Revenue operations (RevOps) is a growing function that is helping companies to grow their revenue streams more effectively. This role can also bring rich results to companies with SaaS business models in the growth stage.
Is a RevOps team the next function you need to hire for your SaaS company?
Learn more about how a revenue operations function could benefit your business by aligning your teams, delighting your customers, and generating revenue growth.
We cover:
What is RevOps?
Revenue operations is an operations function that aims to align the revenue-generating functions (sales, marketing, and customer success) to ensure they all pull towards the same goals.
The four pillars of revenue operations are operations, enablement, insights, and tools. These key areas allow RevOps to optimize processes, enable teams, increase data-driven decision-making, and remove technology inefficiencies all while aligning revenue teams and driving revenue growth.
Instead of focusing on small parts of the customer journey by siloing sales operations, marketing operations, and customer success operations, RevOps seeks to align operations teams across the entire customer lifecycle. Allowing a smoother revenue process across your organization.
Want to learn more about the power of revenue operations? Check out our guide:
Revenue Operations Alliance
Why is RevOps a must for growing SaaS companies?
Growth-stage SaaS companies may start to run into new challenges as their teams get bigger. Mainly, your departments may begin to silo as they increase in size. With this misalignment comes teams all pulling in different directions.
The result? Your business growth starts to slow or even stagnate, as your teams try to meet their departmental goals (and start to pull away from wider business goals).
A RevOps function with a well-implemented strategy can change your SaaS company for the better. The function focuses on alignment within your revenue-generating teams, leading to increased revenue growth and more satisfied customers.
Let’s dive into the reasons why revenue operations is crucial for a growing SaaS company.
Alysson Pehoski
Align business goals
Ever find that your revenue departments are all pulling in different directions? A revenue operations team can help to align those teams toward a common goal.
Sales, marketing, and customer success teams can sometimes get carried away and start focusing on their short-term team goals over long-term business objectives. RevOps can shift the focus back to revenue generation, leading to sustainable growth over time.
To create this cross-functional alignment, revenue operations focuses on visibility across these functions - including merging databases and encouraging cross-collaborative meetings.
Once your teams are sharing data and talking to each other regularly they can focus on improving customer experience and generating MQLs, leading to decreased churn rates and increased sales. In turn, growing your recurring revenue over time.
Customer satisfaction
Since your revenue-generating teams are more aligned than ever they can work together to create a seamless customer journey across the sales cycle.
Visibility across functions allows data to all be in one place, so marketing, sales, and customer success can all work from the same information to delight your customers. This allows revenue opportunities for upselling and cross-selling to be identified and ensures the warning signs of churn are spotted early.
Handovers between sales and customer success teams can be much smoother and more effective once these teams start working together. RevOps may even help to automate some of these processes, by implementing automatic welcome email sequences.
This frees up customer success reps' time and allows them to spend more time providing quality customer service to your clients, further improving customer satisfaction and reducing churn.
Happy customers = better retention rates!
Remove inefficiencies
The revenue operations function loves to streamline your processes and workflows by clearing common blockers and removing unnecessary technology. These procedural changes can allow your teams to work more efficiently and produce better results.
RevOps teams also try to automate regular repetitive tasks, this can further enhance revenue-generating processes by reducing workload from your teams and allowing them to spend more time selling, creating brand awareness, and supporting your customers.
Enhanced decision-making
RevOps professionals like to focus on the data. This means they can bring predictability and consistency to forecasting and other key metrics within your sales, marketing, and customer success functions.
These insights will help you to make data-driven decisions that can help your business to grow and generate revenue. Including investing in the right markets, channels, and audiences.
You can also use these insights to better train your sales reps, by understanding what differentiates your top performers from the rest. This information can be used to train and enable the whole sales team, leading them to close more deals.
Sustainable scaling
RevOps might be the key you were looking for to continue scaling your SaaS company sustainably. Since the function creates a cohesive ecosystem between people, processes, and technology that focuses on revenue growth, it’s an essential element for scaling up your business.
Oscar Armas-Luy
How does RevOps affect your tech stack?
Sometimes having 20+ tools in your tech stack is unnecessary, but pulling that network apart can be a daunting task full of landmines. Revenue operations will help you optimize your tech stack and cull redundant software and tools.
Removing unnecessary platforms from your tech stack will allow your teams to work more efficiently as they don’t need to constantly hop between tools.
RevOps teams can also implement systems to protect the data quality of your main database. By prioritizing data hygiene in your CRM, you can create a single source of truth allowing better reporting and monitoring of your revenue cycle.
This can lead to more informed decision-making and allow you to catch warning signs earlier - meaning you can course correct to stay on track!
Plus, getting rid of a few redundant tools from your tech stack will save your SaaS business money you didn’t even realize you were wasting.
Rebecca Stewart
Final thoughts
With the power of RevOps, SaaS companies can grow to new heights!
Utilizing revenue operations to align your revenue-generating functions, improve customer satisfaction, and optimize internal processes will lead to increased revenue growth.
And once your new RevOps team is finished with your tech stack, you might even save some money - further boosting your bottom line!
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