Improve Sales and Marketing Through RevOps

Improve Sales and Marketing: Work Smarter Through Revenue Operations

By Matt NagelDec 8 /2022

As you’re reviewing your sales and marketing performance from the year, you might notice some gaps that seemed small at first have become gaping holes as you’ve grown.

Your marketing team might have a hard time attributing their efforts to closed deals, making it difficult to show a return on your investment. Your sales and customer service teams might be struggling to follow up with every consultation request, quote and inquiry. And if you’re still relying on manual processes to assign these requests to the right person, you could even be losing potential deals or experiencing more customer churn. 

You may not think of these as revenue operations (RevOps) issues, but taking the time to fix them can have a significant impact on your sales performance. The goal of any RevOps initiative should be to uncover new ways your company can grow by optimizing your technology and processes to improve your team’s efficiency, sales pipeline and close rates. It just might be the single most important initiative you undertake in the coming year. 

Here’s a closer look at how to plan and budget for RevOps services.

Planning for Revenue Operations: Key Considerations

What marketing and sales automation do you have in place now?

Even if you’ve been using a CRM for years, your revenue operations team may not be realizing its full potential. It may not be properly connected to the systems you use for email and content marketing, limiting visibility into which marketing activities have the biggest impact on revenue. You may be missing automation elements that could simplify the sales process for your team — such as sending automated emails and follow-up tasks when someone enters a deal. 

How reliable is your contact database? 

If you’re like many companies, you’ve been gathering data on customers and prospects for years, but you can’t remember the last time anyone reviewed that data. Considering almost half of email subscribers today churn within a year, you could be sending hundreds or thousands of emails that aren’t reaching their intended destination. In addition to invalid email addresses, some of the most common problems we see when we’re beginning a revenue operations initiative are:

  • Contact records without an email address
  • Email addresses with no other contact information
  • Duplicate contacts due to information entered from several sources
  • Simple typos impacting email deliverability 
  • Spam traps or email addresses that can get your company blocked from sending future emails

Fortunately these issues are relatively easy to fix. Email validation services can help you clean up your database, eliminating outdated, duplicate or incorrect emails. 

If you’re missing critical information, email enrichment services like ZoomInfo can help you fill in those gaps. Using a service like this can also help you simplify your forms, improving conversion rates. 

To what extent are you using personalization?

Personalizing emails and other interactions you have with customers and prospects significantly improves conversion rates. Personalization is only possible if you have a properly segmented database, a barrier for many organizations. 

Even if you have some segmentation in place, there’s usually room for improvement. Here are a few data segmentation strategies you may not have considered: 

  • Segmenting by marketing behavior (contacts who opened an email or visited a page)
  • Using previous purchasing behavior to recommend related products or services
  • Using subscription renewal dates to remind customers when it’s time to renew
  • Acknowledging customer birthdays for a special offer
  • Offering a discount or exclusive product or service to your most valuable customers

Having full visibility into your customer journey will help identify new revenue-generating opportunities you can implement without significantly adding to customer acquisition costs. 

What business intelligence are you missing from your reporting?

You may be gathering data from many different sources, but how well can you draw conclusions from it to adjust sales operations and marketing strategies?

Can you say with certainty which marketing efforts contributed the most revenue in the past year?

What sources of website traffic led to the highest conversions?

What percentage of prospects who requested a consultation or free trial ultimately became customers, and how does that compare to previous years?

What products or services were most profitable?

Top  platforms like HubSpot will improve your revenue forecasting while allowing your RevOps team to create in-depth reports, including:

  • New contacts created by a specific source (such as your blog)
  • The first and last page a contact visited before requesting a consultation
  • A breakdown of the total deals you’ve won and lost
  • The average annual revenue per customer for each of your products and services
  • Total revenue growth

Examples of Successful RevOps projects 

The Kuno Creative team has worked on many RevOps projects to provide better sales and marketing alignment. Here are just a few examples:

Sales enablement and training

Our team worked with a global company that had two enterprise CRM systems, one for its US team and one for the UK. We helped them configure a centralized CRM in HubSpot that housed each of the company’s different business units and sales teams, making it easier for everyone to manage and track their activities. We also trained the sales team to use the system so they could be more efficient.

Tracking partner sales and commissions

A software company was relying on manual processes to track sales and commissions from partners who sold its solutions. An assessment of their processes revealed the company could be using HubSpot for partner relationship management. Our team spent several months setting up workflows to help the company automate this process, saving their team significant time in the long run.

Closing gaps between sales and customer service

The sales team for an environmental services company was having a difficult time assigning projects to the customer service and logistics team responsible for cleaning up oil spills. The company’s legacy CRM had no automation when someone requested a job. The Kuno team set up workflows within HubSpot to close these gaps. Every sales rep now has their inbox connected to HubSpot so the system logs every customer touchpoint, helping sales managers quantify the team’s productivity and providing visibility to the rest of the company. When a deal closes, the customer service and logistics team receives an automated email with a description of the work that needs to be performed.

Budgeting for RevOps

Budgeting for activities like these depends on several factors, including:

  • Whether you need to migrate data from another system
  • The size of your database
  • Your team’s timeline
  • The number of sales and marketing technology integrations you need
  • The complexity of workflows you need 
  • The number of team members who need to have input and/or training

All this will impact the extent of the work our team will need to do and how frequently we will need to meet with your team throughout the project.

You may also want additional support to optimize these processes after we’ve developed them.

Why Work With Kuno For Your Next RevOps Project?

Getting revenue operations right is critical, but it can be time-consuming if you’re trying to do it all internally. Kuno has an entire team of specialists dedicated to these projects. Our team is certified in HubSpot and can assist with everything from onboarding and data migration to building out complex sales and marketing workflows. We also have experience using other CRM systems, such as Salesforce, and we can make recommendations to help your team work smarter.

Once you have your sales, marketing and customer service processes running like a well-oiled machine, you may want to accelerate your performance by investing in digital marketing. Our team can recommend the best ways to optimize your website, develop a strong content marketing strategy that includes video and other engaging elements, and put together a plan for promoting your brand through paid advertising.

Schedule a time to talk about how we can help.

Align your sales and marketing teams with sales enablement solutions from Kuno Creative

Matt Nagel
The Author

Matt Nagel

Matt uses marketing automation and data insights to help nurture leads into customers and deliver an overall optimized buyer experience. He has extensive professional experience developing, executing, and analyzing marketing processes and campaigns. Matt organizes and leverages client tech stacks to reduce friction and ensure the highest ROI is realized.
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