12 Do’s and Don’ts for Successful Revenue Operations
12 Do’s and Don’ts for Successful Revenue Operations
A thriving company depends on revenue. And in the information era, businesses should adopt new approaches. A successful revenue operations (RevOps) model is one path for aggressive growth to ensure your business stays profitable. For one, revenue operations eliminate silos and operational friction. It improves the buyer journey and gets the right people on your team.
Problem: A company’s goal is to bring in as much revenue as possible to support growth. Depending on their roles, your team has different responsibilities. However, often the varying focus creates silos and friction. Inevitably, it gets harder for businesses to perform at their peak as they grow.
Opportunity: A successful revenue operations model changes the operation of your company. And it does it by automating and reorganizing a business to remove friction. Moreover, it allows vital decision-makers to gain actionable information to ensure robust KPIs. In sum, revenue operations is an approach that takes all the parts of a business, and creates a singular ecosystem.
Resolution: Regardless of the specific responsibilities, everyone needs to understand the nuances of revenue operations. Successful revenue operations require different tactics, approaches, and planning than many companies do. Even so, for businesses that do it, it breeds success. The following are some do’s and don’ts for successful revenue operations.
1. Get the Right Tech Stack for Streamlined Scalability and Growth
Revenue operations is a highly strategic business approach leaning on powerful tech tools. When choosing the right technology for your revenue operations implementation, you ensure streamlined scalability and growth. But power doesn’t mean complexity.
In fact, the right tech stack is all about intuitive user experience (UX). But it relies on single spine technological architecture to support all your areas and processes. For leaders to analyze data against KPIs and make better decisions, it’s essential to use analytics and business intelligence tools. So, when shifting to RevOps ensure the right tools for the right people.
2. Use Automation to Eliminate Unnecessary Manual and Change Behavior
Effective revenue operation should equip your company with automation that eliminates unnecessary manual work. Moreover, it changes worker behaviors. It’s essential to think of successful revenue operations as people-first innovation.
In other words, your business improves performance because of the elimination of manual processes. And with greater and more streamlined performance, your team changes how it does business. In doing so, it seeks to create, innovate, and achieve the highest metrics. You can’t do it without solid tech.
3. Establish a Clear Buyer Journey
If your customers don’t know where they’re going and how to get there, they might get frustrated. In short, they might start looking for other options. Customers are more likely to purchase products if they have a clear buyer journey. RevOps is tailor-made to support the buyer journey. Because it’s all about seamless integration and the whole genuinely being the sum of its parts, everything revolves around a frictionless experience. Therefore, buyers get everything they need to flow through the buyer funnel.
4. Get Payments Faster with a Sales Hub
Of course, you want your business to get payments quickly. But for that to happen, you have to create meaningful relationships. Therefore, your company needs a powerful sales hub. In so doing, you ensure that your team has the right resources to close deals due to great relationships. With successful revenue operations, your CRM isn’t just a database. It’s a path to seamless automation, integration, and engagement. And that gets you converting your leads to increase your profitability exponentially.
5. Optimize Your Website and Marketing
Do we have to say it? Okay, we will. If you don’t optimize your website, you’re harming your business. Moreover, you need the right marketing tools to target and convert the right audience. For many, the website is where most of your sales happen. So, even if you’re a service business, your site helps sell. If you don’t optimize your website, it says a lot about your business. As we know, Google rules search engine results. And it places a premium on mobile-first sites—no matter your industry. Moreover, since algorithms change multiple times a day, you have to update your site continually. It’s not a one-and-done activity.
6. Get the Right People on Your Team
You need to have the right people on your team for successful revenue operations. Every day, your team has to handle a lot of tasks. There’s a lot of pressure to keep the business running and increase profits. But, if you don’t have the right people, you may miss out on revenue. Revenue operations require you to recruit and retain a top talent team. As a result, it means having a group of people who love to innovate. You need people who also embrace technology—no matter their role. And you want to have people who help you create a team culture of learning and continuous shapeshifting.
7. Don’t Let Your Team Do Business as Usual
One of the most vital reflexive skills of the modern business environment is agility. Nothing stays the same from one day to the next—not to mention from one year to the next. No matter the role, every team member must be comfortable with being entirely uncomfortable. Successful revenue operations will stretch your team and business. But in so doing, as silos and friction get eliminated, you’ll see profits increase. Ultimately, RevOps is not about doing business as usual. It’s about creating new ways of viewing things—based on data—every day.
8. Don’t Be Afraid to Make Changes
The best advice for a thriving revenue operation is to make changes to your business. If you don’t make changes, you’ll never be successful. A great way to do this is to test new things—continually. If you’re selling products online, try selling products in different ways.
Every day, your business changes. And successful revenue operations ensure you can make the best decision because of its singular ecosystem. If you want to compete at the highest levels, you must continually test and reinvent. (Take a look at our article about leading change).
9. Don’t Keep Up… Lead
Leading your business is more than reading sales books and attending sales conferences. Leading is also about seeing things others don’t see yet. And that requires being demanding of yourself as the leader and others.
Today’s top-performing businesses lead—no matter the business, product, or service. They don’t follow. And they can do it because they have actionable and holistic, company-wide data gleaned from RevOps. Also, they have a team of people who thrive on continuous change and reinvention. None of those things are possible with a solid technology base to inform decision-makers.
10. Don’t Listen to the Naysayers
A great piece of advice for successful revenue operations is not to listen to the naysayers. The naysayers tell you that the RevOps model’s too complicated. Well, it doesn’t make sense to them, but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Further, the naysayers say you can’t do it, and it will fail. In short, the naysayers are those who don’t have any helpful ideas to offer. The reality is that there’s a reason why innovative companies lean into revenue operations. It works, and it’s the top approach used in the modern business environment.
11. Don’t Forget to Demonstrate the Value of RevOps
For your company to embrace successful revenue operations, it’s essential to demonstrate the benefits. Of course, one of the key ways to do so is by demonstrating impact on the bottom line. Further, you show impact through the metrics critical to revenue operations success. These metrics include revenue growth, cost reduction, and performance improvement. Demonstrating the value of RevOps shows the need for revenue operations. Second, it reinforces the need to avoid the silo problem. So leaders must share information throughout the company offering how the shift to RevOps provides benefits.
12. Don’t Overlook RevOps Automation and Seamless Integration
The use of automation and seamless integration tools gives you velocity and reduces errors. And that increases accuracy and improves communication and collaboration across the company. In other words, tech integration provides greater simplicity. It also eliminates the complexity and creates more holistic and trustworthy data. Inevitably, that means you get massive performance and profitability improvements because you decrease friction.
In sum, some people still fear automation. One of the reasons is that tech stacks have become overly complex. However, a strategic and integrated tech stack approach creates a powerful nexus for people and technology to work together. Further, strategic automation makes it easier to scale. And scaling means gaining a competitive advantage. Businesses need to adapt to different approaches. Revenue operations (RevOps) is a powerful path for achieving aggressive growth.
Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions where he helps leaders design, develop, and deploy smarter business growth strategies. Ben is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion. He leads a team that takes a structured learning approach to business challenges, which allows them to assist leaders in bridging the gap between ideas, innovation, and revenue—taking ideas from mind to market.
Velocity Strategy Solutions is an on-demand, next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm which provides clients with a relentless focus on data, execution, and results that positively impact the bottom line. Velocity delivers integrated people and revenue strategies combined with a disciplined approach to growth architecture that elevates the capacity of leaders, teams, and organizations to succeed and win more.