There’s a new fancy term in the business world being tossed around. When we first heard it, we thought, “Ooh, that sounds SO cool, and people will think we sound cool when we start using it!” And then we were like, “What does it mean?”
So, we’re not only going to tell you what it means, but we’re going to tell you why it’s important to your business and why you should start saying and using it too.
What’s the new term?
REV OPS.
Learn it. Like it. Love it. We think it’s here to stay.
No, it’s not what Maverick does before he hops on his crotch rocket or leads the Top Gun team on a secret mission. Short for “Revenue Operations,” it’s a position, department, or arm of your go-to-market (GTM) team that centralizes the sales, marketing, and customer operations departments.
The RevOps position or team is like an operational ninja that slashes the silos between these departments and aligns the business’ activities to increase revenue. Basically, it’s making sure your customer-facing departments act as one well-oiled machine instead of many different cooks in a kitchen.
Top B2B companies that utilize RevOps report an increase of 100% to 200% in digital marketing ROI, a 10% to 20% boost in sales productivity, and a 30% reduction in GTM expenses. (Sweet!) Here’s how having a RevOps department improves your marketing and sales.
Coordinate Operations Across Other Departments
Most businesses have dedicated teams for sales, marketing, systems operations, and customer operations. However, these departments tend to exist in silos independent of one another. For example, enhancements in customer operations don’t always transfer to changes in marketing strategies, though there’s a clear connection.
If the company has identified a way to improve customer management, there’s a great marketing opportunity here to let potential customers know of the enhanced services they can expect from your team. Likewise, improvements in system operations can translate to key selling points that your sales team should point out. Operational silos may increase efficiency within individual departments, but they tend to leave money on the table. This is where RevOps professionals come in.
RevOps teams can artfully weave together the activities within other operational teams, systematically identifying opportunities for growth and putting the necessary infrastructure in place to increase revenue and improve the company’s bottom line.
Identify New Growth Opportunities
The RevOps team strives to uncover opportunities for development. With a laser focus on identifying ways to increase revenue, these professionals use their full skill set to cut costs or boost sales. This includes:
- Assessing operational weaknesses.
- Responding to economic pressures.
- Evaluating societal and political conditions.
- Adapting to market changes.
- Increasing business resilience.
- Identifying valuable trends.
Through these activities, RevOps teams can uncover untapped leads, often by the thousands. The RevOps department can also support operations by identifying opportunities to increase efficiency, boosting output and cutting costs.
Fully Utilize Business Tools and Data
Many companies are already investing in powerful tools that can better inform the company and increase revenue, yet they’re not utilizing these platforms to their full potential. HubSpot, Shopify, Salesforce, GoSite, and other programs have ample utilities built in that can inform the decisions and activities of a dedicated RevOps team. However, without that team in place, companies will likely find that they lack the manpower to capitalize on all this functionality.
Letting your RevOps team loose on these tools perfectly demonstrates how having a RevOps department improves your marketing and sales. While sales and marketing teams will cherry-pick the utilities that apply to their limited scope of operations and leave the rest of the bounty untouched, a RevOps department can handle the rest of the harvest, making sure that no valuable fruit is left on the tree.
Eliminate Unnecessary Redundancies
While sales and marketing are working steadily to tackle the immediate projects and problems in front of them, RevOps enjoys the latitude to step back and look at the bigger picture, finding strategies and opportunities that will benefit both teams and bring the company’s overarching activities into alignment.
The RevOps department evaluates the activities of both the sales and marketing departments with a keen eye for improving efficiency and generating greater revenue. This team helps improve communications, streamline workflow, and facilitate better data collection and usage across the company, with a particular focus on marketing and sales, where customer data is perhaps most valuable.
When sales and marketing work independently from one another, they may overlook inefficiencies like the use of two similar programs within the company. The RevOps team will pinpoint such issues and streamline operations by training both teams to use the same program for their activities. This will condense essential data in one place so that everyone in the company can make better use of the information. Meanwhile, this approach can eliminate the need for extraneous programs and activities that cost the company precious dollars, whether in the form of unnecessary man-hours or an extra software subscription.
Provide Consistent Brand Experience
RevOps focuses on alignment so that customer-facing departments can present a consistent face and an outstanding, unified experience to the public. When someone deals with a salesperson, they can have a great experience, and then after their purchase, contact customer service and have a much different experience. RevOps makes sure a customer experiences the brand no matter who they deal with.
RevOps helps to identify shared goals across both sales and marketing so that both departments can build off of the activities of one another. This empowers the sales team to fully utilize the assets produced for marketing while informing the marketing team of key sales data that will help with proper targeting in future campaigns.
Oversee Automation
More and more companies are electing to automate business activities for greater efficiency and lower costs. Studies show that as of 2020, 31% of businesses have at least one function that’s now fully automated. Of these, nearly half are scaling automation across multiple parts of the business. Meanwhile, an additional 35% of businesses are piloting automation of at least one business function.
While automation offers many benefits, it also requires a certain amount of oversight. The RevOps department can provide that oversight while seeking ways to optimize the automated processes so that they better serve the needs of the sales and marketing teams. Since the RevOps department handles sales data, customer service reports, and marketing information, it’s perfectly positioned to organize and disseminate this data in the most efficient and profitable way possible.
Since Liger works to build solid marketing foundations within businesses, we naturally coordinate with sales and customer service teams to improve unity and your overall brand. This is a great first step if you don’t have a RevOps team, but if you do, we’re pleased to work with them to build a clear, unified brand for your business. Contact us for a complimentary brand audit.
