Plenty of businesses have begun to focus their attention on revenue operations. These revenue operations align the goals and campaigns of a brand’s marketing, sales, and service. This marriage of common processes ensures fewer glitches for customers moving through the company’s pipeline. It also removes barriers to success for employees, such as redundancy and moving at cross-purposes.
A focus on revenue operations can benefit any size company by improving efficiency and profit potential. However, revenue operations are especially important for early-stage organizations with fewer resources, smaller teams, and less runway. Being able to harmonize and combine these three departments’ objectives eliminates friction for startups. Additionally, the process of implementing a full-fledged, integrated revenue operations movement fosters better communication—and less siloing—between employees.
How can you start putting revenue operations into action at your small business or young upstart? Start by implementing the following practices and strategies.
1. Use a single portal for all corporate agreements and contracts.
Your marketing and sales personnel will frequently send out everything from proposals to legally binding arrangements. These may land in the inboxes of prospects, clients, or even vendors. If you’re not using a cloud-based, automation tool across the board, you’re sacrificing efficiency.
According to PandaDoc, an all-in-one document automation software, the traditional contractual sales cycle can take weeks and be fraught with human error. Housing your revenue operations e-documents on a centralized platform allows your people to bypass delays, potential manipulation, and other hold-ups.
For instance, a salesperson can pull up a customer’s original marketing proposal to draft an updated personalized contract. The contract can be shared with the customer, edited in real-time by both parties, and signed electronically. And it can all happen in hours, not days.
2. Ensure everyone in revenue operations uses your CRM.
Research collected by SuperOffice, a cloud CRM platform, suggests nine out of 10 companies rely on CRM software to improve productivity and meet quotas. Nevertheless, some brands forget to share the full breadth of CRM across all their revenue operations verticals. As such, sales and customer service may use the CRM, but not marketers.
This can present problems along the way, especially in terms of curating and analyzing historical data. Statistics from all customer journey touchpoints need to be available to any member of the revenue operations team.
Being able to see the complete sales funnel from the widest to narrowest points—and beyond—leads to more power and control. Consequently, you’ll want to train all staffers to understand how to make your CRM part of their workflows.
3. Share your revenue goals with all revenue operations personnel.
It’s impossible for someone in the customer service department to participate in revenue operations without knowledge. Rather than only sharing your company’s revenue objectives with marketing or sales, loop in service, too. Being transparent about revenue goals allows everyone to contribute fully to bringing dollars into your company.
Another benefit to adding someone from customer service into all revenue operations meetings is knowledge. You might be surprised to learn how much customer service experts can inform marketing or sales campaigns. Their insights can be invaluable and help tweak messaging or timing.
4. Consider making someone head of revenue operations.
Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). VP of Revenue Operations. Director of Revenue Operations. They might sound like revamped sales titles, but they’re not. These positions have emerged as companies begin to see the value in having someone own the revenue operations process. Although, you don’t necessarily need to bring on a full-time employee from the outside.
One way to move toward having a CRO is to reposition a sales or marketing leader into a broader role. However, if you want a separate individual to serve as CRO, you could hire a part-time consultant. Either way, work with your team leaders to develop a workable hierarchy that includes a fair division of responsibilities. You can set up your CRO as a lateral counterpart to the CMO, for example. How you rearrange your internal structure will depend on your vision, culture, and growth goals.
5. Revisit your current tech stack.
Does your tech stack seem healthy or is it too crammed or disjointed? Sit down with your teams and find out which software and tools they use, and which they don’t. Collect information across the board, and be sure to include your IT team in your fact-finding mission.
After you get a better understanding of the tech you’re paying for, work with your revenue operations leaders. Talk about condensing to fewer platforms or integrations, if possible. Alternatively, find out if you’re not getting the most impact from a product or platform. Boiling down your tech tools to what’s needed—and nothing else—will streamline your workflows and close sales, marketing, and service gaps.
Want to become a disruptor and kick up your brand equity this year? Pay attention to how you’re handling the revenue operations process. You could be a few thoughtful changes away from realizing profit margins you thought were dreams.
