RevOps 101: Transform the Way You Grow

Software as a Service (SaaS) is all about listening to customers. We are no longer in an era where patents protect revenue or customers lack the resources to find better solutions. Cutting-edge SaaS solutions are replicated too easily to rely purely on innovation and new features.

Today, you have to hear, listen, and serve your customers better than anyone else or you’ll lose. It’s that simple. Providing the best customer experience is the ultimate competitive advantage available for B2B SaaS companies.

This isn’t new. No matter where you go, companies and leaders routinely talk about putting customers first. However, most companies fail to make the proper changes to position their customers at the center of their business.

B2B SaaS companies that are serious about serving their customers are shifting their operations and go-to-market (GTM) strategies to a framework called Revenue Operations (RevOps).

In case you’re not familiar with RevOps yet, at a high level, it’s the practice of aligning operations, data, processes, and GTM teams - marketing, sales, and customer experience or success (CX/CS) - at every stage of the customer experience.

Think of your business as an orchestra. The marketing team is the strings, the sales team is the percussion, the CX team is the brasswinds, and RevOps is the conductor. All of these sections need to be playing the same song at the same time.

Your business units are no different. They need to speak the same language to your customers, coordinate their goals and reach them together, and they need to proactively solve gaps throughout the customer journey.

If you’re looking for a deep dive into what RevOps can do for your business and how you can implement it, you’re in the right place.

Scaling a SaaS Business is Tricky

Let’s start with focusing on the problem RevOps is designed to solve - efficiently scaling rapid-growth companies.

Scaling a business is extremely exciting and rewarding, but without aligned teams, efficient operations and processes, and centralized tech stacks and data, it’s an uphill battle.

Rapid-growth companies face difficulty meeting customer expectations as they scale. 

Typically, companies grow revenue by hiring across marketing and sales teams. After all, more sales reps means more closed deals.

Unfortunately, the surge of new customers tends to overwhelm. CX struggles to onboard and support new and existing customers, which leads to hiring more CX reps and managers. 

The vicious cycle of expanding headcount to scale the business is extremely expensive, complicates processes and operations, and creates an abundance of new headaches.

The inability to keep pace with the growth doesn’t go unnoticed by users. They suffer through the gaps and poor customer experience and struggle to adapt and optimize the solution. The result is lost revenue.

And - let’s be honest - the employees who are doing the grunt work are likely unhappier than the customers facing a disappointing experience. The company's most valuable asset - its people - is working long hours, inundated with manual tasks, and incapable of meeting customer and leadership expectations.

Customers are frustrated, employees are burnt out, the competition is just a Google search away or already engaging with your customers, and - thanks to technology - it’s becoming easier and easier to change solutions.

Fortunately, technology is improving every day and enabling GTM teams to focus more on the customers they’re serving. However, these SaaS solutions require strong adoption and optimized data - meaning accurate data that can be centralized and leveraged for robust reporting and customer journey insights.

This is where RevOps thrives. Its mission is to maximize revenue by optimizing the company’s tech stack to generate accurate, data-driven insights into the customer experience. The goal is to grow your revenue to outpace the hiring of sales reps and maximize the value of investments.

When properly implemented, RevOps ensures data-driven decision making, complete visibility, and accountability across all teams, a single data source of truth shared by all teams, a consistent and predictable sales pipeline, and a better customer experience leading to higher win rates and faster sales cycles.

The Increasing Popularity and Necessity of RevOps

Though RevOps is relatively new, the challenges it solves are nothing new. Some of the core strategies it implements are seen across marketing automation, sales enablement, and CX teams. You may even hear a VP of Sales discuss implementing similar solutions across his or her teams. 

The difference with RevOps is an adaptation of these strategies to unify the entire customer experience across the entire organization.

Since technology has changed the way customers purchase products, companies have adapted the way they attract, sell, and support. These changes have led SaaS companies to a shift away from a traditional funnel and towards a more customer-focused flywheel approach.

An optimal flywheel is engineered to create momentum across the customer experience. It’s designed to take prospects and convert them into champions of your business who consistently renew and evangelize your product to their network. 

SaaS companies built on traditional operations and silos find they stall the flywheel’s momentum when they scale. The poor customer experience - disjointed handoffs across GTM teams, untimely sales engagement, inability to measure hot leads, slow proposal process, lack of personalization, fragmented customer messaging - results in dropped sales, lost subscription renewals, and expensive customer acquisition costs.

RevOps enables businesses to optimize their flywheel and quickly adapt to meet their customer expectations with efficiency.

The RevOps shift is accelerating across B2B SaaS companies because it provides an insightful, aligned and adaptable operations platform to drive their GTM strategies. 

How to Implement a RevOps Solution

RevOps is a framework to generate efficient, data-driven revenue growth by aligning GTM teams (marketing, sales, and CX) to focus on the customers’ lifecycle.

One of the greatest benefits of RevOps is it helps business leaders measure, identify, and prioritize gaps in the customer experience.

RevOps - when done correctly - is designed to achieve this through a unified tech stack with centralized data that creates a powerful, end-to-end understanding of the customers’ journey across your GTM teams.

Not only does it make for happier customers, but it also makes for happier employees.

Revenue Operations allows your GTM teams to focus on their passions and what they do best - marketing to attract customers, sales to build the right relationships at the right time to close deals, and CX to support users and create lifelong champions - instead of operating and optimizing SaaS tools, aggregating and centralizing data, building efficient tech stacks, and aligning operations and processes across other teams.

As we explore how to execute RevOps in the six sections below, it’s important to note that RevOps is positioned as a separate unit that compliments marketing, sales, and CX teams and typically reports directly to the company leadership that oversees the GTM teams.

RevOps is best delivered through a defined framework. Let’s go.

1. Align GTM Teams

The first objective of a successful RevOps team is to partner and gain alignment across each of the GTM teams and its leadership to understand the core components of RevOps:

• Strategic goals, insights, and planning
• KPIs and reporting
• Tech stack and platform
• Data
• Processes and responsibilities of GTM teams
• Enablement, onboarding, and training

Another objective is to ensure the teams are using the same terminology and delivering consistent messaging to customers throughout their journey and touchpoints with teams.

We recommend aligning GTM teams once per quarter to discuss the six components mentioned above and share this information across teams to ensure visibility and transparency. It’s common that teams are often working in silos to solve the same problem and never align to create a proper end-to-end solution.

It’s also extremely beneficial to use these quarterly opportunities to build camaraderie and connections across the teams.

2. Customer Journey Mapping and Ideal Customer Profile

Once the RevOps team is able to partner and align with each team, it needs to build a full end-to-end mapping of the customer journey. The mapping should be regularly updated based upon the quarterly alignments the RevOps team conducts with the GTM teams.

The mapping should tell a complete story. It should provide detailed insight into how much of the customer journey occurs before speaking with a sales representative, what is the customer acquisition process, how efficient is the acquisition process, how much customer’s time is spent engaging with each team, how teams interact at each stage of the customer journey, how handoffs between GTM teams work, where are drop-offs in the sales and renewal process, and so much more.

Furthermore, this insight will provide valuable information in generating accurate ideal customer profiles (ICPs). The marketing, sales, and CX teams should be an integral partner in generating ICPs or personas, but it’s also important to include the RevOps team. RevOps’ data-supported, end-to-end knowledge of the full customer journey will take your ICPs to the next level, and your GTM teams will be elated for the deeper context.

3. Data and Process

The fuel that powers the RevOps engine is the data it ingests. It’s important to remember that RevOps is aiming to improve the complete customer journey - from the first time a prospect identifies a problem your product solves to the prospect becoming a loyal, champion customer. In order to accomplish this feat, the tech stack and data used by the GTM teams need to be aligned.

It’s time for the RevOps team to partner with GTM teams to identify what data points each team needs at each stage of the customer journey.

Present the customer journey mapping and use it as a guide through the conversation. It will provide GTM teams with helpful context as they think through what visibility is important or lacking throughout the customer journey and their process.

Don’t be surprised if the GTM teams don’t have all the answers. RevOps teams should be prepared to educate the GTM teams on metrics and KPIs that are available based upon their current tech stack and data, as well as metrics that may be beneficial in the future.

Timing is also an important piece of the puzzle. RevOps teams need to identify when GTM teams and leaders need the data - weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. - and should provide them with the appropriate metrics and reports based upon that timing.

Once the RevOps team understands the data needs and timing of the GTM teams, it needs to identify KPIs for the RevOps team, too. These metrics should be heavily catered toward revenue-based metrics.

Here’s a list of some important KPIs for RevOps teams to consider:

• Cost of Customer Acquisition
• Customer Churn
• Upsells and Cross-Sells
• Lifetime Value
• Revenue Per Employee
• Account Relationship Score
• Pipeline Forecast Accuracy
• Pipeline Velocity
• Sales Cycle
• Monthly Recurring Revenue / Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR/ARR)

Once these KPIs are understood, the fun and power of RevOps really begins. The RevOps team will then aggregate the data and insights needed by each team and build the necessary metrics and reports.

4. Measure and Identify

The beauty of data is its impartiality. When properly aggregated and optimized, it doesn’t carry an ego, it doesn’t have ingrained biases, and it doesn’t push an ulterior motive. It reveals the raw truth.

Once GTM teams and leadership are obtaining the necessary data reports, they’re able to start measuring their performance at a macro-and micro-level across the entire customer journey and within each stage and team.

The first priority at this step is to focus on building a data-supported baseline of how the company is performing. If you wish to take it a step further and speed up the timeline, solutions are available that can be integrated into your tech stack to generate a baseline from historical data.

The power of RevOps, as noted before, is within the data. When it's configured properly, it enables leadership to identify bottlenecks, diagnose potential or early-stage problems, understand the impact on the business, and, therefore, prioritize where teams should focus.

Take the necessary time at this step to generate an accurate baseline of the company’s performance. Once you feel confident in that data, begin to make incremental improvements. There are likely easy wins and quick changes available that can make a significant difference to the customer experience and the business's bottom line.

5. Start Optimizing Tech Stack

RevOps carries a common misconception that companies need to transition their entire tech stack in order to implement and execute it. That’s simply untrue and it goes against one of the pillars of RevOps - strategic insights and planning.

Companies with siloed data and disconnected tech stacks shouldn’t be overwhelmed or dissuaded from incorporating RevOps into their operations. Yes, RevOps - at its peak - is built upon a cohesive platform and centralized data, but RevOps takes time and doesn’t need a perfect tech ecosystem to provide invaluable contributions.

Transitioning tech stacks is expensive no matter your budget, and it carries major risks. Be patient with the process. There’s no need to solve this overnight. 

As shown in Step 4: Measure and Identify, let the data (or sometimes lack thereof) guide your decisions here. 

Nevertheless, it is likely your tech stack can be improved. One of the core responsibilities of your RevOps team is to evaluate your current technology and potential new tools. 

This would also be a good opportunity to evaluate if there’s any overlap between software or any tools you’re no longer using. 

Keep in mind, the tech stack is all about serving the customer. You’re looking to make sure the path of your customer journey is smooth—with no barriers, roadblocks, or potholes.

The RevOps team should provide a thorough analysis of how new solutions will complement or hinder your tech stack and customer experience.

Again, be patient. Often, it takes companies years to make a full transition.

With all of that being said, there are some extremely important solutions available that are worthy of more immediate consideration. Sales and RevOps technology are booming, which is a major reason why RevOps is booming in general. 

These solutions ensure clean and accurate data, appropriate lead routing, faster and more powerful sales insights, and a force multiplier to close more deals and drive revenue.

For example, some of these tools use metrics to create engagement scores that identify the hottest leads for sales teams and inform account executives which leads need more engagement (or relationships building) before they will consider buying. These metrics are also beneficial for understanding the health of current customers, their likelihood to renew, and which accounts need more engagement from your CX team.

The RevOps team should be skilled at evaluating, strategizing, implementing, administering, and optimizing these technologies to efficiently and accurately enable your GTM teams, especially sales and CX, to deliver the most timely and personalized sales process and customer experience.

6. Feedback Loops and Knowledge Share

SaaS companies that build feedback loops and knowledge share opportunities for their GTM teams are best positioned to thrive in their market. These customer-facing teams and individuals intimately know the customers. They understand customer problems, frictions, and successes better than anyone else. Their stories are important to solve the bad news and share the good news.

Give them a microphone. Encourage them to speak about their experiences. Prompt them to share their feedback. Not only will this enable the company to proactively solve issues, especially when their feedback aligns with the data, it will also ensure leadership is consistently aware of the latest customer experience and perspective.

This isn’t revolutionary or profound, but employees want to be heard. They want to share their experiences and drive positive change for the company. Building these feedback opportunities empowers your teams to iterate quickly and grow together.

RevOps Team Structure

Since RevOps is a team itself, it’s important to know how it’s structured. Like any other department, RevOps has a hierarchy and leadership. Here are some potential positions within a RevOps team.

RevOps Lead

Every team needs effective leadership, and RevOps is no exception. The lead is responsible for maintaining and optimizing the RevOps system, which includes its technology, data, and processes, as well as aligning GTM teams and operations to solve company and team goals.

Platform Team

Since RevOps manages and maintains the company’s tech stack, there’s a lot of day-to-day work to administer. For larger teams, it's important for admins to delegate certain tasks to others. It’s particularly helpful if you can specialize members of - or groups within - your platform team to focus on specific functions or teams. You might want to consider the following teams or roles within your platform team:

• Tools Team

  As mentioned before, your RevOps team is responsible for your company's tech stack. A tools team is specifically meant to handle this aspect of Revenue Operations. Every tool your marketing, sales, and CX teams use or needs should go through this team. They evaluate and procure new tools, integrate the software into the tech stack, and administrate and optimize the systems involved.

• Enablement Team

  This team focuses on bringing the sales team whatever they need to close deals. This often includes content, knowledge, information, and technology.

• Operations Management Team

  This team focuses on customer-facing and revenue-related operations - making sure they line up with what your business needs. As your business grows, this team may branch into a marketing operations team and a sales operations team, becoming more specialized in those avenues.

Analytics Team

As you might’ve guessed, this team is responsible for the data. They focus on aggregating and analyzing data to inform marketing, sales, and CX. Since data is often stored across various platforms and applications, it's important to have an expert analytics team to report the data to necessary stakeholders, so that they can measure, identify, prioritize and improve business decisions. 

Depending upon the size of your business, you might consider breaking your analytics team into even more specialized teams to streamline the process.

Project Management

RevOps is designed to collaborate with other departments, and it needs someone to filter and prioritize requests from other teams, ensure the RevOps team is staying on track, and deliver as promised.

Getting Started with RevOps

For many rapidly scaling B2B SaaS companies, RevOps is the way of the future. In order to do it right, it takes commitment, resources, and time. Fortunately, there are numerous ways to incorporate RevOps into your business.

For those looking to hire an internal team, look on LinkedIn to find your RevOps leader. RevOps titles are the fastest growing on the platform. It’s also important to note that those with experience in marketing automation, operations, and technology or sales enablement, operations, and technology are great fits.

As you look to fill out your RevOps team, individuals with experience as business analysts working through requirements and processes as well as business systems analysts who oversaw technical and product management initiatives are strong prospects.

Beyond that, we recommend hiring a diverse set of people who have experience growing and scaling startups.

In case you’re interested in auditing, strategizing, or implementing a RevOps plan, but you don’t want to hire a full internal team, work with a company like Bloom Agency or other RevOps-specializing companies that can help. There are numerous ways companies like us can partner with your business to evaluate or help build your RevOps future.