The Ultimate Guide on How to Implement RevOps

Revenue operations (RevOps) is rapidly gaining momentum in the B2B industry as thought leaders and growth experts continue to emphasize the significance of aligning internal teams within organizations to cope with the rising complexities of customer journeys and business processes.

According to Forrester, 86% of company decision-makers confirm that RevOps is vital for meeting their company goals. However, only 41% stated that they were deeply familiar with the nuts and bolts of revenue operations.

This is what this guide aims to do: help company leaders sort through the hype and make RevOps work for them.

What is Revenue Operations?

Revenue operations is the strategic alignment of teams, workflows, data, and technology to create an interconnected, end-to-end revenue process, achieve predictable results, and accelerate revenue growth.

Traditional go-to-market (GTM) organizational structures are more prone to being characterized by highly fragmented teams, data silos, and misaligned priorities. This may lead to disjointed processes within customer life cycles and executives’ inability to consistently make accurate decisions.

Revenue operations, on the other hand, is aimed at breaking down silos, consolidating internal processes, and facilitating better revenue-impacting decisions.

RevOps cuts across the various departments connected to the revenue cycle, including marketing, sales, customer success, and finance. This creates an overlap where all connected teams perform in sync with each other.

For example, in a RevOps ecosystem, driving sales is not the sole responsibility of the sales team. Instead, it is a shared objective of all team members, and everyone plays a crucial role in driving the revenue pipeline.

Benefits of RevOps

RevOps is seeing consistent growth in popularity across the B2B industry. But it isn’t surprising when you consider its impact on organizational revenue and alignment of go-to-market (GTM) operations.

According to Boston Consulting Group, RevOps-oriented B2B tech companies are reporting significant improvements in multiple areas, including:

100% to 200% rise in digital marketing ROI
10% increase in lead acceptance
20% improvement in sales productivity
30% reduction in GTM expenses
20% increase in customer satisfaction

Additionally, a study by Forrester showed that organizations with a revenue operations platform reported nearly three times faster revenue growth than those that didn’t. Public organizations with a RevOps platform and team also reported 71% higher stock performances.

When to Introduce RevOps

Revenue operations is widely recognized as a high-impact way to accelerate productivity and revenue growth. But when is the best time to integrate it into your organization?

Research by Revenue.io shows that most companies introduce RevOps in the $5M-$20M annual recurring revenue (ARR) range. This is followed by companies in the $20M-$50M ARR range.

Companies with smaller ARR also get involved, with revenue operations implementation occurring 24% of the time.

While it is never too late to introduce RevOps into your organization, early integration is highly recommended as it can lead to more significant benefits down the road.

Revenue Operations Integrations Checklist

Recall that RevOps focuses on the alignment of teams, workflows, data, and technology. So each stage will focus on one aspect, detailing the steps you’ll need to take to ensure a successful RevOps integration.

Preparatory stage

The preparatory stage focuses on the alignment of teams—getting stakeholders on the same page before fully diving into RevOps.

Gain Executive Support to Restructure Revenue-Facing Teams

A RevOps framework cuts across sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. To successfully onboard your revenue operations strategy, you will need buy-in from the leaders of each department.

To get the required support, you need to:

Ask questions about their challenges, what sort of tools they use, and how they typically function
Keep your pitch brief and hard-hitting
Highlight what each team leader stands to benefit from the restructuring
Speak in terms of ROI—detail how much incremental gain should be expected over time
Line up case studies showing how other organizations are ramping up with revenue operations

The aim at this point is to help these leaders understand the organization’s current situation, how their efforts impact the revenue pipeline, and the possibilities ahead.

Define Your Company Vision and Revenue-Generating Milestones

This stage involves collaborating with the executives to define a common vision and a set of milestones for all supported routes to market (for example: e-commerce, offline retail, etc.).

The aim is to create a structured, trackable, and transparent process compatible with the revenue-facing teams so efforts from the various teams will lead up to the same goals.

Design a Revenue Operations Team Structure

This involves outlining the various roles required within the RevOps team. To get the best structure for your organization, you will need to outline all of the GTM roles and processes from end to end, noting where there might be functional gaps.

According to RevOps Co-Op, a high-level structure for a B2B organization post-RevOps implementation would likely look like the one below:

The structure above is only an illustration since every organization can base its revenue operations team structure around its unique needs, size, and budget.

Re-design the Roles of Existing Employees and Hire the Missing Specialists

The specific roles you’ll need to include largely depend on your organization’s size, the industry, target audience, and more.

For the most part, you’ll be reassigning roles to existing employees to fit into the RevOps ecosystem. This will usually require additional training. For larger, multi-regional organizations, RevOps integration will most likely create the need for more specialists.

To hire the right specialists for RevOps roles, you need to look out for comprehensive expertise (in SalesOps, MarketingOps, and CXOps), as well as technological, analytical, and communication skills.

Defining RevOps

Now that the groundwork is established, this becomes your opportunity to get the ball rolling. This stage focuses on aligning processes to establish a transparent and consistent collaboration among revenue-facing teams.

Map the End-to-End Customer Experience

Your aim at this stage is to create a detailed roadmap of your customer journeys from a consolidated perspective and establish strategies that reduce the number of steps required to take customers from awareness to purchase.

Here’s how to map your customer journey effectively:

Create a detailed definition of your ideal customer personas—challenges, curiosities, interests, goals, etc.
Niche down to the persona most relevant to your company’s offering
List out all possible touchpoints
Identify tools and processes that connect every major activity
Identify possible roadblocks your prospects might encounter while passing through your touchpoints
Set periodic audits for inspecting and updating the map

Consolidate a Go-to-Market Strategy

This stage involves specifying cross-functional responsibilities, getting inputs from each department, and creating a consolidated action plan for taking your offerings to the market.

The aim at this stage is to agree on the most productive routes to market, define the logistics of distributions, troubleshoot product positioning, and ensure that all steps are accountable to revenue growth.

Agree on Data Strategy and Governance

At this point, revenue-facing departments will need to agree on data strategy and governance to collectively support revenue-impacting decisions.

This includes:

Defining shared metrics that are relevant to the revenue process
Agreeing on acceptable data quality and procedures for quantifying it
Identifying commercial use cases where analytics will drive revenue-impacting decisions
Deciding on what kind of analytics will be used for each use case

Design a RevOps Workflow

Still part of the process category within the RevOps framework, this stage is where you create the blueprint that guides the entire RevOps workflow.

Design the End-to-End Revenue Process

The E2E revenue process focuses on all activities that lead customers from prospecting to purchasing. While customer journeys focus on the customer, this aspect pays attention to internal processes by GTM teams.

Your role at this stage is to create a plan that consolidates cross-functional activities into one revenue-impacting process. This involves identifying the most productive revenue channels, setting up handoff rules and SLAs, and acquiring the tools and technologies needed for accelerating revenue cycle operations.

Establish Communication

There needs to be established communication procedures across the teams to enable efficient collaboration. Team leaders and employees with related functions across departments should be mandated to meet regularly to share what they’re working on.

This ensures that there is a continuous feedback loop to help all teams improve their processes.

Establish Data Transparency and Centralize Analytics

This part represents the data segment of the RevOps implementation timeline. This stage aims to help revenue-facing teams utilize shared data and analytics to optimize performances and achieve predictable results.

Centralize Sales and Marketing Data

Successful RevOps strategies heavily rely on the seamless sharing of high-quality data among revenue-facing teams.

Securely collecting and centralizing data from the entire revenue process promotes transparency among teams and enables insight-led revenue-influencing decisions.

The process starts with data integration (pulling data from multiple sources into one location to generate unified operational and analytical insights) and ends in visualization (presentation of data in visual forms like charts, graphs, tables, etc.).

Considering that the various departments rely on different data sources and prioritize contrasting naming conventions for their KPIs, it is crucial to ensure that your integration tool has data normalization capabilities.

Data normalization is the process of harmonizing disparate naming conventions from multiple data sources to achieve coherent data fields.

👉Get our guide on sales and marketing data centralization

Ultimately, successfully centralizing cross-functional data puts you in the best position to scale your revenue operations.

Integrate a Revenue Data Platform

A revenue data platform helps data-driven teams get deep insights into customer behaviors, optimize campaigns at scale, and generate predictable results. This is a considerable asset for GTM teams because it not only offers the most efficient way to consolidate and utilize cross-functional data but also makes the transition into the RevOps model far easier.

Platforms like Improvado make RevOps implementation easy by offering an extremely convenient way to access and utilize data productively. For example, the platform automatically extracts data from all the sources and channels used across multiple departments, normalizes them, and unifies them within one destination (e.g., a data warehouse).

This makes it possible for revenue teams to access and generate accurate insights about cross-team operations without losing a second to manual labor.

Invest in Technology Onboarding

Revenue operations relies on specialized technologies to automate processes and enhance productivity. You will need to collaborate with executives to identify your company’s RevOps automation software requirements.

It is also important to take note of the available tools used by your GTM teams and how they fit into your RevOps implementation plan. That way, you can determine what tools to keep and the ones you can drop.

In the early stages, your revenue operations software collection will likely include a CRM, order management, marketing automation, sales enablement, customer communication, and data integration tools, among others.

Create a Data Decision Framework

Working with high-volume data can make revenue-impacting decision processes tricky, especially when receiving inputs from multiple departments.

To combat this, you should collaborate with executives on developing a data decision framework with sample scenarios and preset actions. For instance, a data decision framework can inform the team whether or not to move a prospect to the closing stage or roll them back for more nurturing, all based on the available data.

It is also important to advise less savvy executives on data literacy programs they should take to enable them to extract their own insights from data.

This will help accelerate cross-functional decision-making processes and ultimately ramp up productivity.

Operate and Identify Structural Flaws

Revenue operations isn’t a set-and-forget system. It keeps evolving and optimizing as new events unfold. Moreover, it takes some time before the entire team fully settles into the new ecosystem.

Your role at this stage is to identify any structural flaws hindering effective collaboration, like misaligned priorities, a glitch in data accessibility, etc.