Consultants typically offer their expert knowledge to an organization to help them solve complex business problems. This allows for an external perspective to focus on these issues over a period of time.
But what problems can a revenue operations consultant solve? What expertise can they offer? And what challenges do they face?
This article dives into the:
- Responsibilities of a RevOps consultant
- Challenges in RevOps consulting
- Top skills for RevOps consultants
What does a RevOps consultant do?
RevOps consultants work with client companies to optimize their internal processes by reducing bottlenecks. They do this by aligning internal teams and breaking down silos. This allows a more fluid movement of information and data - creating a more efficient revenue process.
Marketing, sales, and customer success teams all work with customers along their customer journey. So when these departments work in isolation, handovers can be rocky and data can get duplicated or lost.
This is where a revenue operations consultant would step in. They would help to manage or create a centralized system for lead information and help to reduce duplicated data. In turn, this can improve customer experience (CX) and employee satisfaction.
A RevOps consultant can also help to set up or manage campaigns to help retain and expand the client’s customer base. This may include improving onboarding, increasing retention, and boosting upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Overall, a RevOps consultant can provide an external perspective and expertise, leading to revenue growth in their client’s business.
Daniel O’Dowd
What are the responsibilities of a RevOps consultant?
Woah… that was a lot of information - let’s break it down into the key duties of a revenue operations consultant.
- Streamline existing processes - Reducing silos, sharing data, and removing blockers resulting in an optimized revenue process.
- Resolve tech stack issues - Ensure each element of your tech stack complements each other and removes duplicated data to save revenue teams time.
- Improve CX - Creating a more streamlined customer journey by improving handovers to improve CX and customer retention.
- Go-to-market (GTM) and sales strategy - Developing the GTM and sales strategy to help clients grow their revenue.
- Provide an external perspective - Consultants bring an external perspective to the organization that an internal RevOps team wouldn’t have, so can provide objective suggestions.
But this varies depending on your offerings as a consultant!
Challenges of RevOps consultants
Working as a revenue operations consultant can have its fair share of challenges. Let’s take a look at some of the problems you might run into when working in RevOps consultancy.
Understanding the business environment
As a RevOps consultant, you’ll be working in many different industries at a wide range of organizations. This means understanding the business environment may be a challenge.
However, this is also a key element as it will allow you to understand how your client generates revenue. Without this understanding, it would be almost impossible to effectively increase their revenue.
Tech stack complexities
Every company uses a slightly different tech stack. This means revenue operations consultants must have a great understanding of the function’s most popular tools and how they work together. But tech stacks can get complicated fast.
Companies can have up to 20+ tools in a sales tech stack. And as a RevOps consultant, you have to be able to untangle that web to unveil where blockers might arise, or which programs are incompatible.
This knowledge will be a massive helper in auditing and reworking your clients' tech stack.
Rebecca Stewart
Aligning with broader business goals
Communicating with your clients is important in any consultancy - RevOps is no different. In order to understand the long-term goals of your client’s business it’s important to listen closely and ask the right questions.
Since you have an outsider's perspective it may be more challenging to understand these business goals, but these should drive the strategy and changes you implement.
Managing change
Consultancy may mean rocking the boat a little, I mean you’re an outsider making a ton of changes to workflows and systems, after all. So be prepared for some pushback!
It’s your approach to navigating these changes that can make all the difference in reducing conflict. Strong leadership and expertise may be required to set your client at ease. Don’t be afraid to explain why you think a change would work best!
There may have to be a negotiation between what you think will work best and what the client is willing to change.
Measuring success
Measuring the success of your project is super important in understanding the difference you made. This can help you to secure more clients and retain the ones you have since they have proof that you improved their processes and revenue.
A data-driven approach is therefore key to a successful revenue operations consultancy strategy.
Ella Harrison
What skills do you need for RevOps consulting success?
Looking to start your career in RevOps consultancy?
This section will discuss what skills you need to succeed as a RevOps consultant. But first Greg Larsen, VP of RevOps at Eltropy and Founder of Catalyst Sales Consulting, discusses his path into RevOps consultancy.
“I somewhat stumbled into it while working on the corporate side.
“I was asked to help with a project and then when I presented it to the company, they asked me to stay on long-term and we worked out a consulting situation.
“I then got a handful of referrals and it grew from there.”
Analytical skills
The ability to analyze complex situations and draw conclusions is key for a RevOps consultant. This skill will allow you to see the gaps in your client’s strategy and understand where the bottlenecks are.
In turn, allowing you to make intuitive changes to these processes that allow your client’s business to run smoother and generate more revenue.
Communication
Communication skills are so important for RevOps consultancy. These skills can help you to understand the business environment and your client's goals. Clear communication is also critical to managing change and retaining your clients.
It is important to set expectations with your clients and to negotiate with them on the changes you implement to ensure they are happy with your services.
Greg Larsen describes how he uses conversations to retain his clients:
“Many clients will start out as an initial project, but the goal is always to turn them into long-term clients. I've found that the way that you frame your value add in the initial conversations can set that up for success.”
Rebecca Stewart
Leadership
As we mentioned, it can be tricky to manage changes in an organization. Having strong leadership skills can make this process easier as stakeholders will naturally trust your expertise and follow your lead.
It can also be useful to show your expertise as this can help your client to feel at ease, and trust your abilities. (Just don’t toot your own horn too much!)
Data skills
Data skills are crucial to measuring the success of your work and displaying this information in an easy-to-understand way. A data-driven approach to RevOps can involve lots of complex metrics - so being able to summarize this information is key.
Your clients might not be able to make sense of the data that you have collected, so breaking it down and creating visualizations of key metrics will give you the edge in helping your clients succeed.
Rebecca Stewart
Final thoughts
To sum it up, RevOps consultants work with businesses to streamline processes, resolve tech stack issues, and align teams. This is very similar to how an in-house revenue operations team would operate.
The major difference is that consultants have an external point of view and can work with many clients to solve revenue problems.
Continue the conversation over on our Slack channel! 👇
