The future of RevOps is not SalesOps 2.0

RevOps is NOT simply turbo-driven SalesOps. It's very different. While both aim to drive revenue growth, RevOps represents a fundamental shift in how organisations approach revenue activities.

Also, it’s worth saying RevOps is not just a revenue-generating activity. It’s retention, customer experience and brand experiences - RevOps is every interaction with a customer, from the first hello and awareness moment to a long life as a customer.

The distinction between RevOps and SalesOps

RevOps goes beyond the scope of SalesOps by integrating sales, marketing, and customer success functions to create a unified revenue-generating engine. Unlike SalesOps, which primarily focuses on supporting and optimising sales processes, RevOps takes a holistic view of the entire customer journey.

Key differences:

• Scope: RevOps encompasses the entire revenue cycle, from lead generation to customer retention, while SalesOps concentrates on sales activities.
• Alignment: RevOps breaks down silos between departments, fostering collaboration and shared goals across teams.
• Data integration: RevOps creates a single source of truth for revenue-related data, whereas SalesOps typically deals with sales-specific metrics.

The evolving landscape of B2B sales

A greater focus on the customer has emerged in B2B sales as sales teams become increasingly trusted advisors rather than pricing and quoting machines.

Only some of the numbers are hard data points. Some of the indicators we might consider soft (for example, NPS - whatever you think of it). 

RevOps is part philosophy and part science.

Just look at the stats (some are true and some roughly right):

• 50% of salespeople have degrees
• 25% use CRM consistently and regularly
• Most salespeople have fewer than 7 conversations a day
• Sales cycle times have increased by over 50% compared to previous years
• 59% of B2B tech buyers avoid meetings with sales managers.
• 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience.
• 71% of B2B buyers are willing to spend over $50,000 in a single transaction using a remote or self-service model

B2B salespeople have become advisors and customer success experts, which is good, fine and nice—we want our salespeople to be helpful, useful and interesting. We want them to work with subject matter experts and solve issues for the customer.

In a B2B world for many manufacturers and industrial companies, many salespeople do their own marketing as well (you SaaS people are spoilt). They do outreach, run homemade ABM campaigns and build their personal brand to fill the extra leads they need in their buckets.

RevOps is not outbound marketing, though some forums and writers would have you think differently.

Winning with RevOps - what are the other extras?

1. Operations management: RevOps optimises resources across all revenue-generating departments (not just sales) to align with business growth objectives (not just sales targets).
2. Enablement: Unlike SalesOps, which focuses on sales enablement, RevOps provides support, data, content and resources to sales, marketing and customer success teams.
3. Insights and analytics: RevOps leverages data from the entire customer journey to inform strategic decisions.
4. Technology management: RevOps oversees the tech stack across all revenue-related functions, ensuring integration and efficiency.

The Future of RevOps

As we look ahead, several trends are shaping the future of RevOps:

1. Increased focus on marketing: 
   1. Brand marketing becomes a number one strategy
   2. Fractional campaigns offer test and trial and error before big campaigns are rolled out
   3. Marketing teams will get tasked across more departments and should welcome the extra elbow room and influence
   4. Social media will be devolved from the ‘corporate’ handcuffs and tedium
   5. Inbound will rise once again and become the battleground of choice for the best, bravest and most differentiated brands
2. Enhanced customer success analytics: 
   1. More emphasis on product usage, repeat buying and low churn
   2. More compensation decisions are made to reward customer happiness and lifetime value
   3. Demonstrated ROI to customers, requiring more collaboration between RevOps, sales and customer success teams.
3. Adoption of AI and machine learning: 
   1. Avoid the automate everything argument - but automate where it makes sense - at your low-value interactions
   2. A rise in predictive analytics and a decrease in the importance of real-time analytics and data
   3. AI helps keep it real - it doesn;t replace - and even it where it does, revops will be at the front of the queue to celebrate.
4. Emphasis on customer experience: 
   1. RevOps will increasingly focus on creating a unified and seamless customer journey across all touchpoints
   2. Micro management of interactions will return
   3. We will focus more on peak events (shout out again to the lovely Mr Kahneman)
   4. Brands will return to Halligan’s Law (the art of understanding what’s next - named by Deeply Digital after the very great Brian Halligan of HubSpot fame)

Conclusion

The future of RevOps is not simply an upgraded version of SalesOps - it's not SalesOps 2.0. It represents a paradigm shift in how businesses approach revenue generation. By breaking down silos, integrating data and aligning teams around shared goals, RevOps is very definitely a return to customer-first thinking and processes. 

As organisations adapt to changing market conditions and evolving buyer behaviours, those that embrace the holistic approach of RevOps will be better positioned to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape. The future of revenue generation lies not in optimising individual departments but in creating a unified, data-driven and customer-centric revenue engine.