There are people who pride themselves on their ability to be on-trend and cool whether that is in their fashion sense, the movies they watch, or even the hot buzzwords in business. I’m not really one of those people. I’m a bit of a skeptic and tend to prefer to create my own path. Pick any proverbial kool-aid, and I’m simply not going to drink it on principle. So when my colleagues started using the term RevOps I all but ignored it at first. It sounded like a lot of nonsense, and possibly the sort of puffery consultants use to sell snake oil and make it sound fancy. Eventually, the term was seemingly everywhere, so I decided I needed to at least get a sense of what people meant when they used it.
What is is RevOps?
RevOps is short for revenue operations. So what does that mean? There are multiple definitions as it is an emerging concept in business. In its most essential form, RevOps brings marketing, sales, and service together working toward the same goal–producing revenue. Don’t businesses already do that? Well, not really. Most businesses have those three essential functions existing separately as different departments or roles within their organization. There no doubt are ways those functions collaborate and communicate with one another, but seldom are they integrated meaningfully or effectively.
In recent years we’ve seen more efforts called sales enablement, or even sales and marketing alignment, and while many of those attempts have produced results in companies, there is one glaring omission–service. Even the best sales enablement program completely falls apart if the company can’t deliver a remarkable customer experience during and after the sale.
Why I ultimately drank the kool-aid
Turns out RevOps was the concept I never knew I always needed. Over the years as we’ve grown our business we’ve fine-tuned our services so we could get even better results for our clients. We started out as a conventional digital marketing and public relations agency. Over time we’ve increasingly shifted what we do and how we do it because the need was so apparent. We’d drive tons of traffic and generate lots of leads for our clients only to see their poor sales processes squander the leads. Or we’d have a client who was consistently hitting their sales goals only to lose the business later because of poor follow-through and bad customer service.
It felt like there was a lot of futility in our work. Implementing RevOps solves these recurring issues. It’s a solution that actually helps our customers achieve what they set out to do. It’s more than a cheesy buzzword, it’s actually a smart approach to really growing a business.
What RevOps can mean for you
Companies implementing a RevOps strategy close more business faster, and retain more of that business. They are better able to evaluate what is working (or not) and WHY, so they can scale faster and more profitably than their competitors. Since everyone is working toward the same goals there tends to be better teamwork and less conflict between internal stakeholders. If your company hopes to grow at a rate of 20% or more in a single year, then RevOps absolutely is the path for that growth.
