A revenue operations or RevOps team has one overarching goal; to increase revenue by breaking down barriers between sales, marketing, and customer success teams. An effective revenue operations team will create and organize smaller, connected goals to help each department work together and lose less revenue between the cracks of each team. They will do this by focusing on operations, enablement, insights, and tools.
Revenue operations teams are becoming more common in the B2B and SaaS worlds, but are still new enough that sometimes it is unclear how teams should be set up. There are necessary elements of a revenue operations team structure that you will need to use for success, and others that will depend on your company size or goals.
In the end, an effective RevOps team is vital in today's business landscape if you want to encourage revenue growth.
What is a RevOps Team?
A RevOps team is a business team that oversees all areas of the sales and customer retention processes to help pinpoint areas that can be improved in order to maximize profits. There are three key areas that are typically looked at and analyzed: sales, marketing, and customer success.
Once a RevOps team has found areas for improvement they will create clear goals and strategies for each department that will lead to revenue growth. These goals are often set to work in tandem with each other and overlap. The revenue operations team is important because it helps keep each department accountable for these overlapping goals. They provide the bridges that break down department silos that sometimes discourage efficiency and collaboration.
A successful revenue operations team will focus on implementation as much as goal creation. Executive teams who have seen RevOps strategies often do not attribute these failures to a lack of proper implementation and meaningful oversight.
From start to finish a revenue operations team is a group of people who have one goal: revenue growth. They are in charge of breaking that goal down into smaller action items that can be carried out by specific departments and people. Their next task is following up and keeping everyone motivated. Another responsibility is to modify goals as they become obsolete or ineffective.
What are the Goals of a RevOps Team?
Increased predictable revenue is the largest overarching goal for a revenue operations team, but it isn't the only goal they work toward. Each of their subgoals will ultimately lead to increased revenue, but they also can stand alone.
One of the most important roles of the revenue operations department is to make life easier for other departments they are working with. For something to work, you need commitment from the employees who will be implementing new strategies. The operations team must help departments embrace fresh ideas by making new practices clear to understand and easy to carry out.
A strong revenue operations team will facilitate communication between departments that usually don't interact. They will also break down department barriers so information is more free-flowing, which often has a positive impact on revenue growth. This helps make life easier for departments and aids in another goal: maximizing resources.
Maximizing both human and physical resources increases revenue by lowering overhead costs. Revenue operations teams look for ways to increase the money flowing in but also look for ways to decrease overall expenses and waste.
RevOps teams have a tightly focused goal, but they have many ways to achieve revenue growth. This makes their duties variable and dependent on industry and business goals and structure. Teams are able to tailor their goals based on data and continual conversations with customer success operations and sales and marketing teams.
Who Makes up a Successful RevOps Team?
There isn’t a one size fits all approach to the creation of a revenue operations team. How a team is structured and how many people are on that team depends largely on the size of a company, how many departments that company has, and what the overall needs of the company or industry are.
In general, there are a few positions that a successful revenue operations organization should have and many more that are optional.
Leader
As is true of any team, the leader will set the tone and impact the success of a RevOps team. The duties can vary slightly from one team to the next, but a chief revenue officer or director will need to lead the team and be responsible for reporting to a higher company officer.
The chief revenue officer will help shape the direction of revenue goals, lead revenue operations team members, and keep C-suite employees or their advisors abreast of important developments. Revenue officers who do not have a strong working relationship with company officers often have a harder time getting buy-in from departments as well as strong implementation. It is vital that the chief revenue officer is able to work closely with a vice president, the chief financial officer, or someone of equal weight.
Operations, Enablement, Insights, and Tools
On top of looking over the key areas of marketing, sales, and customer success, a RevOps team's productivity is split between four general areas: operations, enablement, insights, and tools. In larger companies, it is common to have a director over each of these four areas, but that might not be feasible in smaller organizations.
Operations
The operations team manages resources and people to ensure goals are met. RevOps team members over operations also work on collaboration and communication between departments.
Enablement
Enablement team members work with sales and marketing to implement specific policies and make sure the strategies needed to meet a goal are implemented. These team members will also enable departments to meet goals through detailed onboarding, ongoing training, and performance reviews. They oversee the sales process and keep the sales team accountable for meeting goals.
Insights
Those who focus on insights work chiefly with data. They are typically data analysts who analyze department information as well as overarching data to get a clear overall picture. They will also include customer data in their analysis. If they don't have access to a CRM platform that manages data they will be in charge of building a database to organize information.
Tools
The tools team is a little different than the other three areas of the RevOps team. They deal largely with technology and less with people and numbers. These individuals might have more of an IT background and will be less involved with sales and marketing decisions. Tools team members are in charge of understanding how to use company technology, researching and knowing what new programs are worth investing in and implementing, and creating a tech stack. They will also evaluate how technology is helping or hurting goals, and propose necessary technological changes.
Even though teams aren't working directly with customers or employees, they need to be keenly aware of all revenue goals to best know how technology can help.
Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success Representatives
At some point, the revenue operations team structure needs to combine the four goal areas of operations, enablement, insights, and tools with the three major departments where change will occur. The sales, marketing, and customer success departments will merge where necessary with these areas of oversight.
In larger companies, it is wise to have a sales, marketing, and customer success representative on the RevOps team full-time. New positions should be created specifically for revenue operations to ensure the job is done well and the employee isn't trying to perform the duties of their old position and their new position at the same time. An overworked RevOps employee will not be as useful as one who can dedicate their energy to revenue growth.
Smaller companies might find it difficult to have a representative from each department solely over revenue operations. In situations where this is the case is it possible to have an employee split time between their department and the revenue team, as long as their duties change to reflect the added time they will now have to dedicate to revenue operations goals.
Even in smaller companies, a successful RevOps structure will rely on employees who are able to dedicate the necessary time to RevOps goals and performance. If they have more duties than they can handle the RevOps team will likely suffer and there will be less new revenue success.
Support Staff
Larger companies will need revenue operations support staff to help the team and RevOps leaders improve efficiency. Similar to the overall revenue operations org chart, there is not an official list of required support staff positions.
Many revenue teams find that their needs are dependent on company culture, size, and workload. Support staff should provide value and help drive revenue growth by easing the burden of the overall revenue team. Administrative staff, technology representatives, and additional department representatives are all useful in larger revenue operations organizations.
Your revenue operations org chart can take a lot of forms. In the end, each company will need to do what works best for them. As long as operations, enablement, insights, and tools are being used as a framework to increase sales, marketing, and customer success operations, then revenue performance is likely to increase. Having one central leader is also crucial for revenue performance to increase.
Benefits of a RevOps Team
It goes without saying that the largest benefit of a successful revenue team is increased income and revenue predictability. Boston Consulting Group found there is a 100-200% ROI on digital marketing endeavors implemented by revenue teams. In addition, 69% of companies that have a RevOps organization have seen positive revenue trends.
The benefits transcend generating revenue. Time and resources are also saved when focused revenue-increasing goals are pursued. Companies that use a revenue operations strategy have seen up to a 20% increase in sales productivity, resulting in saved time and less person-to-person sales effort.
All areas see an increase in productivity, not just sales operations, and that is largely to do with goals that cut down on redundancy. This not only saves time but builds morale and makes employees feel more needed and valued. Revenue teams naturally create goals that drive predictable revenue; the byproducts of those goals are new policies that make jobs easier, reduced burnout, and higher employee satisfaction.
Much of employee satisfaction can also be traced to better-defined job roles due to RevOps goals and practices. Separate departments are all on the same page under a RevOps team, but they are allowed to focus on their specific jobs without worrying about other team members because the revenue team is taking care of cross-department communication and compliance.
Revenue operations make sure that each department is contributing to the same company culture and brand. They do this by setting the tone and unifying all messaging to the customer, marketing, and sales teams. In this way, they are able to generate revenue, maintain operational efficiency, and increase morale throughout the entire company.
Equally as important as employee satisfaction and retention is the customer experience. Customer success efforts should be born from feedback and data analyzed by RevOps teams. Companies with strong RevOps employees have seen an increase in customer success and a better overall customer experience.
Lastly, your RevOps organization members can fill in on or spearhead special projects as company needs arise. While revenue forecasting and growth should be their main focus, team members can help in project manager or team member roles. Some team members can even be hired with the expectation that they will spend part of their time on special projects as well as developing RevOps strategy. Often special projects will inform or carry out RevOps goals so these duties work well together.
Use Marketing Data to Help Your RevOps Team Stay Informed
A revenue operations team needs data and information to perform their duties. A CRM system with marketing and sales insights makes a RevOps team's job easier. Easy data management saves time and allows revenue operations leaders to focus more of their efforts on increasing revenue. Each department also benefits individually from a strong CRM platform, making it vital for any business looking to have smoother marketing operations, more customer success, and increased sales.
Web Canopy Studio provides marketing insights that your revenue operations team can use to inform their strategies and goals. Submit a proposal to learn more about their services and how they will enhance your revenue operations team's work (or help a new team get off the ground.)
