Paolo Negrini, Head of Marketing Ops, Tech and Analytics at Adobe, gave this talk at the Revenue Marketing Summit hosted by our sister community, Revenue Marketing Alliance, in 2022.
You may have heard the definition, but what are five key areas of responsibility for a person in revenue operations? Paolo Negrini, Head of Marketing Ops, Tech and Analytics at Adobe, gives his perspective 👇
So what is revenue operations?
Defining revenue operations can be done from many angles - but I want to focus on customer perspective. Revenue operations is a function that underpins the entire customer journey.
If you think about the highest level, the customer journey is how you get customers, how you keep customers, and how you grow customers.
And then you've got different ways in which you can engage with your audience. You can have self-service mechanisms, how people come to your website and engage there and then convert, or how they’re assisted.
And then all of those are effectively thinking about how you can drive this personalized omnichannel experience.
From my perspective, revenue operations supports that through five key areas of responsibility:
There's a few questions to ask yourself when approaching these. Let's jump straight in👇
Strategic planning
Strategic planning is how you align different functions across the organization.
With strategic planning, marketing and sales would need to get closer to understand the product fit. To me, it's very important that marketing and sales come into a RevOps model and they're very close in terms of what the market is and what the market looks like.
So starting right from the top level, what’s your total addressable market? And then you go down one layer to, what’s your total serviceable market? Your market analysis, your customers, your prospects, how does all that look?
Ash Finnegan
Business modelling
Business analytics is all about how your business works.
What’s your waterfall model? You start with the concept of a response into an MQL and into pipeline, that kind of flow.
And then how does it work? What are the different touchpoints and conversion rates? Then it's much easier to have common ideas and bring everyone onto the same page.
Running the businesses is another thing that’s very hard, and lots of companies are doing it in different ways.
You might have marketing running the business model in one way and sales in a different way, so they're not always in sync. But having a way to implement joint QBRs for marketing and sales so that you break those boundaries is important.
Maybe you have weekly reviews and you have feedback loops from the marketing team. How do you plug in to that on a regular basis?
Your business analytics is straight from the foundation, which is your data strategy, where the data lives, and how you structure it. Are you placing it in a duplicate data lake? Are you putting it in a SQL Server? Do you have it in your CRM? Where is that? And what does that look like? How do you make sure that’s solid and integrated?
Then you get into the descriptive and diagnostic reports. What reports are you using? How do you make sure that those are centralized and you don't have one report from your sales function, and another report from your marketing function?
And then the other thing is your predictive and advanced analytics. It's more about your forecasting and how you make sure that you understand that if you do XYZ, what's going to happen going forward and where to invest your limited resources in the best way.
Rebecca Stewart
Process design
Process design is all about the simplest things, like how lead routing works, how leads are flowing into your sales function, and what the selling process is.
Let's say you've got a Salesforce CRM and you need to define what the process is within opportunities. What are the entry gates and exit gates? How do you make sure that those are all synced from a marketing and sales perspective?
Documentation is also very important. We all say it’d be great to have documentation, but we never do it. But it's one of those things where the more and more we do, the more we have those SLAs and SOPs all written down, and the better it is because you’ll have a new person coming in and they’ll be able to know what's going on. They're not being thrown in the deep end and forced to sink or swim.
Commercial technology
How do you build commercial technology that’s integrated?
With commercial technology, I'm not talking about the sales tech and MarTech. It’s the system architecture, how you bring everything together, how you manage the vendor, and how you support and administer those systems.
Systems enablement
And then for system enablement, when you onboard a new system, how do you make sure that everyone adopts it? How do you make sure that everyone understands how it works? How you can upskill the team? Maybe there's a shiny new tool that you're onboarding that's super cool, but people aren’t versed on it and they don't know how to use it.
How do you make sure that people understand how to use certain systems and certain tools in the right way?
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