Building a Revenue Operations Team

What is Revenue Operations (aka RevOps)?

Revenue Operations, usually shortened to RevOps, is a B2B function that integrates marketing, sales, and customer service teams through automations (such as the HubSpot CRM) to reduce your staff’s workload and enable your company to scale more easily. 

RevOps uses automated workflows to assist your team through the process of capturing, nurturing, selling, and offering support to leads and customers so that your team can better focus on human interaction. Using this methodology, companies don’t need bigger teams to achieve increased revenue goals.

RevOps came about because companies were increasingly giving marketing the responsibility to generate revenue. This increased expectation led to marketing ops, sales ops, which manages the sales functions in a business, and finally, RevOps, which encompasses everything from the lead's first interaction to customer support.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy, but how do you even begin to implement a revenue operations strategy?

How to create a revenue operations strategy

Building a revenue operations strategy means bringing together your marketing, sales, customer success, and finance teams and aligning their functions with three goals in mind: reducing costs, streamlining internal processes, and identifying new revenue opportunities.

You’ll achieve these goals by taking three elements into account—people, processes, and systems.

People Supporting a Revenue Operations Process

This includes both your customers and your internal teams (marketing, sales, and customer service). On one hand, you need to clearly define who your customers are and what they’re trying to achieve. This step is crucial as each of your teams will have a different perspective based on when they’re entering the conversation. To help your team align on this point, it helps to map out your buyer’s journey.

With a clear buyer’s journey, it’s time to define which of your teams will fulfill their needs. This is largely related to where the customer is in the customer lifecycle — ie, your marketing team will be the first point of contact; once the lead is ready for more, the sales team will step in. And finally, the customer service team will be there to support them after they’ve become customers.

Now, you get to move on to how things will be done.

Building a Revenue Operations Process

Once you defined who is responsible for each step in the customer lifecycle, it’s time to define how the teams will operate.

First, we want to devise a way for marketing teams to hand off the lead to the sales team as soon as they’re ready to engage with a sales rep. This is called a “marketing qualified lead” or MQL. Marketing qualified leads are leads that are a good fit for your product and have expressed interest in learning more.

Once the lead is passed to sales, the sales team will then determine if the lead is a “sales qualified lead” or SQL. One tool for measuring a lead’s status as an SQL is the BANT analysis, which assesses a lead’s budget (can they afford to invest in a solution?), Authority (are they the right person to make the buying decision?), Need (do they have a need or problem your offer can solve?), and Timeline (do they have a clear timeframe to make a decision?). If they “pass” this assessment, the sales team would begin working on an opportunity until the lead becomes a customer.

Next, once a lead has become a customer, it’s time for the customer success (or account management) team to take over. The CS team will onboard the customer and provide them with the products or services they purchased. 

The sales-CS handoff is essential for a positive customer experience that has the potential to create recurring revenue and convert customers into evangelists.

Choosing Revenue Operations Systems

Finally, now that you’ve defined your customer lifecycle and the role of each team, it’s time to create the systems that will enhance this collaboration.

With HubSpot, you’ll use workflows and automations to ensure that contacts move through the CRM and that each team is able to step in at the right time. The key functions you need in your marketing automation tool are:

• Record when a new lead takes action (requests a download, books a consultation or demo, and more). This can trigger email sequences and other automated activities.
• Notify when the lead has become a marketing or sales qualified lead.
• Assist in the handoff between sales and customer success for a smooth onboarding.

Developing a RevOps Team

Companies wanting to roll out a RevOps strategy need to create what’s called a RevOps team. This team is divided into “sections” that are responsible for each stage of the marketing > sales > customer service process. 

So, whom do you need?

First, your marketing team will be responsible for creating content and marketing initiatives to support the brand, reach prospective customers, and educate your audience. These efforts will generate leads.

Second, you have your marketing operations team. Marketing Operations is defined by HubSpot as, “the people, processes, and technology that power a business’s overall marketing strategy and increase chances of success.” This team is in charge of mapping the customer journey, leading the RevOps process, turning marketing into a revenue engine, and implementing marketing automation and analytics.

Third, the sales team is responsible for interacting with the leads generated by your marketing efforts. Your sales reps will connect with, educate, and turn leads into customers.

The fourth part of your RevOps team is Sales Operations. Often abbreviated as Sales Ops, this team manages the CRM and sales automations. This includes creating workflows triggered by specific revenue streams, email sequences, and alerts going out to the sales team once leads are ready to purchase. Reporting and monitoring are also part of the Sales Ops team’s responsibility.

Finally, your Customer Service or Account Management team is responsible for maintaining the customer experience long-term, encouraging upsell and referrals, and deepening relationships with existing customers.

A Revenue Operations Strategy can completely transform your business

Revenue Operations is an essential business function that breaks down the silos in your organization so that every team can work together toward the company’s goals.

By implementing a RevOps strategy, you can better leverage the tools in your existing MarTech stack, shorten your sales cycles, and increase your revenue without the need for a bigger team. In fact, your RevOps strategy will free up their time to engage with leads or customers instead of tracking data or following manual processes.

Are you interested in exploring RevOps? 

Book a consultation with our team to figure out if your organization is ready for a revenue operations strategy.