“RevOps” or “Revenue Operations,” is the paradigm in the B2B world of taking marketing, sales, and customer success out of their silos and looking at them as an integrated whole. This cross-functional perspective has become very popular recently based on the need for organizations to profess the same brand story via omnichannel communications to customers and prospects.
Simply put, your company needs to meet your prospects and clients where they are at in their journey in order to provide them with a seamless customer experience. RevOps in B2B is an attempt to improve end-to-end customer experience (CX) as a competitive advantage for growth and scale.
Here at 1 Bold Step, we use a 40-point model to measure our customer’s RevOps efficacy. Using this model, we can quickly identify the areas in an organization that need to be fleshed out to position the organization for growth and scale via RevOps.
Some organizations have a surprisingly well-developed RevOps game in place (even if they don’t call it RevOps). While others need a good bit of work. Not sure where you stand? Here’s a simple gut check against these 4 RevOps best practices.
1. Focus on Customer Experience
The number one focus of RevOps is creating a great customer experience — no matter where they are on their journey with your company. Marketing, sales, and customer success should all represent your brand with the same brand story from their unique functional perspective.
How is that done? Here are a few tricks.
Marketing:
Marketing needs to be educating your customers about your offerings and the marketplace. The education process should be directly related to what your customers are searching for on the internet.
If your customers are typing in “Is there anything new in ball bearing science?” then marketing better be blogging about that, talking about it on social media, and offering to educate your customers on what’s new.
As a customer, the process of being educated about your brand and your offering needs to be quick and easy.
Sales:
Ideally, content and messaging is built into the sales process early, but if that ship has sailed, your sales team(at a minimum) needs to be reading what marketing is writing. Marketing is educating the customer; it’s Sales’ job to then customize the buying experience based on the content being produced and the specific problem they are solving for each customer.
Even in organizations where Sales is doing outbound cold calling, Sales needs to assume the customer will educate themselves based on marketing’s output. Furthermore; Sales should encourage the customer to learn more and direct them to new insights.
Regardless of the sales methodology you use, the customer should feel that the buying experience is built around their need to find a solution to their pain points. Be sure to tailor the buying process to the customer.
Customer Success:
Nowhere is it more obvious that the customer experience is king than in customer success. Your customer success team should treat every customer’s issue like it is the only one in the queue.
Are you measuring customer success with Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys or other tools? What are you doing to get feedback from your customers about their experience with multiple touch points of your business?
2. Facilitate Cross-Functional Communication
Marketing, sales, and customer success all have a unique view of the customer experience. The insights that come from those views need to be shared throughout the company.
I heard a story where a company got a bunch of “widgets” returned because they “didn’t do what the website said they could do.” Customer success needs to make sure marketing knows that the website is incorrect. Sales need to learn that their customer was unhappy. If the company isn’t sharing information cross-functionally, that issue will likely happen again.
Cross-functional communication is a must to make RevOps work. Marketing, sales, and customer success must share relevant information with the other RevOps team members so each member can improve their specific core competency.
As an example, marketing and sales need customer success to tell them what the lifetime value of the customer is so they can use that figure in benchmarking against the customer acquisition cost (CAC). Marketing and sales then need to agree on how much of that CAC is going to be used by marketing and how much is going to be used by sales.
If your RevOps teams aren’t communicating, you don’t have a RevOps team.
3. Iterate on Strategy
I love the Mike Tyson quote, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Just because you had a strategy session and built a RevOps plan, doesn’t mean it is going to work forever.
Your RevOps plan needs to be iterated annually and reviewed quarterly. Even during the quarter, you may find that you need to dump some ideas and pull in new ones. RevOps needs to be dynamic to keep up with changing communication technology and customer inclinations. And if you get punched in the mouth, you might need to do a full strategy review in the middle of the year.
Because RevOps includes operations, many people make the mistake of leaving strategy out of the picture. But that’s a mistake. RevOps requires both iterative strategy and standardized operations.
4. Standardize Operations
When it comes to RevOps best practices, standardizing operations is the practice most people immediately think of… and rightly so as it is what enables the first three best practices.
Underlying a well-honed RevOps team is a tech stack that facilitates standardized operations. Standardized operations will bring growth and scalability. Creating repeatable operations processes that generate successful outcomes based on scalable technology is the fertile ground from which RevOps best practices will make a difference in your business.
Overall, RevOps serves as a catalyst for scaling B2B companies by breaking down organizational silos and fostering an integrated approach across marketing, sales, and customer success. This transformative approach ensures a unified brand narrative and a seamless customer experience across all communication channels.
RevOps optimizes customer interactions, enhancing the efficiency of customer acquisition and retention. The emphasis on cross-functional communication facilitates a holistic understanding of customer needs and behavior. By standardizing operations and leveraging technology, RevOps establishes a scalable framework, enabling companies to dynamically adapt to changing market conditions, efficiently allocate resources, and ultimately achieve sustainable growth.
Now you have a look into the 4 best practices of RevOps. If you are looking for ways to grow and scale your organization, give these RevOps best practices a try.
If you find yourself struggling to see the whole picture when it comes to your growth, reach out to book an introductory call with us. We’d be happy to help.
