This comes from Adam Maxted, John Hunt, and Greg Larsen’s panel discussion, ‘Impact of RevOps on customer retention & reducing churn’, check out the full talk here.
Retaining customers is tough these days. Budgets are tightening, competition is fierce, and revenue streams feel fragile. So how can your business not just survive, but thrive in this climate?
RevOps industry leaders, Adam Maxted, John Hunt, and Greg Larsen shared their secrets with us for using RevOps to boost retention and slash churn. Their insights could give your organization a serious competitive edge.
Offering up proven tactics for aligning teams, increasing renewals, and preventing customer losses, here are their five top tips on how to leverage RevOps for boosting revenue retention at your organization:
- Breaking down silos to power collaboration
- Connecting departments and prioritizing collective goals
- Leveraging technology to engage and retain
- Monitoring risks and results to optimize retention
- Making retention a priority
- Final thoughts
1. Breaking down silos to power collaboration
According to Adam Maxted, Local Revenue Operations, Country Manager UK & India at The Knot Worldwide, RevOps can significantly enhance departmental productivity and customer focus when structured appropriately.
In his current role, Maxted has seen firsthand how positioning customer success under the RevOps department facilitates tighter feedback loops and smoother collaboration.
"Having the customer success team within my department, hearing the feedback straight away from the customers and clients themselves, it’s been really beneficial to help us power the revenue-facing departments in the right way," Maxted explained.
With real-time customer insights flowing directly to RevOps leadership, bottlenecks could be easily identified and resolved faster. This then accelerated their ability to tear down departmental silos and bridge collaboration gaps.
Stronger cross-team alignment also unlocked more effective upselling and cross-selling through their CSMs.
As Maxted put it, "You automatically get cross-selling skill through customer success. It costs way less than sales teams but still brings in revenue."
By building trusted advisor relationships, their CSMs gained valuable context to uncover expansion opportunities with existing clients.
Additionally, focused customer success enablement training equipped their team to accelerate renewals and curb churn risks.
"We implemented specialized training on upskilling for renewals, cross-selling, and boosting revenue buckets. The CS team is just so important," Maxted emphasized.
The tight feedback loops enabled by RevOps ultimately helped them smooth out departmental friction and unlock the power of their CSMs.
Highspot
2. Connecting departments and prioritizing collective goals
Aligning priorities across departments is so crucial yet so challenging. Just ask John Hunt, Head of Enablement of Zappi.
As Hunt puts it, "With so many competing priorities between sales, marketing, and customer success, it's really critical we work hand-in-hand with a unified mindset for growth, so we don’t end up operating disjointedly."
Without tight alignment, it's impossible to scale efficiently amid fluctuating markets and uncertainty. So how has Hunt's team enabled stronger cohesion between departments? Cross-functional meetings have been key.
They host a monthly "Revenue Council" meeting bringing together sales, marketing, CS, and RevOps leaders. This provides a forum to strategically review upcoming initiatives and campaigns on the horizon.
Crissy Saunders
It ensures everyone is aware of what's coming down the pike that may impact their team or require their coordination. No more last-minute scrambles when a new product launches or campaign kicks off!
They also hold regular biweekly "hot topics" meetings. These give leaders an open space to raise pressing issues and discuss them collectively.
With so many competing priorities across divisions, these meetings facilitate transparent conversations on resourcing. Where should they focus limited time, money and energy for maximum impact?
"It's been really effective, because you'll inherently get some friction between sales and CS. RevOps serves as that neutral arbiter to align everyone," Hunt explained.
By serving as an "honest broker" through these touchpoints, RevOps helps get all the organizational oars rowing in sync.
When departments silo, strategies fracture. Consistent cross-functional meetings have empowered them to keep priorities aligned across divisions.
3. Leveraging technology to engage and retain
RevOps also plays a big role in customer retention through marketing tech optimization and automation, explained Greg Larsen, VP of Revenue Operations at Eltropy.
For example, sales engagement tools like contact sequencing platforms can nurture customers when applied to the post-sale side. These can deliver targeted content journeys and automated touchpoints to keep clients engaged after onboarding without overworking CSMs.
“Using a product called Groove, which is typically a sales engagement tool that is used on the front end side, to use it on the back end side with the CES team, setting up the customer journey from a communication standpoint, from initial sign on to renewal,” said Larsen.
This enables companies to keep customers engaged with valuable content after onboarding without overburdening CSMs.
Retention automation is also huge for renewals. John Hunt's team at Zappi implemented automated reminders to customers 90 days before contract expiration.
“What we make sure to do is work as cross functionally as possible. So we have kind of two really cross functional things that we do with Zappi,” explained Hunt.
“The first is a monthly meeting that I lead called, we call it the Revenue Council, essentially, it's all the things that are going to be kind of hitting the team's for lack of a better word in the next 30 days.”
So by optimizing the marketing tech stack and automating renewal journeys, RevOps helps lock in revenue streams for the long haul.
Rebecca Stewart
4. Monitoring risks and results to optimize retention
For Larsen, it’s also vital for RevOps to monitor leading indicators of churn risks and retention success. Metrics like product usage, logins, and customers’ willingness to deliver reference calls can signal early on any potential friction.
“It’s not until that retention rate drops below 90 into the 80s that all of a sudden it’s like a fire drill. So how do we get to the point where RevOps can proactively help reduce the churn and increase customer retention, rather than be the fireman, thinking ‘Oh customer retention is bad now, now let’s go and focus on it,’" said Larsen.
Proactive monitoring and management of these churn metrics enables RevOps leaders to intervene with targeted retention initiatives before customer losses escalate. This prevents reactive “firefighting” scenarios.
For Maxted as well, analyzing client satisfaction levels and response rates provided invaluable retention insights.
“The happier your customers are with the response that your customer success team has given them, the more likely they are going to come back and ask you a different question and stay with you,” he concluded.
5. Making retention a priority
While the RevOps experts admitted they don't have all the answers, they unanimously agreed that RevOps is indispensable for slashing churn through tight alignment, smart automation and vigilant monitoring.
As Hunt emphasized, "It's so tough to acquire new customers. You want to keep them for many years to maximize lifetime value."
Churn forces you back to square one. So what tangible steps can organizations take to make retention an ongoing priority rather than a panic button?
Maxted's team implemented specialized customer success training to instill a retention-first mindset. This equipped their CSMs with the skills to proactively maximize renewals.
Meanwhile, Hunt's team began sending automated reminders to customers as renewals approach, prompting their account managers to kickstart renewal conversations early.
Small but consistent process improvements like these empower RevOps to keep customer retention top of mind organization-wide.
This prevents urgent fire drills down the road when churn inevitably spikes. As Maxted put it, "We have to take proactive steps to make retention a priority now - not just react later."
Ash Finnegan
Final thoughts
The bottom line? All our RevOps experts unanimously agreed - leveraging RevOps is an absolute must for supercharging revenue retention and slashing churn.
When implemented effectively, RevOps tears down departmental silos through tighter collaboration. It aligns priorities across sales, marketing and customer success. And it maximizes efficiency while minimizing attrition through smart automation and vigilant monitoring.
The key is making customer retention an ongoing priority, not just a panic button when renewals start declining, these small but consistent process improvements add up.
For any business dependent on recurring revenue streams, making RevOps a priority now is vital to future-proofing growth amidst economic uncertainty.
In today's hypercompetitive market, no organization can afford to overlook RevOps, by working together, we can reinvent revenue operations to boost customer loyalty.
Want more proven tips for increasing renewals and reducing churn? Join the Revenue Operations Alliance community to connect with RevOps leaders all over the world driving real change.
