In this edition of Insider Interviews, HG Insights’ Sr. Director of Global RevOps, Spencer Hardey, explains how to deliver significant benefits to businesses — for example, improved data-driven decision-making, efficiency, and customer experience — by developing and implementing a RevOps strategy.
Budgets are getting tighter. Revenue targets are shifting. Across the board, sales strategies are under review. In this economic climate, having full visibility to track and measure Go-To-Market (GTM) success using metrics to maximize efficiency is more important than ever.
The RevOps function was born from the challenge of creating a single source of truth as individual teams invested in new, disparate SaaS technologies. It has emerged as a new way of thinking about how to grow your business — by identifying everyday patterns, trends, and win/loss analysis to make recommendations to help optimize the sales process, resource allocation, and tighten team alignment. RevOps straddles all GTM teams to hunt patterns, trends, and insights to fuel recommendations that move the needle on supporting each role to be successful.
In this tight economy, companies are now realizing that without full visibility into leading and lagging KPIs, it’s impossible to decide where to effectively invest limited resources.
I have seen firsthand how RevOps can help companies grow their revenue as a RevOps leader over the last few years. In this article, I’ll share my story and explain how RevOps can benefit your business.
What is RevOps?
RevOps, or revenue operations, is a relatively new discipline. Essentially, our function is to maximize sales conversion rate and track activities at every stage of the funnel while providing visibility on success metrics to prioritize future investments.
In addition to straddling all departments, RevOps straddles the past and future — we provide trusted intelligence on how all our teams performed last quarter and find ways to be more successful in the next quarter, whether that’s by improving account segmentation, scoring and prioritization, territory planning, revenue/bookings, forecasting, budgeting, and even staffing/hiring. Then we measure efficacy by providing leading KPIs around account health, aligning Ideal Customer Profiles around products, personas, and use cases. The visibility on these KPIs lets me know where to advise we invest our limited resources, especially when market conditions are tight.
We focus on aligning sales, marketing, and customer success to drive revenue growth. It helps the whole business, regardless of which department, to optimize the way revenue is generated. By breaking down silos between these departments, RevOps teams can help businesses to improve their data-driven decision-making, increase their efficiency, and improve their customer experience.
Another important thing RevOps does is to help create the same vocabulary across the business so everyone’s speaking the same language — which is especially important when dealing with KPIs and other metrics.
In short, RevOps is about helping the entire company sell more effectively — something that’s especially important in down economies.
How I Found RevOps
I first learned about RevOps when I was working as an FPA consultant for Fortune 500 companies. I was responsible for tracking the company’s financial performance, and I quickly realized that there was a lot of disconnect between the sales, marketing, and customer success teams. This disconnect meant that leaders across the company spent more time debating KPIs than they did trying to increase performance.
Then I started working at a rapid growth startup and got some behind-the-scenes knowledge about GTM motions. I knew that there had to be a better way to do things, so I started researching. I was immediately impressed by the potential of RevOps to improve the way businesses operate. After HG performed multiple acquisitions, I was given the opportunity to take a larger role in everyday operations. Eventually, I was trusted to take on more work related to GTM growth, and I decided to make a career change to focus on RevOps.
How RevOps Changed My Company
After I joined my current company, I was immediately put in charge of building a RevOps team. I started by creating a roadmap that outlined my goals for the team. My goals included:
- Creating a single source of truth for all revenue-related data
- Automating as many manual processes as possible
- Improving communication and collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success
- Measuring and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs)
Over the next few years, I worked hard to achieve my goals. I built a team of talented professionals and we’ve adjusted our account segmenting, scoring and prioritization, territory planning, budgeting, and even staffing and some hiring practices. We implemented a new CRM system and we created a number of automations that saved us a lot of time. We also identified new KPIs around products, personas, and use cases and started tracking them more closely, which gave us a better understanding of how our business was performing. Now we can confidently invest our limited resources, especially when market conditions are tight.
As a result of our efforts, we saw a significant improvement in our revenue. We also saw an improvement in our customer satisfaction, and we were able to reduce our churn rate.
How RevOps Will Change Your Company
If you’re looking for ways to increase revenue, I encourage you to consider investing in RevOps. It will help you to improve your data-driven decision-making, increase your efficiency, and improve your customer experience.
Here are some specific examples of how RevOps can help your business:
- Improve your data-driven decision-making
- RevOps teams can help you to collect, analyze, and use data to make more informed decisions about your sales, marketing, and customer success strategies
- Identify and decide on KPIs, so all departments can agree on what success looks like, then analyze their performance
- Agree upon your Ideal Customer Profile and tactics for targeting it
- Increase your efficiency
- RevOps teams can help you to automate manual processes and improve communication and collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success
- Account segmentation, scoring, and prioritization
- Sales territory planning
- Revenue and bookings forecasting
- Budgeting, at every level of the business
- Improve your customer experience
- RevOps teams can help you to create a more seamless and consistent customer experience across all touchpoints
- More accurate, quality data on account health and churn risk
If you’re not sure where to start, I recommend reaching out to a RevOps consultant. A consultant can help you to assess your current situation and develop a plan to implement RevOps in your business.
RevOps Recurring Value
RevOps is a relatively new discipline, but it has the potential to deliver significant benefits to businesses. It is a powerful discipline that can help you to improve your data-driven decision-making, increase your efficiency, and improve your customer experience.
HG Insights first implemented a RevOps strategy a few years ago, and we have seen huge benefits:
- Our sales and marketing teams are now much better aligned
- Around our Ideal Customer Profile, account scoring, campaign targeting, and leading KPIs
- This has led to improved communication and collaboration, which has resulted in more closed deals
- We have improved our data-driven decision-making
- Better sales territory planning, Revenue and bookings forecasting, and budgeting
- This has allowed us to make better decisions about how to allocate resources, which has led to increased efficiency and profitability
- We have improved the customer experience
- Now, our customers have a more positive and seamless experience when interacting with our company
- And many more benefits
If your company is experiencing any inefficiencies (as all of us are!) or if you’re looking for ways to improve your company’s revenue (as all of us should be!), I encourage you to consider RevOps.
