The traditional approach to managing revenue in the tech industry has been to divide responsibilities between sales, marketing, and customer success teams. However, as the industry evolved, companies recognized the need for a more integrated approach to managing revenue that involves all departments.
Enter revenue operations, a relatively new concept that has taken the tech industry by storm. Revenue operations, or RevOps for short, is a framework for aligning revenue-generating departments and processes to improve overall efficiency and effectiveness around the customer journey.
The Role of RevOps Teams
RevOps teams are responsible for designing and implementing the strategies and processes that drive revenue growth. They work across departments to identify areas of inefficiency, design solutions, and implement technology that streamlines processes and improves communication. They are also responsible for collecting and analyzing data to identify trends and make data-driven decisions.
The Benefits of RevOps
RevOps can bring a number of benefits to tech companies and enable companies to scale. By implementing a RevOps strategy, companies can better leverage tools in their stack, shorten sales cycles, increase efficiency and alignment, as well as enable better data-driven decision-making, resulting in improved customer experience without the need for a bigger team. By breaking down silos between departments, RevOps can improve communication and collaboration across the organization.
RevOps is on a mission to generate revenue and remove friction in the revenue generation process. The work they do with data can lead to more accurate forecasting and better decision-making. By managing the entire customer journey, RevOps teams can ensure a seamless customer experience that leads to increased retention and revenue growth.
RevOps has become increasingly popular in the tech industry in recent years. According to a 2022 survey by LeanData, 60% of B2B companies have a dedicated RevOps function, up from 52% in 2017. The survey also found that companies with a dedicated RevOps function reported higher growth rates and better alignment between sales and marketing teams.
Why You Shouldn’t Cut Your RevOps Team
The primary goal of a RevOps team is to optimize revenue across an organization. Key team members include marketing and sales operators, strategists, sales enablement, analysts, systems administrators whose sole goal is to improve the performance of the organization.
Most CROs are dealing with challenges around new logo acquisition, customer churn, and longer sales cycles. Cutting the team that enables better and faster decision processes that improves your sales team’s ability to sell and support your customers seems to be counter-productive. RevOps teams have historically been running very lean. Perhaps a better strategy for your RevOps team might be the following:
Streamlining systems
Improving the effectiveness of your messaging and your sales team
Researching opportunities for growth in underserved markets or where your competitors are losing
Increasing the frequency of your customer conversations to better understand their challenges and how to help them overcome them
Your RevOps team identifies opportunities to increase revenue and ensures that each function is aligned towards achieving revenue-related goals and broader organizational goals to promote a seamless and consistent customer experience across all touchpoints. Trimming your RevOps team could result in missed opportunities for revenue growth, gaps in the customer experience
In summary, cutting your RevOps team may save you cash today, but it can have far-reaching consequences on revenue, efficiency, scalability, data-driven decision making, customer experience, and strategic planning that will affect your company in the long term. It is important to recognize the critical role that RevOps teams play in the success of modern organizations and invest in this function accordingly.