RevOps Co-op Weekly #3 - So what exactly is revenue operations?
To some, it's the glue that holds the entire GTM function together. To others, it's like trying to convince your dad to upgrade from a '65 Lincoln Continental to a brand new Tesla.
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.
🤔 So, what exactly is revenue operations?
Wondering what revenue operations is? You’re in good company. Even revenue leaders are divided on what revenue operations professionals do, which is why you’ll see job descriptions and department structures vary from company to company.
Put simply, the purpose of revenue operations is to look at the big picture and do the best thing for the company at large. They streamline internal processes, make established systems more usable, and keep customer-facing departments aligned so the hand-offs between teams are as seamless as possible.
What does RevOps do?
If you’ve worked with marketing, sales, or customer success personnel in any company, you’ll note a degree of tension between these departments. The conflict is natural. The personality profiles that do well in each role tend to be very different, they rarely share the same goals, and even if they do share goals, the way they go about achieving them contrasts with one another.
So is RevOps just a fancy name for sales ops or marketing ops?
Nope.
Revenue operations should span marketing, sales, and customer success to minimize the impact of traditional silos. The function should be responsible for insights, enablement, tools, and processes.
Gabe Rothman, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Rescale, says it best:
“Revenue Operations is essentially trying to convince your dad that a Tesla Model S is faster, smoother, more comfortable, more efficient, and easier to drive when all he wants is his tried and true ’65 Lincoln Continental.”
Insights
Revenue operations is responsible for developing goals for marketing, sales, and customer success, and those goals are meant to reflect the company’s true north: revenue production.
For example, historical marketing metrics included marketing qualified leads and marketing set meetings. Someone in revenue operations may include these metrics as early indicators, but the north star would be pipeline and revenue generation, which is closely aligned with sales quotas. Then customer success would be held to retention rates (renewal rates) and perhaps expansion rates.
Enablement
When people say “enablement,” they typically think of sales enablement that emphasizes product training and pitch decks. Revenue operations enablement spans across departments and has an added emphasis on data-driven training. Insights are used to determine who the most successful representatives of each department are in order to figure out what can be scaled to the entire workforce.
Let’s say our top sales producers are Jessica, Annie, and Marko. Jessica's close rate isn’t stellar, but she starts with a large number of second meetings. Her pitch is outstanding. Annie has developed an ROI calculator for her champion to share with their CFO, and Marko’s proposals have a level of professionalism that can’t be beaten.
Tools
Technology is great when it works, and it works best when someone is at the helm who understands how to “attract, acquire, and retain” a customer.
Because revenue operations spans these functions, they have the information necessary to avoid blind spots each of these siloed operations organizations displayed on their own.
Processes
Early on, I learned that my role in operations was to temper the data leadership demands with what is realistic for the people who would generate the data.
I’ve witnessed a problem in multiple technology startups. Data-driven executives want every data point possible to help guide them in decision making. The impulse is understandable. Early on in a product’s life, we need to understand its efficacy, the traits it’s missing, the profile of the person who wants to buy it, and which industries are buying.
Unfortunately, there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of information you require from a human and the accuracy of said information.
Once revenue operations discovers the happy medium between data requirements and usability, we do expect teams to comply with the new processes in order to keep things efficient. We’ll even create reports and push management to use carrots and sticks to maintain compliance. And if we’re in charge of compensation plans, you can bet we’ll try to sneak in a component that drives CRM usage.
Read the full blog post on this topic here.
🐦 This week in #RevOps Twitter
Couldn’t agree more 🙌🏻
Whether you’re building a company or building out your RevOps team, this is applicable
Level 1 of the RevOps journey = most DEFINITELY anarchy
📚 Your curated #RevOps reading list
Tech worker burnout is higher than before the pandemic, from Business Insider
Silicon Valley's workforce is reporting feeling more burned out than before the pandemic. A new survey from anonymous workplace chat app Blind found that 68% of tech workers feel more burned out than they did when they worked at an office.
That number is higher than it was in February, when Blind found that 61% of professionals reported feeling burned out. While working remotely has alleviated some daily stressors like commuting, which can be particularly arduous in Silicon Valley, it's added new stress like longer hours, less work-life balance, and video-chat-fatigue.
"All of the issues that we've heard about really paint this broader picture of a more vulnerable population and more stressed population in our workforce than we had going into this pandemic," Terri Patterson, a psychologist and principal at global risk consulting firm Control Risks, told Business Insider earlier this year.
Rich data, poor data, from the FiveThirtyEight blog
There’s a perfect storm of circumstances in sports that makes rapid analytical progress possible decades before other fields have their Moneyball moments. Here are three reasons sports nerds have it easy: 1) sports has awesome data, 2) in sports, we know the rules and 3) sports offers fast feedback and clear marks of success.
Now replace the word “sports” above with “my companies GTM function.” Does your companies GTM function have awesome data? In your companies GTM function, are the rules clearly defined? In your companies GTM function, is there fast feedback and clear marks of success?
Not all churn is bad churn, from the Appcues blog
Churn. It's the bane of every SaaS company. No single metric creates more anxiety and lost sleep among software founders than their product's churn rate.
And rightly so—losing too many customers is a pretty solid indicator that something in your business is failing—and not just your revenue. Speaking of which, what may seem like a small increase in churn can quickly cut your revenue and valuation in half.
High churn rates are never something to celebrate. But is all churn bad? Or at least, as bad as it's cut out to be? Actually, no...
There’s bad fit customers, customers with short term needs, churn from transient markets, and more. Too much churn is never a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that all churn is bad.
Funl is a GTM data platform that provides end-to-end, full funnel analytics and insights that keep marketing, sales and customer success teams aligned and working seamlessly together. In short, Funl is an operating system for your GTM team.