Revenue operations (or RevOps) better align Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success functions to encourage better revenue growth across an organization.

It’s a framework to connect your technology, processes, and strategy and create a frictionless revenue-generating machine while delighting your customer at every stage.

What Makes Revenue Operations Difficult?

Traditionally, due to the nature of trying to build a successful company in ‘real-time’, businesses have been a collection of interconnected but disparate departments. Yes, they all have the same goal (the company’s ultimate success), but they also have their own needs and constraints. Likewise, the larger they get, each department also has its own ‘Head of’, Vice President, or Director with a unique approach.

For example, in most organizations, sales operations report to the Head of Sales, marketing operations report to the Head of Marketing, and Customer Success to, well, you get the idea.

Each team has its own set of goals, tools. and priorities. And, for the most part, it works. But the challenge with this way of working is that disparate systems mean friction points where sales conversions are potentially lost for a variety of reasons.

Through better collaboration and visibility, RevOps looks to close the numerous and various gaps across people, data, processes, technology, and team accountability through improved operational efficiency. This will drive a more cohesive business by unifying teams through shared goals and by sharing information.

Picture an orchestra: a collection of individuals who all need to work in unison to achieve a result – a pleasant melody. Can you imagine every chair playing their own tune, in their own time at their own volume? That’s most organizations. But RevOps (much like an orchestral conductor) unites disparate business functions, to get them working in unison to achieve a collective result more powerful than their collective parts.

So, how do we get to this utopian state of optimal growth?

Short answer, it’s not easy and requires an in-depth examination of your entire business, focusing on the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. But the improved financial results are well worth the effort.

Growth of RevOps in Businesses

Since 2019, there’s been a 300% increase in RevOps-related roles on LinkedIn and a 57% increase in companies implementing RevOps strategies or building RevOps teams.

According to a recent HubSpot blog, companies that implement RevOps have seen the following impact:

10-20% increase in sales productivity
15% increase in profitability
19% increase in speed of growth
71% improvement in stock performance
100-200% increase in digital marketing ROI

Impressive, right? But what if the system is working well and delivering the results we hear you say? Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right?

Not quite. According to HubSpot, 60% of current operations professionals end up repeating or double handling business tasks due to a lack of team alignment. This means targets get missed, goals aren’t reached and stakeholders across the board get frustrated. It’s a lose/lose for everybody.

But once you get the orchestra all playing the same song, your business will thrive.

The Origin of RevOps

Most business deals achieve the greatest revenue after the point of sale. I.e., delighting customers through a range of appropriate cross-selling, up-selling, and re-selling opportunities after the initial conversion.

To provide this type of customer-first experience, you’ll need to spend some cash upfront. But the money you’ll likely spend to secure a customer (or the cost of acquisition) is only a small fraction of what you can expect to earn from them throughout their customer lifecycle.

Once you recognize and accept this shift in customer focus, you’ll be able to shift your energy towards fostering customer loyalty and driving more revenue.

These are the 6 main ways SaaS has altered relationships between customers and the businesses they buy from: