Understanding the role of RevOps
Rosalyn kicked things off with an excellent definition of revenue operations.
“Ops is the underlying infrastructure. Sales and marketing departments have people who are experts in their field. But ops is really there to ensure that those teams have the right processes, policies, data, insights, and technology to act as the engine that helps everything run.” - Rosalyn Santa Elena
As the name suggests, RevOps takes that operational focus and then applies it to revenue. A great RevOps manager or team should be involved in not only sales and marketing but also customer success, product, and any other department that affects new or retained revenue.
How to know when you need RevOps
Today, most medium- and large-sized companies have marketing operations managers and sales operations managers, but the title of revenue operations manager isn’t as common.
How do companies know when they need to hire someone for RevOps?
Our experts agree that the answer can’t be dictated by a certain employee headcount or amount of ARR. Rather, a dedicated role is needed when the people currently doing those functions can’t manage RevOps in addition to their core responsibilities anymore.
“Companies might have different people within marketing and sales doing RevOps, but they’re not calling it RevOps. As the company grows, whether in ARR or complexity, it can make sense to have a dedicated RevOps role.” - Adam Pelley
“When a sales or marketing leader is doing operations, it takes away from what they do best and the things they should be doing. Plus as ops experts, we’ll probably be better at creating those processes, getting policies in place, and creating the infrastructure.” - Rosalyn Santa Elena
How to win at RevOps strategy and implementation
To improve your RevOps strategy and reap all its benefits, try these expert tips.
Pitch the value of RevOps
You can’t implement RevOps if you don’t have executive buy-in. To get your C-suite team on board with investing in RevOps, pitch its enormous value.
Rosalyn summarizes that value well:
“One of the instant wins of RevOps is having a holistic view of revenue from end to end. Teams with strong RevOps not only have the ability to understand what’s working and what’s not, but they have the technical capability to easily move in a different path and tackle the next important thing. Incremental tweaks of 1% or 2% improvements across the lifecycle are going to have a huge impact. ” - Rosalyn Santa Elena
Get advocates on board
CEOs aren’t the only people you need to convince. Across the organization, there will be a lot of questions and confusion around what RevOps is. Each person will want to know how it can help them specifically. Answer their individual questions and get them excited about the results of RevOps so they’ll be willing to assist you.
“At the beginning of a consulting project, I talk with all of these leaders, and I think of it as going on a roadshow. You’re pitching to them why RevOps and why now, and you get all of these different advocates within the organization to help you implement it.”- Rosalyn Santa Elena
When in doubt, you can always remind people that they will get a holistic view of revenue data, save mass amounts of time on data collection, and increase their capacity for proactive and strategic planning.
Hire the right people
Make sure you’re hiring the right person for the RevOps role. If you hire someone with a solely marketing ops background, they might struggle to coordinate with sales. They might spend their time unevenly, fail to measure sales metrics accurately, or make the sales team feel like their needs aren’t as important.
“You need to hire someone with expertise across the funnel. If you are going to hire for a RevOps role, they need to be truly focused on RevOps and look at the entire customer lifecycle. Ideally, their focus is on supporting the customer experience and revenue.” - Rosalyn Santa Elena
Of course, people can grow into the role, but you need to make sure they’re committed to working with all departments equally.
Foster collaboration between ops teams
Colin is the first RevOps person at League. It’s a 700-person company and previously, there were sales ops and marketing ops but there wasn’t that one function tying it all together.
Here’s how he approached his first few weeks in the job:
“The first thing I did was set up regular meetings with sales ops and marketing ops so we could start to get aligned. Now RevOps, marketing ops, and sales ops collaborate as if we’re one team, but then we report to our separate teams and help manage their day-to-day work. I also helped us set up cohesive metrics and a single source of truth for reporting.” - Colin Tanner
One Closing Show Live viewer asked for advice on how to manage RevOps when there aren’t any siloed ops roles (no marketing ops or sales ops managers). It’s typically too much for one person to manage ops within sales, marketing, and revenue, so if that’s the pickle you’re in, know that it’s important to hire additional ops people ASAP.
Invest in your tech stack
The right technology is paramount to a winning RevOps strategy, but in the current market environment, it’s hard to make the case for more or different tech. To help your plight, Adam recommends prioritizing calculations on time savings.
“You’re less comparing the investment with other tools and more with headcount. Because some tools can be used to augment or not have to increase headcount. Look at what teams will be impacted and how much time they will save.” - Adam Pelley
Colin also points out that most companies have elements of their tech stack that are going to waste.
“Look at your tech stack and find things that you don’t even know you’re paying for that nobody is using. Make sure you’re communicating with other teams about what you’re using so you can use the same tools rather than bring in another tool.” - Colin Tanner
The more you’re able to work in the same tools, the more money you’ll save and the more successful the collaboration will be.
