5 Revenue Operations Trends to Escape Slow Business Growth

When you grow a business, the usual scenario is that your revenue increases faster than expenses. However, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, the growth of your business is so slow that it makes it challenging to remain profitable. If this is your situation, don’t panic. Understanding revenue operations trends are your solution.

Problem: The pandemic forced companies to transform. And those that were agile experienced an increase in profits. However, those that were more hesitant saw profitability remain flat or worse.

Opportunity: Revenue operations (RevOps) is the path for your business. In short, it creates an integrated and seamless ecosystem for your company. Further, it eliminates friction. And in the age of tech, the name of the game is to diminish business friction.

Resolution: Therefore, the solution to slow profits is to understand the five revenue operations trends you should absorb into your business. If you find yourself with low revenue, it’s time to embrace RevOps. There’s a reason why RevOps is becoming mainstream. It’s essential for business operations and profitability. So don’t get left behind!

The Velocity Strategy Solutions Path to Revenue Operations

As a management consulting company, it’s our business to be on the leading edge of revenue growth for our clients. As a result, since founding Velocity Strategy Solutions, I’ve talked about emerging revenue operations trends. In doing so, companies such as INFUSEmedia, Breadcrumbs.io, and Expertise.com have featured me. I’m grateful, of course, and humbled.

But there’s a reason why I firmly believe in revenue operations. I see our clients who adopt it increase revenue and those that don’t often experience slow growth. For better or worse, companies that don’t adapt—fast—find it harder to see revenue growth. As we all know, there’s too much change happening, and agility is gold. So, let’s explore the five revenue operations trends critical for business profitability in a fast-changing environment.

1. Change Your Leadership Post Pandemic

When your revenue growth is slow, it’s not just your sales team failing. While your sales team often drives revenue growth, your entire leadership team experiences lagging growth. While no one can predict pandemics, the reality is that you may need a new group of leaders. The pandemic forced businesses to embrace tech fully. And those that didn’t felt a drag on revenue growth. In short, if your team isn’t leaning into tech, if they still think departmentally, you have a problem.

As you know, leadership is vital for business success. But, the skills you needed in leaders before the pandemic aren’t the same as those you need now. For instance, you need a team with exceptional agility and soft skills. At a time of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, you need leaders who truly know how to lead people into the unknown.

2. Data is Not a Department

Many companies focus on growing revenue by hiring new people and increasing headcount. But this doesn’t necessarily affect revenue generation. Instead, revenue generation depends on informed decision-making. And that means data is exceedingly vital. Everyone across the entire company has to have access to the same kinds of data. Data is not a department. Data is the core of your business.

So, it makes sense to think of it as a revenue-generating function. Further, don’t think of data as all of the data points you could gather. That’s the function of revenue operations. However, what data truly is—at its essence—is leadership. In other words, it’s knowing that business intelligence and people, together, inform how you operate. Data is not a conceptual idea. Instead, it’s leaders knowing how to get the complete information for good decisions—no matter what you sell as a product or service.

3. Use Technology to Deliver Mass Personalization

Technology allows you to deliver mass personalization quickly and at scale. Again, it’s vital to lean heavily into technology. And it’s one of the reasons, as per my earlier point, if you have someone in leadership who doesn’t trust tech, you need a change. I’m not saying tech is infallible. It isn’t. But it’s vital.

Tech, primarily through revenue operations, is the only way to truly scale your business. The reality is that a streamlined tech stack on a single integrated architecture can beat human productivity. But that’s not a bad thing. What that does is free up your team to do what humans do best—innovate and create. Technology allows you to go beyond basic personalization. It enables you to deliver a much more customized experience for each customer.

4. Interdisciplinary Teams Replace Functional Departments

If your teams are set up as functional departments, you’re at a disadvantage. The reality is, and experience proved, that departments become siloed. As you probably read countless times in recent years, the flow of information is vital. So, having silos slows your business. And it makes you less agile and able to deal with change. In short, you have to break them down.

We know that speed is of the essence in business. For instance, you want to be the first to market with innovations. The only way to achieve it is through decentralization, interdependence, and having an interdisciplinary team. And that’s at the very core of successful revenue operations implementation. It depends on a diverse ecosystem with a rapid data flow for informed decision-making.

5. Create a Culture of Learning for Revenue Growth

As your business grows, you need to improve continuously. And that’s why you need to create a culture of learning. When you nurture a learning culture, you develop an environment where everyone expects to learn new things. In short, we live in the information age. And that means your team—everyone—has to immerse themselves in learning technology and understanding data. There’s no other path.

So, one of the most important ways you can improve revenue growth is to create a culture of learning. Learning means knowledge and understanding the lessons of failure. Sure, it’s uncomfortable, but that’s part of the business journey. Therefore, all leaders need to continually push their teams to get comfortable in being uncomfortable.

Revenue Operations is the Path to Growth

In closing out the revenue operations trends, RevOps is the path for today’s businesses. And if your business is lagging in revenue growth, it’s time to embrace it. I could write all day about revenue operations because there’s just so much to it. But, I’m a firm believer in the streamlined, data-informed, and systemic approach to a robust business ecosystem. Why? I’ve seen the success of my clients.

In a fast-changing social and business climate, everyone has to know what everyone else is doing. And that means you need leaders who deeply believe it. You need a management team that embraces technology and data. And you need to systemically create a culture and holistic environment that’s pushing in one unified direction. Businesses can’t be fractured to have any chance of success in this highly competitive environment. So, if your business is lagging in revenue growth (or even if it’s to remain competitive), it’s time to embrace revenue operations.

---

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.