The Future of Revenue Operations
How Revenue Teams Will Unify & Evolve
To Create Customers With Data, Insights
Introduction
The notion of combining sales, marketing and customer success around common goals has been an ongoing discussion within the B2B community. Many organizations, as well as industry experts and analysts, now believe they need Revenue Operations (Revenue Ops) to grow their businesses and deliver a seamless experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
Marketing
The team gains clear visibility into which investments
are bearing fruit and which need to be redirected.
info@leandatainc.com
info@demandgenreport.com
How Revenue Teams Will Unify & Evolve
To Create Customers With Data, Insights
The Future of Revenue Operations
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669.600.5676
The team can rapidly act on accurate and complete
data to generate pipeline and close more business.
Sales
The team can provide a seamless experience for customers
because everyone has access to the same data.
Customer Success
The partner team can maintain streamlined workflows
between direct and indirect sellers to increase sales.
Partner
As of 2019, many companies, including Heinz Marketing and Salesforce, have created Revenue Ops departments, and the title “Director of Revenue Operations” surpassed “Director of Sales Operations” on LinkedIn by 68%, according to SiriusDecisions.
68%
Despite a wealth of technology and data, modern B2B organizations have never been so challenged to drive revenue growth,” said Dana Therrien, former Sales Operations Strategies Practice Leader at SiriusDecisions. “However, we’re seeing some of our clients adopting a fundamentally new go-to-market approach that unites fragmented customer-facing functions – sales, marketing, customer and partner – under one umbrella. We believe this new business model, which we’re calling Revenue Operations, is a game-changer and will fundamentally change how businesses align themselves internally to drive growth.
Key areas of focus for modern Revenue Ops teams, such as alignment across the organization, effective enablement and unified data;
The biggest impact on the future of B2B Revenue Ops; and
Tools and tactics utilized by best-in-class Revenue Ops teams.
This iPaper will uncover trends, tips and best practices
to fuel Revenue Ops teams for success, including:
What percentage of your qualified generated leads are lost and/or misrouted within a year?
Is Unified Data Hurting
Your Business?
None
Between 1-10%
Between 11-20%
More than 20%
According to research from Gartner, the average cost of poor data quality on businesses can rack up to anywhere between $9.7 million and $14.2 million per year. Furthermore, bad data is estimated to cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion annually.
Revenue Ops encompasses different departments in each organization. In its
State of Revenue Ops 2019 report, LeanData found that of over 2400 sales, marketing, and operations professionals, 46% of respondents either have a fully centralized or partially centralized Rev Ops function in place.
46%
The structure of a Revenue Ops team varies by the organization. But a mature Revenue Ops team has representatives from sales, marketing, customer, and partner ops. Generally, there are four areas of focus for a Revenue Ops team:
Collaboration, Enablement & Data Fuel Revenue Ops Teams For Success
Industry experts agree that best-in-class Revenue Ops teams are focused on maintaining cross-organizational alignment and collaboration to better understand the data that goes across the entire customer lifecycle. This, in turn, positions Marketing teams to better enable Sales to close the deal.
Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing, likens a Revenue Ops team to EMTs, in which everyone knows their roles and the procedures. “This starts with clarity around who and what a customer is,” she said.
Are they someone who just made a
one-time purchase?
Do they renew subscriptions but are not active users?
How do you define an active user?
Are they the buyer, a user, or both?
Are customers tiered by lifetime value or other criteria?
Revenue Ops teams must share a common knowledge of their customers:
Once every team shares a mutual understanding of
the customer, maintaining alignment across the organization is critical to keep the revenue engine running.
One key to alignment is to ensure all teams are speaking a common language — no matter their objectives.
It all boils down to maintaining that coordination and alignment and understanding the data as a team to execute the right messaging at the right time to the right audience.
Ultimately, this collaboration and alignment enable Revenue Ops teams to have customer insights seamlessly flow through departments, allowing for a better understanding of how goals and tasks will be addressed.
“Regardless of any organizational structure, Sales and Marketing teams have to come together, first and foremost, to align to the core metric, which is pipeline and your revenue goal for any company,” said Steve De Marco, CRO of LeanData.
These questions and others need to be decided and then the systems these functions use need to capture this data. When someone from one of these teams is working with the customer, do they have the data at their fingertips? This will only continue to work if the interactions and exchanges with customers — such as a support issue, a delivery issue, an inquiry for a quote, a request for a meeting, a download of a doc, etc. — are recorded and then shared with other parts of the business.
Laura Patterson,
President,
Vision Edge Marketing
These questions and others need to be decided and then the systems these functions use need to capture this data. When someone from one of these teams is working with the customer, do they have the data at their fingertips? This will only continue to work if the interactions and exchanges with customers — such as a support issue, a delivery issue, an inquiry for a quote, a request for a meeting, a download of a doc, etc. — are recorded and then shared with other parts of the business.
[Marketing, Sales and Service] roles have different objectives, which sometimes puts that trifecta at odds. Sales is focused on creating revenue. Marketing is focused on driving brand and engaging audience members to support that revenue. Services/IT is focused on making the systems run properly. The key is to get everyone focused on the end results of revenue, bridge that gap and create a common language.
Jeff Coveney, CMO,
Digital Pi
Revenue Ops Depends On Garnering
Deeper Prospect, Customer Insights
Top-performing Revenue Ops teams that are aligned across the organization have an ongoing process around their prospect and customer data — from gathering insights from every interaction to aggregating it all into one single source of truth on the target account that everyone can access.
“You can't put the curtains on the house before the house is built,” said Coveney. “Companies must have good data in order to get insights out of it.”
This coordination effort is going to change the roles of everyone who’s in Revenue Ops, where they’re going to have to understand the data that goes across the entire customer lifecycle. They’re going to have to understand that it’s not just a data source, but a feedback loop from customers and their IPS and how that goes into execution layers, follow-up actions and communication layers. It's pulling all the pieces together across the entire customer lifecycle, so it’s a workflow and tech stack that everyone’s connected to.
64%
Research from Demand Gen Report shows that more than half (64%) of buyers noted that one of the most important variables when evaluating vendors was a team that demonstrated knowledge of their company and had insights into their problems. This type of knowledge can only be gleaned from current and relevant data.
“Leverage all of the vast troves of data at your disposal to glean insights and ideate creative ways to engage with a consumer who has a shorter attention span and is inundated with more messages,” said Michelle Killebrew, VP and Head of Marketing for PwC, in a conversation with Demand Gen Report.
Holistically, Revenue Ops teams have much to gain from the deeper focus on prospect and customer data in the coming years:
Artificial Intelligence & Intent Data Fly Under The Radar
Specifically, some of the emerging trends around data include insights gained from artificial intelligence and machine learning, which experts believe can shake things up for Revenue Ops teams by helping to provide insights that aren’t easily accessible through traditional channels.
First- and third-party intent data also position Revenue Ops teams to get more granular insights around prospective customers, by helping B2B organizations identify leads that are currently showing buying signals in a specific area based on the content they are consuming.
I think intent data is going to be the biggest one, in terms of gaining an overarching, holistic view of using first- and third-party intent data to develop a more well-rounded Sales and Marketing revenue strategy. I think, over the next couple of years, we’ll still see a lot of new businesses pop up that are trying to do that. And we’ll probably start seeing some consolidation of the existing tech right now, and just platforms that are pulling together all different types of data and intent signals that will help Sales and Marketing teams be more effective.
Harmony Anderson,
Sr. Director of Demand Gen & Events, Outreach
“[AI] is surfacing things that — as a human being — I couldn’t surface,” said Bill Binch, CRO at Pendo. He believes that we’ll soon see such insights being productized. Research shows that less than one-fifth (18%) of marketers are leveraging AI solutions, while 66% are planning to use, evaluating or currently implementing AI solutions.
Teams Utilize Enablement Tech To Streamline Revenue Ops
Industry experts agree that the tools driving the future of Revenue Ops are the solutions that are prioritizing better sales enablement efforts across the entire organization. This includes everything from providing relevant content and messaging to building relationships with prospects, to ensuring relevant insights are shared with reps to have contextual conversations.
“The biggest trend that I'm seeing is the need for enablement, where at every point, you have a piece of technology that you're using, you have messaging that goes along with it, you have to understand what's happening and what the customer is seeing,” said Otvos.
For marketing, experts highlighted the growing importance of a centralized platform to house brand-appropriate content for Sales reps to utilize. This better positions Sales reps to have the content they need to engage prospective customers. Solutions such as Uberflip and PathFactory are examples of products that have features like content depositories.
This has grown more vital in the Revenue Ops world because the role of Sales reps has evolved into one, in which they must educate their audience in a new way. Instead of product demos and fact sheets, buyers are looking for relevant stories that relate their
own experiences to the product or service.
Stories are the new documentation, you can have a claim that ‘by using our own products, we can effectively match and tag and route leads really efficiently.’ But what does that actually mean? Instead, the story can say, ‘Here’s an example of a customer that has 50,000 leads coming in every month, their reps were spending two hours a day sorting through these leads inefficiently. Once we were able to solve that problem, they shortened their sales cycle by 30% and saw an extra $5 million in revenue that year.’ That’s one example of how the story is now the documentation.
Don Otvos, VP of Revenue Operations,
LeanData
Demand Gen Report’s annual ABM Benchmark Survey Report shows that only 25% of B2B companies said they currently use intent data and monitoring tools, while 35% said they plan to use intent insights within the next 12 months.
Conclusion
As businesses look to streamline internal initiatives to offer a consistent customer experience, best-in-class B2B teams are turning to Revenue Ops as a solution to streamline future go-to-market initiatives.
Experts agreed that having a holistic view of customer engagement throughout the sales funnel leads to better experiences for both customers and employees alike.
“It's so important to have Revenue Operations, whether it's a formal revenue operations unit or an informal group of people that just meet on a regular cadence,” said Pat Oldenburg, VP of Demand Marketing & Ops at ServiceMax. “My team is making decisions and Sales Ops is making decisions, when we should be doing the same thing with one another."
Ultimately, the future of B2B business relies heavily on Revenue Ops to streamline internal teams so they can go to market as one, while simplifying workflows for team members in Marketing, Sales, Service and Partner departments.
“Operations isn't just running commissions, or just your Salesforce admin,” said LeanData’s Don Otvos. “We must have this function in order to execute strongly as a team, and we believe that adoption is going to continue to grow.”
We’re trying to focus efforts on everything that has to do with the customer experience. While there is a lot of point projects across all of our core platforms that have to do with various aspects of [customer] data, the end goal is to improve the customer experience and improve the support and experience for our Sales reps.
Pat Oldenburg,
VP of Demand Marketing & Ops, ServiceMax
Ultimately, the common denominator between these tools that are fueling Revenue Ops efforts is that they are increasing interdepartmental efficiency throughout the organizations.
Automate conditional sales workflows.
Enable seamless routing of leads & data to appropriate Sales reps.
Glean more accurate data for reps.
Mirror heavily to what direct Sales reps are dependent on.
Data is vital to consistent messaging and streamlined workflows between direct/indirect sellers.
Must provide a common data thread through all go-to-market actions.
Leverage solutions that integrate with MAP/CRM/Sales Automation tools you already use to unify, sort and manage data across multiple channels.
Continuous data streamed from customer engagement allows better opportunities for retention and cross-sell/upsell.
Experts also noted that tools and technology focused on easily consuming and understanding customer data have grown vital to the modern Revenue Ops team. This is especially important for sales reps who require the necessary insights to understand buyers and account pain points to create meaningful conversations. This is also important to indirect Sales teams and partner
networks, who need all these insights to keep their messaging consistent with the brand. Customer Success relies on this information, as well, to understand client sentiment and identify potential churn.
For example, solutions such as LeanData are positioned to help Revenue Ops teams unify data, track account engagement, automate the flow of information to the right reps, and measure the impact of Sales and Marketing efforts.
“LeanData is very, very strong at helping bring data into a system and then getting those records off to the appropriate salespeople,” said Coveney. “You can't report and get a vision out of your data unless your data is stronger.”
Ultimately, the common denominator between these tools that are fueling Revenue Ops efforts is that they are increasing interdepartmental efficiency throughout the organizations.
The Revenue Ops Tools Of The Trade
With more than 7,000 technology options to choose from, it's understandable that Revenue Ops teams can be overwhelmed with the tools available to them to operate. Here’s a list of some common solutions noted from industry discussions around Revenue Ops stacks.
The RevOps Practitioner’s Perspective
With advancements in modern business technology, B2B companies are positioned better than ever to streamline their Revenue Ops practices. Here are what industry experts and practitioners have to say about working with a Revenue Ops platform to coordinate go-to-market planning, execution and analytics:
As seen on:
LeanData is intuitive and easy to setup, especially with a stellar implementation and customer success team. I’ve worked with Shreyas, Tim, and Stephanie and they have guided me through the entire process: taking the time to walk through the router setup, promptly answering all questions, setting up calls when requested/necessary, and helping troubleshoot issues that come up. Tim and Stephanie are always on the call and I’ve never felt like there was a disconnect or miscommunication.
Great tool with amazing team to support it!
Kristine P.
Revenue Ops Manager
Ray M.
Director, Marketing Operations
Jacco D.
Chief Revenue Officer
Out of the box you can upload lead lists to identify what is/isn’t already in your database. Once we set up our automated lead routing flow, we can now ensure both old and new contacts are in the right place, stage and owned by the right people in Salesforce so our sales team can do their job selling and not worry about data management. Plus, they have great consultants helping set up and succeed using LeanData.
Actionable insights on your Salesforce database!
Easy to use platform with a visual flow map of where every single lead/contact/account/opportunity is routed. Their team is awesome and helps you set up your initial map. If you’re like most marketing folks, it’s a visual flow chart that allows you to create your perfect automation flow for where a lead should go. I’ve used it for years and only seen better and better product year after year. One of the best parts of LeanData is the consolidated view of all your notifications that you’re sending - it’s been tremendously helpful to know exactly where a notification is originating from. We also love the auto convert lead to contact on customer accounts, it’s been a game changer for our database hygiene.
Best way to ensure follow up on leads!
Research shows that roughly 25% of leads go bad every year, whether it be through misrouting or getting lost in the funnel. If the average contract value of a lead is $10,000, for example, that’s $250,000 in revenue being lost out of every 100 leads that get qualified.
25%
X
18%
66%
35%
25%
None: Way to go!
Research shows that roughly 25% of leads go bad every year, whether it be through misrouting or getting lost in the funnel. If the average contract value of a lead is $10,000, for example, that’s $250,000 in revenue being lost out of every 100 leads that get qualified.
10%: That isn't bad!
25%
X
Research shows that roughly 25% of leads go bad every year, whether it be through misrouting or getting lost in the funnel. If the average contract value of a lead is $10,000, for example, that’s $250,000 in revenue being lost out of every 100 leads that get qualified.
20%: That's OK!
25%
X
Research shows that roughly 25% of leads go bad every year, whether it be through misrouting or getting lost in the funnel. If the average contract value of a lead is $10,000, for example, that’s $250,000 in revenue being lost out of every 100 leads that get qualified.
20%+: You're not alone!
25%
X
Don Otvos, VP of Revenue Operations,
LeanData