Elevate Your RevOps Team and Strategy by Removing Common Roadblocks

Revenue operations (RevOps), the approach to align marketing, sales, and customer success operations teams under one umbrella to drive revenue growth, is gaining more and more attention.

Gartner predicts that 75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy RevOps by 2025, and Forrester Research found organizations that deployed RevOps grew revenue nearly 3X faster.

Moreover, companies that align people, processes, and technology across their marketing and sales teams achieved 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability, also according to Forrester Research. 

So, whether your organization has decided to form a dedicated RevOps department or is delegating RevOps responsibilities across operations teams, evolving to a RevOps business model is a step in the right direction to improve collaboration, alignment, and profitability.

RevOps pillars: Aligning people, processes, and technology comes with challenges 

The backbone of your RevOps engine is the people, processes, and technology pillars that work tightly together. 

In a perfect world, these three interconnected components are fully aligned, streamlined, and run without hiccups. However, this is frequently not the case.

Under the hood of your organization, you might well find misaligned teams, broken funnels, messy data, and fragmented customer journeys. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the challenges in each of these three pillars and how to mitigate them.

People

Your executive team understands the value of RevOps and has changed the team structure and culture to support a future of RevOps in your organization. 

However, executing a compelling GTM strategy needs alignment across teams. 

Oftentimes, marketing, sales, and customer success ops teams do not work towards the same goals, responsibilities between the groups are unclear, and work is done in silos, impacting the overall customer experience (CX).

In a Pedowitz study, 46% of respondents said that “a lack of communication between teams” was a top challenge to providing exceptional CX, and only 29% of organizations had fully aligned their marketing, sales, and CX teams. 

These alignment challenges lead to missed opportunities for revenue, wasted time, and substandard customer experiences.

To improve communication and strengthen relationships between departments, try to hire RevOps colleagues with diverse backgrounds in marketing, sales, or customer success.

This will help your team relate to other teams faster and understand what these groups are trying to achieve.

Processes 

RevOps are constantly in demand in an organization, fixing disjointed processes, broken funnels, and inefficient handovers between teams that impact revenue. 

Research by Ventana found that more than 80% of organizations will limit the effectiveness of their revenue management by having an incomplete view of a customer's lifetime journey - from lead and engagement to purchasing, onboarding, renewal, and expansion.

At this point, it’s not rare to see teams struggling to keep their head above water, constantly fighting fires with multiple requests while trying to find time to concentrate on innovative projects that move the needle for the business. 

To help your team focus, consider taking a systems thinking approach and structure your team with a product management mindset. 

Incorporate principles that will help you to prioritize, iterate, and get work done in sprints without the expectation of having to deliver something new and different every week.

Technology

Tech stacks are complex and hard to maintain as app portfolio sizes surge. A Productiv report shows that large enterprises use 364 applications to run their business, and each team uses between 40 and 60 different applications. 

Given the sheer number of applications used between departments, it is no wonder that systems are not fully integrated. As a result, data isn’t able to flow seamlessly end-to-end. 

Without a single source of truth containing clean and readily available data, knowing where you effectively spend your team's budget is challenging.

To get the most out of the tools you pay for, consider partnering with a visual integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) to connect your apps, let data flow seamlessly, and automate the workflows involved.

Having covered the three RevOps pillars, let’s take a closer look at some of the challenges experienced in each of the three business departments that make up RevOps and how to mitigate them.

By business area: A closer look at RevOps challenges and how to solve them

Marketing operations 

Marketing operations (Mops) currently face the challenge of integrating a growing and often disjointed tech stack. 

According to ChiefMartec, 52% of Marketers said that integration was their biggest obstacle to success with marketing technology (Martech), and the total number of Martech solutions stands alone at 9,932 — up 24% from 2020.

Image Source: ChiefMartec

Besides navigating a diverse tech stack, Marketing Ops have to ensure the efficiency of their own efforts, which is not easy, considering the bottlenecks manual work can present.

According to Airtable, marketing leaders lose one-third of their week to manual, operational tasks. In addition, three in four marketing leaders say that they’re frustrated by the amount of time it takes to execute most marketing campaigns. 

The solution is to free up time and streamline your marketing processes by automating the grunt work.

You can start by automating lead generation and nurturing campaigns so that you can schedule, manage and distribute campaigns faster across digital channels. 

Does your team do a lot of online research? This too can be automated by watching online review sites and pulling customer comments into your database, to name an example. This will help you prioritize customer responses across multiple platforms and maintain ranking scores to protect your brand reputation. 

Sales operations

Sales Ops are continuously looking to minimize friction in the sales process, and get high-quality marketing leads in the hands of sales reps faster. 

However, manual routing is still the number one lead routing method, according to LeanData

In the same study, 67% of people reported that leads were assigned to the wrong sales reps, resulting in prospects waiting for extended periods before being contacted. 

Interesting insights about these issues don’t end here. For instance, the Harvard Business Review found that the average response time is 42 hours! And according to Drift, 55% of companies do not even respond within five business days.

With 78% of customers buying from the company that responds first according to Sopro - and 61% of overperforming sales leaders using automation in parts of their sales process according to HubSpot - incorporating automation is a way to boost your sales operations.

To get your leads immediately in the hands of your sales reps, start by automating your lead routing processes. Once leads are flowing accurately to your global sales reps, look at automating other sales processes to shorten sales cycles.

Image Source: McKinsey

Customer success operations

Customer success operations teams are challenged with integrating and managing tools that provide a seamless customer journey and are aligned with sales. 

However, the handover process between sales and customer success teams is often inefficient, with vital information misplaced or not shared between the two teams. 

A survey by Rocketlane found that 43.9% of customer success teams are juggling between 5-10 projects at once! And as much as 60% of teams are using between 4-6 different tools for onboarding projects. 

As information spreads across multiple tools, spreadsheets, documents, and communication channels, challenges start to multiply.

How many different tools do you use during the entire onboarding and implementation journey for communication, collaboration, and project management?

Image Source: Rocketlane

According to customer onboarding expert Donna Weber, customer onboarding is an important part of the customer journey, and poor onboarding is the main cause of churn. 

In the U.S alone, customer churn is costing businesses $136 billion a year. 

Also, Wyzowl found that over 90% of customers feel that companies could do better when it comes to onboarding new users, and 86% of people said that they are more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content. 

With onboarding having a direct impact on product usage, value generation, and customer retention according to Forrester Research, an efficient customer onboarding process is important to your business. 

To improve your onboarding process, start by automating a few touchpoints. A quick win could be automating the handover between marketing and sales, uploading sensitive customer information to your server, or providing timely project status updates. 

Automating a few of these processes will save your team valuable time and improve the overall onboarding experience that impacts churn and revenue down the line.

Final thoughts

Organizations face ongoing complexity with technology rapidly changing and customers’ expectations growing.

Companies that adopt a RevOps business model that successfully aligns internal teams to drive revenue growth will have an advantage over the competition. 

However, the integration and management of people, processes, and technology across departments are challenging.

To overcome these common roadblocks and elevate your RevOps team and strategy, get a personalized demo with a Make expert and see how we can help support your RevOps business goals.