RevOps Alignment

What is RevOps Alignment?

RevOps alignment, or revenue operations alignment, is the strategic integration and synchronization of multiple departments — specifically sales, marketing, and service — to maximize revenue impact. It’s about breaking down the traditional silos that separate these departments and fostering synergy among revenue-related functions for a streamlined and efficient operation​​​​.

It involves the following activities:

• Aligning goals and objectives
• Sharing data and insights
• Integrating processes, systems, and tools
• Collaborating on strategies and tactics

RevOps is a relatively new concept that’s gaining traction as businesses realize the limitations of traditional departmental structures. It recognizes every department contributes to the overall revenue generation process. Aligning them towards common goals leads to significant growth and success.

Synonyms

• Aligning revenue operations functions
• Breaking RevOps silos
• RevOps tech stack alignment

Importance of Alignment in RevOps

The primary goal of RevOps alignment is cohesion between teams, which ensures departments execute smooth handoffs between one another, adhere to clear processes, and experience minimal friction.

Clear Alignment on RevOps Goals and Objectives

In today’s B2B organizations, the abundance of data, prominence of social selling, and increasing overlap between sales, marketing, and customer success activities has blurred the lines between each revenue-generating function. The only way to navigate this multifaceted environment is by bringing these departments together to share insights, align processes, and work towards a common goal: revenue growth.

Streamlined GTM Motion

RevOps touches every aspect of your GTM strategy.

• Marketing generates leads with messaging that prepares prospects for the sales pitch.
• The sales team, in turn, are equipped to address the specific points raised in the marketing materials.
• After a sale, the customer success team has all the context of the customer journey.

When you’re bringing a new product to market, the most important factor is the messaging. It has to be on-point, consistent, and true to your brand. Without RevOps alignment, there’s discrepancy between departments about customer pain points, sales messaging, and product positioning. This results in disjointed and ineffective GTM motion.

Synchronized Technology

Every department uses its own software, which makes sharing information quite a challenge without an integrated RevOps tech stack.

Briefly, this includes:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Marketing automation
• Sales enablement
• Configure, price, quote (CPQ)
• Revenue intelligence
• Reporting and analytics tools (e.g., a customer data platform)
• Project management
• Billing and subscription management

Members of your RevOps team won’t explicitly use each of these tools, but they all need to share information with one another in order to accurately reflect your organization’s revenue data, automate processes, and avoid duplicating work.

Data Sharing

Year after year, data reliability continues to be the biggest challenge for revenue teams. According to RevOps Co-op’s 2023 RevOps Trends Report, 78% of RevOps and sales leaders say they don’t have the right data to make accurate forecasts. And only 13.4% are able to automate their data processes entirely.

Aligning RevOps team members and systems is what makes it possible to share data. A single source of truth leads to more informed decision-making and fewer challenges as members of their respective departments connect with customers at different points in their journey.

• Marketing knows which leads are closer to converting.
• Sales knows what content leads have engaged with.
• Customer success can act upon any changes in customer behavior.
• RevOps leaders can make high-level decisions about the future of the company.

Although each individual department will make its own decisions, it’s ultimately up to RevOps leaders to figure out the right mix of strategies and tactics to take the business forward. Without a clear consensus on what’s already working and how customers move through the sales funnel, those decisions are impossible.

Customer Acquisition

Companies that invest in RevOps see a 10% to 20% increase in sales productivity. According to Forrester, they also grow 3x faster than those that don’t.

When productivity and efficiency go up, your sales cycle shortens and your customer acquisition cost goes down. The more efficient you are at acquiring new customers, the more resources and time you’ll have to devote to nurturing those relationships post-purchase (which should be the ultimate goal, especially if you’re running a SaaS/subscription business).

Customer Experience

The B2B customer experience determines whether or not you’ll sell to and retain a customer. Focusing on alignment between all revenue operations departments will help you move each customer painlessly through their journey.

While sales and marketing teams have to consider this, it falls on the customer success department to ensure they’re getting what they need from your business. The insights sales and marketing share can help them do that, but only if your information is accurate and seamlessly integrates with your CRM.

The Elements in RevOps Alignment

The three pillars of RevOps alignment are: Process, Platform, and People.

Process — How You Grow Your Business

Sales, marketing, and customer success departments each have their own processes. RevOps aligns them to a singular process.

With RevOps, companies need to:

• Define the stages of the funnel.
• Create SLAs between teams.
• Understand buyer personas and pain points at each stage.

Based on this information, your team should have a better understanding of how long it takes customers to make their way through the funnel, and how often they convert. You can then create team-specific goals that will help you reach your overall revenue targets.

Platform — How You Equip Your Team

How you collect, store, analyze, and share data with your different members of your revenue operations team is critical. This is where choosing the right tech stack comes into play.

Look for platforms that offer:

• Seamless integration with each department’s tools.
• Robust reporting and analytics capabilities.
• Automation features to streamline processes and eliminate manual work.

When selecting your tech stack, carefully consider whether each platform easily (and inexpensively) integrates with the others. The fewer software vendors, the better.

People — Goals and Incentives of Everyone in the Revenue Process

RevOps teams are tricky to evaluate and incentivize because they comprise members of multiple departments, each with their own goals and KPIs.

To evaluate RevOps success in a SaaS company, leadership should track:

• MRR/ARR growth
• Sales efficiency metrics like conversion rates and sales cycle length
• MQL:SQL conversion ratios
• Revenue expansion and customer retention rates

All these figures should come together to tell the story of how effectively your company is growing, how effective your revenue-generating activities are, and how healthy your customer base is.

How to Ensure RevOps Alignment

Shared Goals and Objectives

Setting revenue goals is a crucial aspect of RevOps alignment. It begins with each department understanding its part in the revenue generation process and setting individual goals that contribute to the overarching company objective.

Collaboration Across Teams

To ensure team collaboration, you need a centralized communication platform (e.g., Slack) where revenue teams can share information, ask questions, and give updates.

You’ll also have to set aside time for regular interdepartmental meetings where team members can discuss progress, challenges, and ideas together.

Shared accountability is another integral aspect of collaboration. Every department should take collective responsibility for achieving revenue goals, and not just rely on individual successes.

Unified Technology Stack

Again, choosing tools that integrate well is key to seamless data sharing. Your CRM is the central source of customer data, so it should be the most carefully selected tool in your stack. Integrate it with your sales, marketing, and customer success/support tools for a seamless data flow.

Data Quality and Consistency 

Beyond system integration, you need to establish data governance policies in order to keep data quality and consistency high. This will help you avoid errors, duplicate data, incomplete records, or conflicting information.

Defined Customer Lifecycle

Broadly, the customer lifecycle includes the following stages:  awareness, consideration, purchase decision, retention, and advocacy. RevOps alignment involves mapping each stage to a specific department.

• The awareness stage belongs to marketing.
• Sales takes over in the consideration phase.
• Customer success continues for retention and advocacy.

Agreed-Upon Metrics and KPIs

Every team measures success differently. The bottom line is, their individual goals need to contribute to those of the company. For that, each team needs to collectively agree with the others on which metrics and KPIs to track.

Let’s say your SaaS company’s overall goal is a 25% YoY increase in ARR. Based on this overarching goal, individual teams would set their KPIs as follows:

• Your sales team would determine the average deal size, then set goals for new customer acquisitions based on how many deals each rep has to close to accomplish that goal.
• Your marketing team would focus on how many qualified leads their campaigns feed into the pipeline, measured by brand awareness, clicks, engagements, and MQL:SQL/lead-to-customer conversion rates. They could also aim to improve the lead-to-customer conversion rate by a certain percentage, ensuring that the leads they produce are of high quality and more likely to close.
• Your customer success team would focus on retention rates and the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which reflects customer satisfaction and the likelihood of referrals. They might also have a KPI for upselling and cross-selling rates, which contribute directly to ARR growth.

Each team’s KPIs are directly linked to the overall revenue goal, and it’s their responsibility to strategize, execute, and adjust their activities to meet these KPIs. Regular cross-functional meetings would ensure that each team’s efforts are aligned and that they support each other in achieving the collective goal.

Executive Leadership Support

You’ll only be able to run your team successfully if executive leadership is willing to invest in the initative. RevOps alignment needs C-level backing to succeed, so those members need to clearly see the vision behind the collective effort.

Customer-Centric Approach

A customer-centric approach in RevOps revolves around prioritizing the customer experience at every stage of the sales funnel. This begins with understanding the customer’s needs, preferences, and pain points through comprehensive customer profiling and segmentation. With that info, each department can deliver a seamless customer experience.

Gather Feedback and Adapt

To identify new revenue opportunities and refine their approach, RevOps team members have to look at feedback together and adapt each team’s individual approach. For example, sales leaders can share what prospects ask the most during the sales process, and the marketing team can use that to address them in the company’s content.

Technology Requirements for RevOps Alignment

CRM

Your CRM is the central source of customer data, and your RevOps strategy won’t work without proper access to it. It’s also the deciding factor in most of your other software purchases.

Look for a platform like Salesforce or HubSpot that has a huge integration library. Even if you don’t think it matters now, it certainly will as you grow your company.

Marketing Automation

A lot of CRM vendors offer marketing automation tools within their platforms. In the same UI, you can handle your pipeline and sales data, your website tracking, and marketing automation.

Other marketing automation tools you might want to look for include:

• Email marketing tools (like MailChimp and Constant Contact)
• Social media management tools (like Hootsuite or Buffer)
• Analytics and ROI calculation tools (like Marketo or Oracle Eloqua)
• AI-powered lead scoring and customer segmentation

CPQ

CPQ software streamlines the sales process by automating quote, proposal, and contract generation.

This is where the majority of sales mistakes and delays happen, so it’s crucial to invest in a CPQ tool that handles the exact type of deals you’re closing. For example, a SaaS company would need one that handled subscription management and billing specifically.

Sales Enablement

Sales enablement platforms primarily focus on content management, training, and coaching.

Examples include tools for:

• Sales content management tools
• Sales engagement and lead management
• Training and coaching tools
• Coaching and feedback platforms
• AI notetaking and data gathering tools

Revenue Intelligence

Revenue intelligence platforms like Gong are central to your RevOps function. They leverage AI to mine customer and sales data, uncover patterns, identify areas of improvement, and make intelligent recommendations for action. It’s your competitive advantage in making data-driven decisions.

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