RevOps 101: How to Build an Optimal RevOps Tech Stack for B2B SaaS

B2B SaaS companies are embracing Revenue Operations (RevOps) business methodology to align their go-to-market (GTM) teams.

A LeanData survey revealed that about 57% of companies are implementing RevOps.

This shift isn’t a fad. It came from the need to improve GTM processes (marketing, sales, and customer experience) and grow scalable revenue.

When starting out, companies often struggle with RevOps, especially when it comes to optimizing their tech stack – a core pillar of RevOps.

Most companies use a handful of systems, with each department working on separate platforms. This fragments the data across the revenue teams, making it difficult to analyze customer experiences and deliver personalized experiences.

If you’re currently struggling with tech stack pains, keep reading. In this guide, we’ll discuss the tools to consider when building an optimal RevOps tech stack.

Before we begin, there are two points we need to make clear.

First, you do not need to invest in all of the tools mentioned here to build a successful RevOps engine.

This list is nothing more than a robust framework to provide ideas. Your business and its needs are unique. We recommend you have a RevOps lead or team that’s responsible for your tech stack.

Second, throughout this blog, we will recommend some of the best tools in the market. In full transparency, we are proudly certified partners with the following solutions:

We believe it’s our responsibility as a RevOps agency to partner with the best solutions in the industry and be certified to implement, onboard, administer and optimize these tools for our clients.

Let’s jump right in.

What Does a RevOps Tech Stack Look Like? [Where to Focus On]

Before anything else, it’s important to step back and get a bird’s-eye view of your GTM teams and their requirements.

Here’s what your tech stack should include:

Marketing – solutions that help marketing teams attract prospects, convert them into leads, and nurture them. Some examples include automation functionality, content management systems (CMS), lead generation tools, and behavior tracking software.
Sales – tools that enable sales to convert qualified leads into customers. This mainly includes sales pipeline management, sales and revenue intelligence, contact management, meeting scheduling software, and product-led growth tools.
Customer Experience – software that empowers your customer success teams to delight customers and retain them. For example, messaging tools, ticketing systems, relationship scoring, and usage tools.

Additionally, you’ll need the following solution-specific tools:

Data Routing, Matching, and Engaging – finally, for effective RevOps, you need solutions for routing, aggregating, and sharing data from all revenue teams.

Account Engagement – your GTM teams, especially sales and customer success, need help capitalizing on lucrative opportunities and delivering personalized experiences to prospects. Revenue intelligence or account engagement tools can help them close more and delight prospects.

Reporting/Analytics Software – certain platforms have built-in tools for dashboarding and reporting across the board. If needed, you may consider getting third-party tools for this purpose.

Middleware – a major component of any RevOps tech stack, middleware helps connect or “glue” all the software you currently have together. It enables teams to move data efficiently in between the different platforms they use.

In the end, the main goal of RevOps is to centralize all the tools and data, and get everyone aligned.

A powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform can provide most of the aforementioned solutions in one place.

However, factors like budget constraints, fractured processes, and buy-in may present hurdles.

The Best Tech Stacks for Effective Revenue Operations

A well-built RevOps tech stack plays a central role in GTM growth, impacting main KPIs like customer churn, account relationship score, revenue per employee, and beyond.

Now that we know which “areas” to focus on when building an optimal B2B SaaS RevOps tech stack, let’s take a look at the specific solutions you should consider:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A customer relationship management (CRM) software is a tool that gathers all the data of your leads and customers in one place for everyone to see, tracks interactions, and helps manage your company’s relationship with them.

As stated earlier, a CRM can help automate and centralize some key GTM processes, and is a must for any growing B2B SaaS company.

Here are a few of the key functionalities your CRM should perform:

Lead and Pipeline Management Tools – Marketing and sales teams at any growing company require an integrated solution that helps track lucrative conversion opportunities in the pipeline and create and manage better sales cycles.
Contact Management Platform – You need a tool to help you collect, store, and organize the contact data of your leads and customers in a central location. That way, your salespeople can easily access that information when cold calling, sending emails, or anything else.
Workflow Automation – Your teams need to be consistent in how they interact with each customer. That’s no small feat. Manual steps bog down all of us. Workflow automation functionality helps your teams stick to the process, automate tedious and repetitive tasks, and improve the customer’s experience.
KPIs and Reporting Dashboard - The whole point behind RevOps is to centralize your data for all teams to access and align on together. Your CRM is an excellent place for that. If your CRM doesn’t contain this functionality, you should consider switching or investing in a business intelligence (BI) tool like Power BI or Tableau. Storing data, dashboards, and metrics across a vast array of siloed tools is exactly the problem RevOps is aiming to solve. Don’t leave your data behind and don’t leave it fragmented to individuals, teams or departments. The goal is to unite teams and data around one single, centralized source of truth.

An end-to-end CRM, like HubSpot, offers tools that help revenue teams at all stages of the customer journey, including lead generation, nurturing, pipeline management, service, and a whole lot more. Hubspot’s platform is a RevOps game changer and is getting better every day. HubSpot’s CRM is also free, but you will need to pay to add its Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations Hubs or CMS.

Salesforce is also a great solution. The biggest difference between HubSpot and Salesforce is that HubSpot’s platform is more robust off the shelf, while Salesforce’s solution is more customizable.

Some more popular CRM systems include Zoho and Zendesk.

2. Marketing Execution and Automation

To be more efficient, your marketing team needs help automating and executing their day-to-day tasks.

The following tools can help with that:

Content Management System – helps create, edit, publish, and share content (blogs, guides, product pages, etc.) on the web.

Social Media Management – manages social accounts, publish content, engage with your audience, measure results, and do it one place.

Performance Marketing – helps with ad management, including creation, publishing, and tracking.

Email Marketing – automates your email marketing efforts.

Search Engine Optimization – discover ranking opportunities through keyword research, helps optimize content, audit websites, and more.

An all-in-one solution, such as HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, may help eliminate the need for separately implementing these solutions. It also has a host of other tools.

3. Marketing Lead Generation Software

This falls under marketing automation, but deserves its own spot on the list.

A decent lead generation software should allow you to:

Build lead generation pages and forms
Nurture leads
Score leads for better hand-offs
Collect data that powers personalization

The HubSpot marketing tool mentioned above offers all of those features, and more.

4. Sales Engagement and Revenue Intelligence

Sales tech is exploding - and for good reason. Identifying buyers at the right time is extremely challenging and providing them with a comfortable experience that converts to a new customer is invaluable.

There are solutions that are dramatically transforming businesses. The tricky part is figuring out which sales solution is best for your team. Some options are full stack while others are more niche.

Communicate with your sales team to understand their needs and process to figure out which solutions is best.

SalesLoft is a wonderfully robust option, RevOps.io is excellent for product-led growth companies, and Ebsta helps build relationships and predictable pipelines using revenue intelligence.

Let’s also give a shoutout to meeting scheduling tools in this section. They make sales engagement much easier on the customer. These tools - Calendly, ScheduleOnce, and HubSpot - automate and streamline the booking process, which drastically improves the customer experience for B2B SaaS prospects.

5. Data Routing, Matching, and Engaging

As you know by now, RevOps is all about the data. But data is complex and difficult to cleanse, organize, and optimize. GTM teams also need solutions that aggregate vital lead and customer data from sources and empower that data to make life easier for your teams and drive growth.

With solutions like LeanData, HubSpot’s Operations Hub, DataLadder, you can create a powerful, customized data machine that will send accurate leads to the best sales rep for that prospect and at the right time. These solutions are a must!

6. Customer Service Tools

Customer service software provides a platform for your customer success teams to receive, manage, and track customer support tickets.

It allows them to:

Automate workflow of the support team
Understand and share customer queries
Prioritize and resolve queries
Identify customer pain points

Some popular help desk tools include those by HubSpot, Zendesk, and Zoho.

7. Messaging Tools

Messaging tools include a customer messaging or inboxing software that allows your CX team to interact with customers.

It also includes a chatbot that allows you to cater to customer queries. The nice thing about chatbots is they can replace your forms and serve as a more organic data capture opportunity.

HubSpot’s CRM offers a shared inbox feature that connects all major channels of conversation (email, website, and social media platforms) and a chatbot that serves your website or Facebook Messenger.

8. Middleware

To reiterate, you need a solution to integrate/connect your tools together.

This is important because it aligns with the RevOps best practice of centralizing and streamlining your tech stack.

When it comes to middleware, Zapier is a popular choice.

Common Challenges When Creating a RevOps Tech Stack

When building a powerful RevOps tech stack, B2B SaaS companies face many hurdles along the way.

Here are some of the most common challenges, along with tips on how to overcome them:

Difficulty Transitioning from Legacy Tools

A lot of companies are deeply invested in legacy solutions they've used for quite some time.

Not only is it difficult to transition the data, but they may also be locked into agreements.

That being said, you don’t have to - nor should you - rip everything down, start over, and opt for a single solution to create an optimal RevOps tech stack.

In fact, we recommend optimizing the stack slowly and transitioning to RevOps over a couple years at minimum.

Internal Teams Become Complacent

Bringing internal changes can be difficult, especially if people have been using the same processes and tools for a while now.

Changing tech stack is no different.

If internal teams have been using the same solutions for a while, it may be difficult to get buy-in from them to embrace new software. On the other hand, maybe they’re the ones pleading for a change.

In either case, the solution is the same: start with understanding their current problems. Your RevOps team is the ones responsible for taking those problems and identifying the best solutions for you. Once improvements are identified, it’s time to educate your teams on how it will make their lives easier.

Lastly, your customer-facing teams shouldn’t be the ones implementing, figuring out how to onboard themselves, or optimize the solutions. Rely on your RevOps team. They ought to be responsible for all of that. They should also coach the teams on how to use the tools properly.

Understanding the Scope

Another common challenge is that it may be difficult to understand exactly what’s needed to set up and implement an effective RevOps tech stack in a B2B SaaS company.

You might face trouble figuring out your exact requirements and shortlisting tools that can:

Align revenue teams
Help them understand and engage with customers at every stage of the buyer journey

For this purpose, use your RevOps team to run a comprehensive tech stack audit to understand where you stand, what tools you already have, how they’re performing and helping teams.

Ending Note: Building an Optimal RevOps Tech Stack Takes Time

The key is to take it slow. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor should your RevOps engine.

Focus first on building your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Then focus on aligning your teams and mapping your customer journey. Once you’ve completed those objectives, identify the data points you need to track the performance of your teams and customer experience.

It’s important to establish a baseline. Once the baseline is in place, it’s time to identify gaps, iterate your process, and start figuring out the software changes you should make.

If you need help auditing your tech stack, feel free to ask us for help. We consult businesses on identifying the best-suited solutions based upon unique requirements and existing technology.