 1:1 relationships that close deals. The truth is that both are needed, but there is a level of trust needed to create a high functioning system. This symbiotic relationship has a fancy term too — Smarketing.
But for all the tension that might exist between Sales and Marketing, they almost always communicate and work together on some level. The department that gets left out? The Service department. While the relationship between Sales and Marketing can be symbiotic, Service is often at odds witht he two. “Why did Sales sell this?” or “Why the heck are they saying we do THAT service, that’s not how it works at all”.
RevOps bridges all those silos and unites us toward a common goal. They’re the person that yells “Avengers, assemble!” from the conference table. (I’ve always wanted to do that, for the record.)
When Sales and Marketing work together, businesses get better reporting on customer acquisition, higher quality of leads and ultimately fewer wasted sales hours. When the two start communicating with Service, you discover more educational opportunities to prime conversations for upsells and where there are disconnects between what was sold and what was delivered that affecting customer retention. When you connect all three of these departments you can pull metrics throughout the entire customer journey, resulting in more accurate forecasting and pricing, which is a a game changer for pretty much any company.
Overall, you create more efficiencies that result in happier customers and a bigger profit margin.
How HubSpot Enables Revenue Operations Teams
So how does HubSpot fit into all this? HubSpot’s newest Hub, Operations Hub, was built to accommodate RevOps functions in an organization.
Mainly, it does this through automations that can easily fetch data from third party applications and collate it with the rest of the data being gathered and processed in your HubSpot CRM, Marketing and Sales Hubs.
For instance, you could track a customer from the time they hit your site through the sales process to the purchase decision and then connect the data with software like Quickbooks to report on the actual Lifetime Value of that customer. That would allow for reporting like:
- “While fewer customers come from [x] lead source, they result in an average of 10x the LTV than our highest volume lead source.”
- “We converted five customers from organic search traffic last year which resulted in a total of [x] in revenue.”
The list of possibilities goes on, especially as you find ways to integrate more of your tech stack.
👉 Not in HubSpot yet? Read our breakdown of the platform.
Creating Space to Solve for Critical Business Objectives
The concepts used in revenue operations are really nothing new, but slapping a label on it has given organizations a tangible way to solve for key pain points. Connecting Sales, Marketing and Service departments ultimately results in greater customer success, which increases revenue growth which benefits everyone.
If you’re looking for some guidance on creating an entire revenue operating system that capitalizes on RevOps to increase the profitability of your company, give us a shout.
