The list of demands for contemporary marketers is growing. While building brand awareness and generating leads for sales remain at the heart of their operations, businesses want to see how marketing efforts are impacting their bottom line and identify opportunities to scale revenue growth.
While revenue growth is often tethered to the idea of spending incremental dollars to grow both team and business, revenue operations – RevOps for short – essentially flips this script.
With the goal to support the customer lifecycle, RevOps uses technology and platforms to streamline and align internal team processes as well as deliver insights and visibility across the entire revenue acquisition process.
By breaking down silos between marketing, sales and customer service, and strengthening their alignment throughout the buyer’s journey, RevOps enables revenue growth that affords investments in new hires, research and development and more.
Here, we’ll dive deeper into the inner workings of RevOps — including a use case — and explore what the rise of RevOps means for both marketers and marketing operations.
When businesses are in the early stages of the lifecycle, their infrastructure is often not built to scale. With smaller prospect and customer bases, companies can take more of a white-glove approach, where 1:1 conversations occur across the customer lifecycle. But as the company grows, this small-scale infrastructure loses its ability to help grow and retain customers due to inefficiencies and missing links in operations.
RevOps takes a strategic approach to streamlining these operations by analyzing what types of support marketing, sales and customer service teams need to stimulate growth. Thinking about these different areas of the customer lifecycle from a holistic perspective helps pinpoint ways to optimize customer conversion points at every stage of the funnel.
On paper, RevOps can feel like an abstract concept. The easiest way to digest RevOps is with real-world examples that illustrate how companies are embracing this approach.
A SaaS provider and long-time Kuno Creative client came to us with the goal of finding ways to improve their inbound conversion rates and operational efficiencies, while better reporting on their successes.
As a first step, Kuno performed a comprehensive lead capture audit where we identified redundancies in both fields and forms. These insights empowered us to reduce requested information at different stages of the buyer’s journey and set the team up for success with changes to the overarching form strategy moving forward.
Other layers of the form optimization process included:
By working across multiple platforms — specifically, Salesforce and HubSpot — the Kuno team was able to ensure a seamless hand-off between marketing and sales, with the right information provided to the right people at the right time.
Between the previous period and when the form optimization was implemented, the client saw a 30% increase in conversion rate across their website — with additional SEO, content and UX/design initiatives likely factoring into the equation as well. With increased visibility and accurate data around sources, the marketing team could better understand and attribute resources to high-performance channels and enhance lower-performance initiatives.
By simply streamlining their lead routing process and putting the most engaging tactics in place, the SaaS provider saw significant improvements to their operational efficiency and inbound conversion rates — all without having to spend a dollar.
Like any other marketing efforts, getting started with RevOps has its hurdles. But as more companies embrace this strategy and find ways to scale, businesses that don’t will fall behind in the pack and struggle to keep up with their market’s needs.
To put this in perspective, Gartner predicts that 75% of companies will deploy a RevOps model by the year 2025.
As the above example illustrates, integrating RevOps into your infrastructure starts with collecting data. While some businesses may already have systems in place to compile marketing, sales and customer service data, others may need to invest in new systems that give them the ability to capture and analyze that information in a consolidated view.
While consistency is critical for data to be accurately reported on, it’s also important to look for areas where key metrics may be missing altogether. For instance, the new sale pipeline may have clear metrics — from the average sales cycle to new customer acquisition cost — but the pipeline for sales renewals may lack insights into key factors, such as the percentage of customers that expanded their products/services at renewal time.
By tying all these ends together in one centralized platform like HubSpot, relevant data can be easily shared across marketing, sales and customer service departments. With a better understanding of what’s driving conversions and drop-offs throughout the buyer’s journey, marketers can sharpen their strategies and processes to develop collateral and workflows that help their business better serve customer needs at every lifecycle stage.
Sales and marketing alignment alone can increase a company’s year-over-year revenue growth by 32%. And when you bring customer service into the fold, a company’s profits have even more room to grow.
In an age where organizations are looking to maximize their ROI at every stage of their customer lifecycle, RevOps delivers. With deeper insights into the complete customer experience, marketers can engage in more impactful initiatives that deliver real results across departments — and in doing so, prove their value to the company’s bottom line.
