In mid-January, to kick off the new year, Brightvision held a webinar dedicated to the emerging field of revenue operations (RevOps). The webinar session was presented by Fredrik Gunnarson, Brightvision's Innovation Manager and MarTech Team Lead. During the webinar he covered many topics, including: what is RevOps all about, what are some organizational challenges RevOps can combat, and how to get started with RevOps.
Are you a B2B tech sales or marketing manager and want to know how RevOps can boost your business? Then keep reading! The on-demand version of the webinar can also be seen here.
What is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?
RevOps is being driven by changing trends and technology. Through automation, analysis, and reporting, you can break down silos and remove the friction between sales, marketing, and customer success. One of the main purposes of implementing revenue operations is so that sales can do sales and marketing can do marketing: they can let revenue operations handle the logistics in between the departments. Proper RevOps can contribute real business value, as there will be an increase in efficiency regarding both energy, time, and budget.
Why is RevOps a hot topic now?
1. Complexity of work
Here's an interesting fact: according to the project management software Asana, you spend around 60% of your job on work about work: figuring out how to make work more efficient and easier for everyone involved. This might involve data technologies, aligning processes, optimizing processes, and so on.
Today, work is more complex: businesses have to learn to manage a lot of new tools and software. For example, you have marketing automation platforms, which are quite technical. You might have an additional CRM, you might need to work with integration platforms, and you might also have a specific event platform, such as a webinar platform. You might have ad platforms, and paid ads are also getting a lot more complex.
"[You] spend around 60% of your job on 'work about work'."
Most people just want to do the job that they're good and specialized at. It's annoying to have technical issues or do things manually when those tasks can be automated. All of us have probably spent way too much time copying and pasting data in spreadsheets. RevOps gives each department the freedom to work how they want. Sales can do sales, marketing can do marketing, and RevOps can handle the logistics in between.
2. Changes in buying behavior and buyer expectations
It's very interesting with the changes that we are seeing in the market right now. We can see a shift in buying behavior and buyer expectations because buyers today have better access to information and more ways of comparing and buying services and products. And competition today is global. So buyers are demanding excellence and want companies to get better.
The buyer's journey is more complex too: we can track and understand buyers better. We know that the price journey is not linear from start to finish in this pipeline. So because of competition, buyers demand that we improve and be better at timing our activities and being more relevant with the messaging.
3. Collaboration in between departments
One challenge for marketing and sales is the alignment between the two departments. The alignment between marketing and sales, as well as customer success, means that today this is an end-to-end integrated pipeline where we need to collaborate between these departments. We have more pipeline stages and, because of technology and data, we are breaking the pipeline into more steps than ever before.
We can't work in silos anymore with marketing, sales, and customer success. If we break this problem down into KPIs, all the way from a potential buyer to a renewed customer, you can align the KPIs to each step in the pipeline. So if we could improve on just one of these KPIs, it can lead to enormous opportunities for you in terms of new revenue and new clients. There are two potential wins here: by identifying the weakest link, you can also identify the KPI where you have the most potential to achieve easy wins.
"[We] can't work in silos anymore with marketing, sales, and customer success"
One of the big trends right now, for example, is personalization, or one-to-one ABM campaigns. Being able to personalize down to a one-to-one level requires access to data and processes. It's very important that we have access to that data so that sales, for example, benefits from the marketing data and vice versa. We can conclude that data is of crucial importance today and also in the alignment process of sales and marketing.
To facilitate the collaboration between departments, you need shared processes and definitions. Basically, there is a need to reduce friction: friction between sales, marketing services, and the friction of more technology, the friction of getting access to the right data, and the friction of poorly working processes. Not always in sync or solving the same problems in marketing, sales, and customer success is a relatable problem for many marketers today.
So getting to the point - how can one overcome these struggles? This is where revenue operations come in and why it is emerging as a hot topic right now. RevOps is one solution to these challenges of more technology, more data, and more roles in these departments, in the marketing-sales alignment.
"[RevOps] is one solution to these challenges of more technology, more data, and more roles in these departments, in the marketing-sales alignment"
How do you get started with RevOps?
For many, this is quite a new area, and I think it is beneficial to have someone to support you, someone to ask those questions to, and maybe to give those important RevOps insights. So, for example, we at Brightvision have the benefit of working with a lot of clients., so we have learned some pieces here and there. But also internally, if you start with RevOps and promote someone internally, it's the same thing. It's about starting with the discovery and understanding the crucial needs of marketing and sales and what the opportunities are. It is quite a long journey, so it's beneficial to start small, see it as a learning journey, and try not to look for the perfect solution.
Step-by-step:
- Find some source of knowledge.
- Find someone that can be the ambassador of the RevOps journey. Start small. Have the goal that marketing that should drive revenue and not as a cost.
- Set up a RevOps team. Work across marketing, sales, and customer services.
What kind of person is suitable for managing RevOps? What are the key competencies needed?
It's really important to have someone who will dive into new things, learn new things and explore opportunities. For most people, this will be new skills and new platforms, and that curiosity — that will to improve the organization and improve processes — that's a core skill. Having that technological skill is also essential because RevOps is quite technical and concerns data management. It's not just about complex tools and coding, but it's also important to understand data and data analytics. Another crucial aspect is having a RevOps representative who understands both marketing and sales, and how these can collaborate across one another. It is also essential to have the goal that marketing should actually be part of generating revenue and not the cost center.
What does RevOps look like in practice?
Key takeaways
- Implement RevOps in order to reduce friction for everyone working within marketing, sales, and customer success.
- Unleash the potential of data, automation, and processes.
- Let marketing do marketing and sales do sales by implementing RevOps.
Would you like to learn more about RevOps ? Watch the RevOps webinar on-demand here.
Last year we also hosted our annual event, MarTech Day where we touched upon RevOps among other things. You can access the on-demand version of MarTech Day 2021 here.
Would you like to learn more about Brightvision and how we work as an agency? If you are a B2B tech company and need support with ABM, marketing, lead generation, and sales, book a meeting and we can chat!
