How you sell is why you win: how to start to implement and win with RevOps

The great Phil Kreindler from Infoteam Consulting once famously said: “How you sell is why you win.” The phrase resonated and still is a guiding construct behind modern RevOps today.

In fact, RevOps is all about how you sell, how you set up and how you operate. RevOps, or revenue operations, merges sales, marketing and customer success operations to improve the overall customer experience and drive efficient growth and it’s becoming the new agenda for sales leaders, marketing directors, and customer success managers. Following a clear roadmap and focusing on collaboration, transparency, removing friction and data-driven decision-making, B2B manufacturing can start to make inroads towards a successful RevOps transformation.

So, where do you start?

Identifying silos

The first step in your RevOps strategy is to identify and dismantle internal silos which can cripple growth. 

Silos often exist from legacy management structures. RevOps doesn’t look to destroy departments which have been in place for some time - and to be fair, you’d never get started if this is the strategy you set out to achieve - it’s a non-starter.

However, you can spot the traits of silos and the inefficiencies they bring with them. Here are some traits to look out for in your initial analysis:

1. We’re all used to physical separation but a silo to watch out for is separation and gaps in communications, goals, strategy and dialogue separation - departments are compartmentalised. 
2. Isolated data sets and technology are less common between sales and marketing these days with modern CRM systems. Still, they're often seen with pre-sales, subject matter experts, onboarding and installation engineers, customer success, service, maintenance and technical support handoffs.
3. A lack of SLAs between departments and teams is another indicator of a silo. 
4. Hand-offs that create a poor customer experience - janky, poorly communicated and executed and overly complicated are simple places to start. Telling your teams and team leaders you have the customers’ interest front and central in the changes you’re suggesting can give you a much longer runway to start to implement and win with RevOps.
5. How you segment customers in your sales support can also create silos. We often see brand promises changing across different segments. It can be a helpful strategy but just make sure you're not building in unnecessary rules. Often in manufacturing and B2B companies, we also have channels to look after - partners, white label partners, trade customers and service and maintenance customers. Each needs a different sales support strategy, but all ultimately require the same trust, values and promises of a well-managed brand.

Silos create friction and barriers. Breaking down barriers creates an integrated approach for customer teams. 

Review departmental communication channels paying particular attention to hand-offs. Look for bottlenecks and roadblocks that could harm your goal for seamless information, data flow and teamwork.

RevOps process mapping

Once you have your laser target on fixing internal divisions, you need to start to map your revenue operations (RevOps) processes. 

Here are some ideas for places to start:

1. Examine how leads move from awareness to consideration. Map what happens, where you lose people and whether there are any ‘peak’ moments (reference to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman - always worth a read of his work on psychological heuristics - advanced RevOps thinking).
2. Understanding the landscape of your marketing and sales enablement content for each stage of the customer engagement experience can often help you identify delinquencies in the process.
3. Map your entire customer journeys
   1. The marketing process
   2. The sales process
   3. Recycling leads that aren’t sales-ready (Old Marketo-speak worth a shout-out)
   4. Presales and pre-sales engineering
   5. Sales
   6. Legal (LegalOps is a thing and becoming increasingly visible as a deal winner. We had a client who was able to re-engineer the processes of getting contracts prepared - removing weeks of pointless and time-consuming negotiations and improving their closed won rate - no one wants to lose a deal at contract stage especially)
   7. Service and tech support (one of our customers identified that getting engineers onboard helps retention and even future sales) 

Ensure every touchpoint along the customer journey is optimised for consistency and efficiency. You can start by conducting a thorough process and data audit, verifying you're capturing accurate and relevant information to inform your strategies and decisions and thinking about the customer...

Defining a RevOps strategy

RevOps people are rarely the leaders and directors of any of the traditional departments. However, we are increasingly seeing job titles including chief revenue officer and chief commercial officer.

If they're just job titles, you still have a RevOps problem.

RevOps will become a trusted right-hand person to the leadership of the business.

Here are some strategies to get you started with RevOps

• Create clear goals

In more than 35 years in the B2B space, I've seen hundreds of disconnects between sales and marketing's strategic and operational goals —actually annoying levels of RevOps disconnect.

Get everyone’s goals aligned. Don’t give marketing a goal to open up and dominate a new SME market in a new channel and then give sales a goal of retention of large enterprises. I’m just using the example to highlight.

• Create a RevOps role and embrace very constructive feedback

Be brave and get someone to look at handoffs, data, efficiencies and successes. Back them, give them permission and support what can be ‘very constructive’ feedback at times. 

• Insist on leadership support

Ensure senior management knows who your RevOps people are and make sure they back the philosophy of making RevOps improvements.

Everyone from leadership to frontline employees must understand and align with your objectives. It's about knowing your endgame and working backwards to identify the technologies, processes and metrics needed to get there. Start by removing friction wherever customers interact with your brand, creating a seamless experience that not only meets but exceeds expectations.

Impact and effort analysis

Implementing any new strategy requires evaluating its potential impact against the effort required. RevOps can bring substantial benefits to a company but you need to be smart.

You must prioritise initiatives with

• The highest return on investment (ROI). 
• Identify quick wins that can provide your team with the motivation and confidence to tackle more complex, long-term objectives as part of your broader RevOps strategy.
• Make sure there's a line item for everyone - and you have a more joined-up presentation you can make to get more people involved in your RevOps approach.

Reporting on your RevOps strategy

Data-driven decision-making is the foundation of RevOps. 

Reporting is often the first issue people realise they have and where they need to work back from. It’s a classic “I need to report to the board and it takes me a day to pull the data together in Excel.” The actual issue often isn’t a reporting issue; it’s a process and compliance issue. 

But first, let’s deal with data. You're going to need good, compliant data, often from multiple sources, technology, integrations, and people.

Establish key metrics

Start by identifying the most important revenue-related metrics for your business. Some common RevOps metrics to consider include:

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Customer lifetime value (LTV)

Monthly/annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR)

Customer churn rate

Sales cycle length

Win rates

Pipeline velocity

Focus on metrics that align with your overall business goals and provide insights across marketing, sales, and customer success.

Set up data sources

As mentioned, to report your metrics, you'll need to connect and centralize data from various systems, such as:

CRM (e.g. Salesforce, HubSpot)

Marketing automation platform

Customer success software

Financial systems

Support ticketing system

Ensure your data is clean and consistent and flows into a central data warehouse or reporting tool.

Create dashboards and reports

Build dashboards and reports to visualise your key metrics. Some essential RevOps reports include:

Sales pipeline report - Shows deals by stage, size, and conversion rates

Customer acquisition report - Tracks new customers and acquisition channels

Revenue forecast - Projects future revenue based on pipeline and historical data

Customer health score - Measures likelihood of churn or expansion

Use data visualisation tools to make reports easily digestible for different stakeholders.

Automate your reporting

Set up automated data syncing and report generation to save time and ensure up-to-date insights. 

It makes sense if your colleagues and leaders can self-serve RevOps reports and dashboards. We often do this with HubSpot - where reports and dashboards are accessible in real time. There is nothing worse than spending a whole day pulling weekly reports together. 

Iterate and expand

Start with a core set of metrics and reports, then expand and refine over time to suit your business needs. Continuously gather feedback from stakeholders to improve reporting.

Choose a strong platform to do most of the heavy lifting

Platforms like HubSpot can help you with reporting and dashboards, and there are many tools, including Databox, to consider. 

Conclusion

RevOps is a game-changer for B2B, especially for those looking to break down silos, streamline operations, and boost revenue. It's about leveraging the right data, working on cross-departmental collaboration and cooperation, and fully committing to a strategy built around customer needs. 

Final tips and advice:

1. Remember to offer training 
2. Be sympathetic when you try to introduce new tools, you might be wrong
3. Be the best at communicating and try visual and graphical comms like dashboards, process mapping and infographics to help your cause
4. Don't be annoying - it's ok to disagree, it’s not ok to be disagreeable
5. Keep the vision clear and the momentum going

By mapping the customer's entire journeys, removing friction, keep people on board and continually refining your approach based on tangible feedback, RevOps will deliver real change—it could be the revolution you've been looking for.