RevOps Co-op Weekly #16 - Your RevOps team is the business version of baseball's utility player
The utility player in baseball can do it all - play infield / outfield and even maintain respectable hitting stats. Breadth and versatility are key - sounds a lot like RevOps, egh?
RevOps Co-op provides resources, content and community for those who ❤️ revenue operations. This weekly newsletter features collected tweets, posts and thoughts on a variety of RevOps topics. We also have a private Slack community with > 1,000 RevOps pro’s from companies like Slack, Lyft, Clari, Miro and more - click here to join.
⚾️ Your RevOps Team is the Business Version of Baseball’s Utility Player
Throughout baseball’s history, the fans have gone crazy over sluggers and the occasional phenom pitcher. The coaches, scouts, and upper management, on the other hand, drool over the utility player.
The true utility player can do it all. They can play infield, switching between shortstop and bases. They can cover the outfield. They even maintain respectable hitting stats.
Talented revenue operations professionals are the corporate equivalents to the utility player. They need to understand the corporate strategy and how objectives support that strategy.
What Makes Revenue Operations Rockstars Rare?
Revenue operations spans analytics, technology stack management, enablement, and process management functions.
Particularly at early-stage companies, the first revenue operations hire is expected to manage major marketing, sales, and customer success systems; execute the rhythm of the business reporting and elevate business-critical insights; and support onboarding and training functions. Usually, this also means fixing a great deal of technical debt created by an evolving go-to-market strategy or hiring an under-qualified system administrator to implement a major supporting system.
It’s hard to find process management personnel who are creative problem-solvers who think outside of the box and understand the importance of creating corporate policies to avoid potential legal trouble.
It’s challenging to find analysts who understand data relationships, advanced reporting logic, and are well versed in query languages and visualization tools--who can also uncover what people really need to see in their reports (as opposed to what they ask for) and understand which events resulted in an odd-looking stat.
It’s dang near impossible to find developers who prioritize end-user experience and can anticipate future changes rather than focusing solely on what’s easiest and least taxing on the system.
This matchup of creative vision and tactical know-how makes excellent revenue operations professionals difficult to find. They’re often referred to as a “purple squirrel” or “unicorn” in the recruiting community.
What Makes Revenue Operations Rockstars Valuable?
There are two kinds of companies. Organizations that understand why they need an operations department and organizations that don't realize thier buying process is a hot mess.
Revenue operations oversees procedural details and provides technical support for market-facing departments (sales, marketing, and customer success). Revenue operations:
Make departments more efficient, saving staff-hours
Identify problem areas with the product and/or go-to-market motion through analytics, removing the friction that prevents your teams from creating more pipeline faster.
Help the business scale without waste by determining which markets can support a sales representative, which marketing tactics are the most productive, and identifying signs a customer is going to churn while there's still time to save them
Some examples I’ve seen play out in organizations I’ve worked with include:
An expert shaved hours off of a customer success department’s day. They identified a pattern in customer support cases then coordinated with product management to fix the issue. While the engineers were at work, the revenue operations expert documented the fix and socialized it with the broader team. This saved each technical support representative 3-6 hours per month replicating errors and digging through documentation.
A revenue operations expert overheard a sales development representative (SDR) complaining about how long it took them to find high-quality leads. This RevOps pro did side-by-side time trials with the SDR team and discovered that the number of lead object validation rules added ten minutes to every stage update. They also couldn't sort leads in a meaningful way. To solve the problem, RevOps streamlined the lead process and prioritized high-converting leads sources like form fills. These improvements led to $1 million in additional pipeline compared to prior quarters.
A revenue operations expert followed a cross-department workflow through each department with side-by-side recorded meetings and found that the list of twenty fields required to close an opportunity were populated again on a different object by an operations professional. Why? Some salespeople didn’t see the value in providing the information, so operations didn’t trust the data and required customers to answer the questions a second time. This improved their onboarding survey ratings by two stars (on a scale of ten).
How Do I Celebrate My Revenue Operations Rockstar?
While you could show your appreciation through gifts (which we are very supportive of--you can find a list here) or awards, the most important way you can show support is by being mindful of the workload your revenue operations team tackles.
Many organizations view operations as a cost center or financial drain instead of seeing the revenue gained by more efficient go-to-market execution and money saved with increased productivity. Because of this short-sighted view, many revenue operations professionals don’t have the teams necessary to proactively identify issues. A lack of agency and feeling as though you’re never accomplishing something meaningful for the company leads to burn out.
If your revenue operations team is voicing frustration because they’re buried in technical debt and spend all of their time reacting, do yourself a favor and listen. Get them additional headcount. Your customers will thank you!
Read the full post at the RevOps Co-op Blog 👉🏻 Your RevOps Team is the Business Version of Baseball’s Utility Player
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Sales Leaders Share Top Advice for Success in 2021, from the Salesforce Blog
“You can’t step into the same river twice.” In the traditional meaning, it’s because the river is constantly in motion, changing as the water flows. But what if it’s actually us that has changed?
2021 will share many of the same challenges of 2020. The difference is that this time, we’ll be ready, with a better idea of how to approach what’s coming. Some top advice includes:
Question everything you know about your customer
Embrace video voicemail
Customer success = your success
Bring the back office into the deal earlier
Invest in RevOps
Practice empathy for your employees
Hire based on talent, not location
Data is your best friend
Don’t abandon your coaching responsibilities
Provide value, not price
Minimize change
5 ways the future of work can make our lives better, from the World Economic Forum
This year has taught us all valuable lessons that will shape the future of work in profound ways – from finding new ways to connect virtually, to leading with empathy. The employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks: It’s about creating and maintaining a meaningful culture for employees, no matter where they sit.
The work-from-anywhere model may be here to stay, but that does not mean the office is over. In fact, for many Salesforce employees, absence has only made our hearts grow fonder. In a recent employee survey, we found that 72% of our employees want to return to the workplace, hungry for the connection, collaboration and innovation that come from gathering in an office.
As we look to 2021, employers have a powerful opportunity to combine the best of remote work and in-office experiences in a way that works better for everyone. Here are the five ways we can reimagine the future of work:
Engage employees like customers
Flexibility is key
Embrace empathetic leadership
Unlock inclusive talent
Reimagine the workplace
B2B Orgs Turn To Third-Party Data, Strong Leadership To Fuel RevOps Engines, from the DemandGen Report
RevOps has positioned B2B organizations to create defined processes that unite both leaders and ground-level teams to streamline revenue strategies and put the customer front and center.
“When I think about revenue operations, it covers a lot of different things,” said Debbie Qaqish, Principal & Chief Strategy Officer of The Pedowitz Group, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “It covers a reorganization, legacy of silos going away, better line of sight to the customer, easier ways to create revenue and an easier way to take advantage of this new customer centricity that's come into play.”
While RevOps, the strategic convergence of sales, marketing and customer success to drive full-funnel accountability across the revenue engine, is not exactly a new buzzword or strategy, it is quickly gaining traction among B2B companies. In fact, research from RingDNA, shows that 33% of B2B companies adopted a RevOps function into their strategies in 2020, an increase from 24% in 2019.
B2B orgs are abandoning their legacy processes to focus on improving their datasets with third-party data and prioritizing organizational leadership and internal alignment for future revenue growth in 2021 and beyond. However, according to multiple experts, many B2B companies still struggle with RevOps, citing issues with strong leadership and a lack of defined processes and data.
Funl is an operating system for your GTM team that provides end-to-end, full funnel analytics and insights that keep marketing, sales and customer success teams aligned and working seamlessly together to drive more revenue growth for your business.