Revenue Operations combines marketing, sales and customer success into high-performing “growth engine”

Marketing and sales alignment. You’ve probably heard that phrase a few times. And you most likely already know that it’s crucial for these functions to work together instead of in silos. Great. But the customer journey doesn’t end when you close the deal – and that’s why something quite essential has been missing from this equation.

78 % of B2B sales and marketing professionals, who responded to LeanData’s The State of Revenue Operations 2019 survey, felt that the biggest challenge for their business right now is steady revenue growth. Almost everyone, 95 %, thought that customer experience is the key to unlocking this growth.

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a new way of organizing company's value-creating processes – marketing, sales, customer success – into the most efficient “growth engine” possible. Within the company, the RevOps team is responsible for aligning marketing, sales and customer success operations with shared goals and metrics, and making sure there are no barriers to growth and no silos created inside the company. RevOps team’s goal is therefore to simply maximize growth opportunities by optimizing the company's key revenue-generating processes. And ensure that the customer experience is excellent at all stages of the customer journey

In practice, this means focusing on the following three issues:

• RevOps team needs to be organized so that sales, marketing, and customer success have shared goals and growth metrics for which they are all accountable.
• Everyone needs to have access to the same, reliable data, regardless of the organizational unit or technologies used – decisions need to be based on this single source of truth, rather than each unit having its own truth.
• At the operational level, efficiency must be improved by synchronizing e.g. business reviews, goal discussions and annual planning.

According to a report by SiriusDecions, the most common way to organize RevOps in companies has so far been through voluntary co-operation as “virtual” teams. However, as titles like Chief Revenue Officer, VP Revenue Operations and Director Revenue Operations are becoming more and more common compared to traditional sales management titles, we might see a change to somewhat more centralized functions in the future.

The goals and operating methods of the RevOps team vary from company to company, but common shared metrics include e.g. the following:

• Annual / Monthly Recurring Revenue (ARR, MRR)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Customer Turnover Rate (Churn Rate)
• Sales Cycle Time
• Win Rate

According to the LeanData survey, the most common barriers to the implementation of the RevOps model are culture, resources, and siloed, inconsistent data. This is hardly a surprise: especially in traditional organizations, transformation to a data-driven and customer-centric culture requires major changes, both in systems and in management and work practices, but above all in attitudes.