While it may seem pointless to try to rebuild something if it isn’t broken, sticking with what you have may not be the best option in the long term, and may not position your company for future success.
Thus, to truly achieve success in today’s business landscape, companies must focus on a data-driven approach to revenue operations and customer experience.
By embracing data-driven metrics such as KPIs and OKRs, companies can gain a holistic view of customer data and insights, leading to personalized customer experiences and increased revenue.
We’ve already heard about how revenue operations is a must-have for any business to navigate these days successfully.
They help focus on the customer journey that’s been changed to focus more on relationships than just making it a numbers game.
Yet what else is needed, and how do we get there?
The journey begins with a fundamental understanding of the customer journey, combined with a data-driven mindset.
- Why is data so critical in the first place?
- How to embrace being data-driven
- Truly understanding the customer journey
- Understanding how to implement an ABX strategy
- How revenue operations comes in
- Bottom line
Why is data so critical in the first place?
Understanding the customer journey is fundamental to developing a successful revenue operations strategy.
By breaking down the customer journey into moments versus stages, companies can identify critical touchpoints and actions that lead to increased customer success.
Taking a proactive approach to customer support is an essential component of connecting the final dots in revenue operations.
Regardless of what we may preach or dictate, even from the success of the past, data-driven metrics will always be the center of truth with every action taken. They help to eliminate assumptions and hubris and are neutral with their emotions.
In fact, companies that first take the time to embrace the data will be almost 60% more successful than other companies, and are 162% more likely to beat out their competitors, who may be lagging.
A recent study by Ernst and Young stated that over 80% of companies already state that data is the heart of every organization, and with good reason.
It helps to eliminate any hearsay and helps to lead the way regarding pitching and developing a revenue operations team.
Hannah O’Meara
How to embrace being data-driven
The term data-driven metrics, or KPIs, OKRs, and other components get said, and then the action stops. So what does it all mean in the end?
It starts with democratizing data and sharing it amongst the various relevant departments. Sharing these points gives everyone a holistic view of what the data looks like, which can lead to customer success down the line.
To bring everything together, revenue operations must connect the dots and bring alignment to various departments and channels.
A unified go-to-market strategy, guided by the power of data and metrics, helps to identify the best opportunities for growth and revenue.
By building a single source of truth in the revenue operations team, companies can ensure every touchpoint is run efficiently and pushes for sales from different angles, and focus their efforts on how to curate and personalize for the GTM teams.
Through the different data points and conversations that can happen, by centralizing and sharing all the data, business leaders can get a bird’s eye view of just exactly what data to focus on.
Is it the target audience, pricing, complaints about a product or service, or everything all at once?
Tracking these points and adjusting the overall strategy to lead to more sales is at the core of being a data-driven organization.
Rebecca Stewart
Truly understanding the customer journey
While many follow customer journey methods, customers have varying and different journeys.
The customer journey helps the organization understand what the customer is going through, what their concerns are until they make the purchase (or don’t), and what helps them to become an advocate in the end.
Yet there’s no single path for every customer, and understanding just how complex it can be to get a customer from awareness to advocacy rolls back to reviewing the data-driven focus built above.
These customers aren’t jumping through your hoops and stages, they are taking their own actions, and when enough data points start to align and seem similar, you can roll those up into those all-too-critical user or buyer personas.
Rebecca Stewart
Then break down the customer journey even further and into milestones versus critical events.
Milestones are fixed points along the path of the customer journey, where one goes forward in a structured sequence.
The critical events are individual actions that can occur throughout each piece of the journey. You can revisit these moments multiple times, and they truly need to be connected.
For example, you want that moment where you keep the promises made in your claims.
Best practices these days are where you build trust with your customers from day one. Customer habits have shifted where not only are they expecting a certain level of customer excellence, but they want that trust and authenticity earlier on.
This is what gets them to recommend your products or services in the end and helps to build up a level of certainty.
Understanding how to implement an ABX strategy
Many often feel that customer experience is just a fancier term for customer support.
Yet there is a core difference between the two, and that’s where customer support is reactive; customer experience is all about taking a proactive approach.
It’s about the anticipation of the questions clients and customers may have and working to develop ways to deliver the answers to them.
It becomes a partnership between the company and the customer so that they always have someone they can rely on to provide feedback and keep them engaged.
This is done post-sales typically and reduces churn rate, especially when you’re providing a subscription-based service or product.
This makes customer success a critical component of helping with connecting the final dots in the end with revenue operations.
The reason for their importance is that they are the ones that will continue interacting with the customer as long as they are, well, a customer. This could be months to years of continuous interaction, assessing their ongoing needs, and continuing to sell and cross-sell relevant products and services that make sense to these customers.
It is an integral part of Net Revenue Retention (NRR), which is how much recurring net revenue each customer brings in over a specified period. It also helps when it comes to calculating the LTV or lifetime value of a client, which helps shape the value each client brings.
Hannah Pegram
How revenue operations comes in
RevOps is there to help with connecting the dots and bringing alignment.
More than two-thirds of marketers are saying how important the customer journey touchpoints and channels are to be connected in these markets. And what revenue operations is, is a killer.
What RevOps is killing is gaps - between everything from various departments and channels to gaps in processes that end up destroying revenue growth.
It does this through alignment and efficiency, through data and metrics that help to provide focus on revenue growth.
Revenue operations helps to relieve the problems above, as well as connect everything together, developing a unified go-to-market strategy.
All the while being guided through the power of data and metrics to show them where the best opportunities are.
Without this type of connectivity, we have these gaps that will continue to widen, and the customer journey will feel disconnected and staged instead of having a seamless flow.
You build out a single source of truth in the revenue operations team, up to the point where anyone that’s part of that team will eventually be able to field any questions.
Beyond that, every touchpoint from RevOps will be run efficiently and push for sales from different angles.
With all elements combined, it shows that the metrics provided and supported by the RevOps teams help to establish the overall strategy to achieve growth, from go-to-market strategies to maintaining customers.
Guy Rubin
Bottom line
A data-driven approach to revenue operations and customer experience, coupled with an understanding of the customer journey and a proactive approach to customer experience, can help companies achieve growth and success in today’s competitive landscape.
By embracing data-driven metrics and developing a unified go-to-market strategy with RevOps, companies can position themselves for long-term success and build valuable relationships with their customers.
Leore first published this article on medium.com
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