Revenue Operations: A Simple Definition

Modern companies have a slew of challenges to deal with. They need to adapt to new technologies, innovate, provide the best service or product available, and keep up with their competition. Another challenge is making sure that they have effective revenue operations to drive change in an organization.

Revenue operations is an ideology that promotes unison within four departments. It is an umbrella term that has all the departments working together under one name. This is unique in today’s world, where companies organize around products or services, not revenue generation. 

This blog post will provide a simple overview to help you better understand the basics of revenue operations.

Defining RevOps

RevOps is a broad term that describes the centralized software, systems, processes, and data for all revenue-generating teams inside a company.

The responsibilities include everything from interfacing with HubSpot to manage opportunity pipelines to managing email campaigns to building internal dashboards for metrics analysis.

RevOps includes several “functions” or departments, but they all essentially do the same thing. They make it easier for a company to sell items and make money.

Where Did It Originate?

RevOps did not always exist. It is a relatively new term given to the amalgamation of selling activities across every department in a company. It has its roots in Silicon Valley, with early adopters beginning to use this model as far back as the early 2000s.

A similar event happened when telecommunication companies conducted the earliest form of RevOps, providing a revenue generation framework for the entire company. Their goal was to have one department responsible for customer experience from start to finish, including all aspects of bringing in new customers and processing upgrades and billing issues.

This set them up for success by ensuring that each department knew what they were accountable for and could work together efficiently.

Who Should Use RevOps?

Revenue Operations is ideal for teams inside a company focused on increasing revenue growth through customer experience. The ultimate goal of these teams or departments is to ensure that you can make sales more efficiently by providing products that meet the needs of new and existing customers and that revenue generated can be tracked and maximized.

There are different levels of responsibility associated with each component or function within RevOps, so it’s important to determine which one is the best fit for your company to ensure you have a complete yet simple game plan.

Benefits of Revenue Operations

Revenue Operations are a great way to manage sales teams and ensure they are accountable for their work.
Some of the main benefits of RevOps include:

Increased Revenue Growth

The most important benefit of having a department focused solely on revenue growth is naturally increased revenue. When all aspects of the sales process are managed under one roof, teams can work more efficiently and cohesively.

This sets RevOps apart from other departments in an organization focusing on sales because it provides an infrastructure that ensures sales strategies are carried out, metrics are being tracked accurately, and that revenue is maximized.

Improved Customer Experience

With improved processes in place for upselling or cross-selling products to existing customers, teams will provide an enhanced customer experience. By centralizing your operations with one department responsible for revenue generation, you can ensure that each function provides the necessary customer support and attention they need to create new revenue opportunities.

Decrease in Customer Churn

Customer churn is the number of customers lost within a certain time frame. This figure directly affects your top-line revenue and harms your growth rate.

By centralizing customer success and using proactive and predictive analytics, you can decrease churn rates through improved outreach and the proper use of personalized data to provide product recommendations that can be upsold and cross-sold to customers.

Real-Time Information and Insights

With one department responsible for revenue generation, you can ensure that all of your systems are working together in a beneficial way rather than restricting or preventing growth.

By having the necessary data from each function available simultaneously, your team can make real-time decisions about the business that will help you grow more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

Reduce Operational Costs

By centralizing your sales and customer success functions under one department, you can reduce the number of people needed for each role and eliminate redundancies that take place when certain functions work independently of each other.

How to Implement Revenue Operations

There are different levels of responsibility associated with each component or function within RevOps, so it’s essential to determine which one is the best fit for your company.

For example, you might choose a low level of involvement by having a centralized CRM platform that all teams utilize and have accountability over. Or, if resources allow, you might decide to implement a more extensive RevOps department by centralizing your sales operations and customer success functions.

While you can’t expect to get the most out of Revenue Operations if it is implemented overnight or on a small scale, you will see immediate benefits like improved processes and increased revenue growth.

Get a Professional Opinion

Getting a professional opinion about Revenue Operations can help you implement it or determine if RevOps is the right fit for your company. Hiring a consultancy firm could be beneficial for your business if it allows you to implement RevOps in a scalable and sustainable way.

Final Thoughts

Revenue Operations combines four previously separate departments. Sales operations, customer success, marketing operations, and systems. The change required to drive growth starts with leadership focused on increasing revenue growth through customer experience.

RevOps combine various teams under one department-level umbrella, allowing for the centralization of data and processes. This will allow for real-time insights and increased efficiency, ultimately resulting in improved sales performance, leading to more revenue.

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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.