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Ecommerce businesses have been dominating the online community for quite some time now. Over the years, we have seen many enterprises transform to operate online, and customers rely more on online marketplaces due to accessibility and comfort. Perhaps the most important outcome of this digital transformation was the concept of Software-as-a-service (SAAS). SAAS has allowed organizations to sell digital solutions and create a client base. To maintain software quality and customer experience, organizations like these have separate teams for development, marketing, sales, and customer success. Conventionally, each of these teams has continuously operated within their silos, but recently, a new concept called Revenue Operations has emerged. Revenue operations or RevOps change how these teams work and interact. Let’s talk more about the RevOps team below.

What is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?

Revenue operations is a business strategy focusing on revenue growth by introducing a new infrastructural paradigm. RevOps revamps an organization’s structure to allow for better management and accountability for customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, etc.), development, and IT. The RevOps strategy removes silos between these teams, so they fall under single management. Under the RevOps management, these teams are judged on similar metrics and follow the same plan of operation. It also ensures that these teams utilize the same tools for most of their tasks to be aware of each other’s work. RevOps aims to increase data sharing and communication for operational efficiency by removing barriers between these teams.

A simple example of improved productivity is the sales and marketing teams. The marketing team works to generate promotional material that would spark the interest of prospects. The sales team builds on that material and ensures the product's sales by offering the best possible solutions. Having common goals, RevOps enables them to design marketing strategies and sales processes that benefit each other and increase profitability.

Business Processes Before RevOps

Organizations have different marketing, sales, customer success, client services, and product development departments. Before RevOps, each of them operated within their domain under different leaderships. A significant problem with such a structure is that these teams cannot strategize their work to benefit other groups because they are unaware of their operation and goals. A marketing team designs its strategies without coordinating with the sales team, so the content might not aid sales enablement. Similarly, client services may not be able to gather accurate customer feedback without the involvement of development teams.

Silos like these prevent teams from working optimally and reaching their full potential. From a business point of view, it damages revenue growth and decreases customer churn rate.

Components of RevOps Operating Framework/Model

A RevOps framework allows organizations to smoothly transition their regular operations under the umbrella of revenue operations. It is a plan of action that all customer-facing teams can follow to better drive revenue growth. The RevOps model allows teams to work together and come up with optimized strategies to achieve their goals.

A RevOps framework can vary from company to company depending on the organization’s business needs. Most models consist of the following elements.

  • Strategy: This is the plan of action that drives the revenue-centric growth of the organization.

  • Process: Design, management, and tracking of end-to-end revenue processes.

  • Data: A centralized data platform consisting of data captured from multiple touchpoints.

  • Workflow: Designing workflows to aid revenue generation. These workflows can be manual and automated.

  • Analysis: Using metrics to analyze the performance of teams and the overall process. These analyses are based on revenue generation, customer satisfaction, customer retention, revenue retention, etc.

  • Technology: The tech stack required to carry out revenue operations. Technology includes tools to be used for process monitoring, data collection, AI forecasting, dashboarding, etc.

Current Tech Stack That Supports RevOps

A technology stack (Tech Stack) steers the customer journey for your product. It is a collection of tools and resources that organizations use to carry out operations and maintain workflows. Without the right tools, any job can become tedious. Establishing a RevOps architecture has some specific requirements.

Every organization uses a different tech stack depending on its business needs. Each team has a set of software tools to carry out everyday operations and maintain customer data from various touchpoints. Depending on their existing stack, some organizations might not need to change much to implement RevOps however, a complete overhaul is required for others.

Many organizations have different tools set up across multiple teams. Though this is fine for normal operations, it is troublesome when integration is required. Using different tools means data from various touchpoints is stored in multiple formats and is challenging to bring together.

A revenue operations team standardizes the toolset used across different departments. A single tech stack ensures everyone uses the same workflow and synchronizes all touchpoints. A RevOps team establishes the following tools.

  1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
    As RevOps is about unifying company operations, CRMs create a central repository for all your customer data. Data collected from different touchpoints is stored in a single place so that marketing, sales, and other departments use the exact data for all their campaigns and operations.

  2. Project Management Tools
    Teams must be aware of each other’s tasks, goals, and deadlines. This increases collaboration by keeping everyone on the same page.
    Some popular project management tools which RevOps utilize are ProofHub, Scoro, and WorkZone.

  3. Revenue Intelligence Software
    Revenue intelligence software uses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for data collection automation. It streamlines data gathering, synchronization, and management across all customer-facing teams.
    Revenue intelligence helps with automated data gathering and provides AI-generated trends and data insights. Companies can use these trends to forecast future inbound-data trends, customer responses, and revenue growth.

  4. Dashboarding Tools
    Dashboarding tools such as Power BI and Tableau provide a simple interface to draw real-time visualizations from provided data. Observing trends from different data sources on a single dashboard makes it easier for teams to create business strategies. Viewing data from various sources gives members a broader perspective and helps align their tasks to ensure revenue growth.

RevOps tactics have proven to add value to organizations by creating an integrated revenue engine that drives all revenue-generating teams.

Why Is RevOps Important in Ecommerce?

In the 21st century, adaptability is an essential skill. It helps you survive the changing times and makes you improve yourself. Today, the way customers interact with companies has changed. Prospects expect a positive experience throughout the sales cycle, from onboarding to deal closing. The burden of expectations challenges providers as they require all sorts of data to make all the right moves.

RevOps helps deal with these challenges.

A Hivemind System for All

Revenue operations create an end-to-end connected system for all customer-facing employees, development teams, and systems. This singular system provides all the required information for improved efficiency in tasks such as sales operations.

Better Understanding for Employees

A single system means all employees have a better understanding of the working of the entire organization. This benefits customer success teams as they can better answer prospect questions.

Improves Sales and Marketing Operations

Sales and marketing teams share common goals. A unified system helps either team implement strategies incorporating important information gathered by the other team. Collaboration between departments becomes seamless, and they can quickly devise tactics to maximize customer churn rate.

According to a HubSpot blog, providers implementing RevOps have seen a 71% rise in stock performance.

Simplified Team Evaluation

All teams targeted by RevOps are revenue-generating. With all teams working towards revenue growth, team evaluation becomes easier. Companies can use similar metrics to evaluate all departments under the RevOps connected system. These metrics include revenue generation, customer acquisition, customer retention, etc.

Let’s talk more about these metrics below.

Key Metrics and KPIs for Revenue Operations

RevOps aim to drive revenue growth. All teams must maintain key performance indicators (KPIs) that point toward revenue generation. Some key metrics for RevOps are:

  • Cost of Customer Acquisition: The amount spent on onboarding a new customer. This helps understand customers’ return on investment (ROI).

  • Customer Lifetime Value: This measures the value a customer has provided to the company throughout their relationship. In simpler words, this is the actual ROI over the customer lifecycle.

  • Annual Recurring Revenue: The total revenue a company expects to receive annually from all of its customers.

  • Customer Churn Rate: This measures the retention of old clients over time.

Related Reading: 7 Ecommerce metrics Every Business Should Track

Is RevOps Different Than SalesOps?

It is common to confuse the functionality of the RevOps and SalesOps departments. Both aim to increase customer acquisition and ultimately add to the company’s revenue growth. Before discussing their differences, we must examine how SalesOps works and the role of the marketing teams in improving product sales.

Marketing Team

A marketing department’s goal is to develop marketing material that would spark a potential client's interest. Marketing creates promotional material used in advertisements and by the sales team. This promotional material creates a positive intent in the client’s mind about the product before the sales rep approaches them.

Sales Team and SalesOps

A sales team is in direct contact with the client. Their goal is to convince the client to buy your product. A sales team needs to properly research their client and perform a market analysis before approaching a prospect. They need to ensure that they offer the client the best possible solution for them and to make the onboarding procedure as simple as possible. A SalesOps team designs the strategies used in a sales process. SalesOps provides research guidelines and supports the actual sales team (sales rep and sales enablement).

RevOps

While SalesOps is only concerned with the performance of the sales department, RevOps overlooks multiple teams. RevOps works to streamline operations within all revenue-generating teams and to bring them all under a single system.

RevOps remove silos between the workforce of sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Its goal is to promote revenue growth by designing similar strategies for all teams to increase operational efficiency. Besides these customer-facing teams, RevOps can also include other vital departments such as engineering and development.

Streamline Your Revenue Stream

A major problem for larger enterprises is the complexity of their internal operations due to unorganized workflows. Multiple teams utilizing different tools to carry out their internal tasks create a clutter of data within the organization.

RevOps connects these teams together, streamlining their processes and promoting collaboration. It creates an organized structure within the enterprise such that teams can share data and come up with efficient work strategies. The RevOps infrastructure allows teams to focus on important things like revenue generation, customer acquisition, and customer churn. RevOps is becoming increasingly important as companies move to improve customer experience and increase customer lifecycle. Get in touch with our team of experts today!