During this Women in Revenue HUG event on July 28, 2022, we learn about the fundamentals of RevOps with Senior Director of Revenue Operations Ryan Milligan, at QuotaPath. Revenue operations are the people, process, systems, and data that controls how your business generates revenue. We covered:
- Introduction to revenue operations: What is it why important
- Applying RevOps to the Flywheel across marketing, sales, and customer success
- Exercise on mapping out force and friction focus on customer experience and customer journey
- Walk away with a launchpad for starting RevOps at your company.
First, a little background on our speaker, Ryan Milligan. Ryan leads the revenue operations at QuotaPath, the best tool to design fully customizable compensation plans, forecast commissions in real-time, and surface commission insights. He is passionate about connecting systems together, building scalable processes, and geeking out on SQL.
Introduction to Revenue Operations
Revenue Operations, also known as RevOps, is an automated business process that aligns the sales, marketing, and customer service organizations to make decisions that drive predictable revenue and promote growth. It includes the people, processes, systems, and data that control how a business generates revenue.
Ryan explains RevOps as "effectively getting somebody from a prospect to a two-year renewal in the simplest, least painless way possible for everyone involved." It's evaluating processes, data, and analytics to build scalable processes for growth.
Why you need Revenue Operations
To put it simply, streamlining processes and silos. With the explosion of tech stack tools, different technologies, and speed to lead being a huge metric that needs to be monitored, it's really important that we as marketers remember that our buyers are human at the end of the day.
They're not a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), they're not a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) they're not a Product Qualified Lead PQL, they're not a Lead, they're a person. It is important to understand this and build a process where we can talk that person through the different stages of the buying journey and make sure it's easily understandable.
We have so many tools in our tech stacks these days RevOps is key in the management, integration, automation, and migration of data between the tools to create a seamless customer journey and sales process. Automation is a wonderful tool when used correctly. Unfortunately, when automation breaks, it can cause unnoticed buyer friction. For example, if a person fills out a form and doesn't revive a follow-up email or their requested downloadable content, it creates friction that cannot be seen from the seller's point of view.
Lastly, RevOps helps to solve the problem of "throwing leads over the fence". Simply put, marketing brings in leads via SEO and paid search, webinars, and events and then hands them off to sales for closing. In this use instance, the sales team does not know what stage of the buying process the lead is in, where the lead came from, etc., which puts them at a disadvantage. By implementing a more integrated buying process, marketers can track the stage of the buying process the lead is in, nurture where needed, provide instant access to purchase or pass along to sales for closure. The Revenue Operations team oversees the process holistically on the customer journey side to review and assist in both marketing, sales, and customer success.
How to Unify your Revenue Operations
It's important to identify the financial targets of the business and drivers, be it ops, ASP, win rate, etc. A clear and agreed-upon financial target plan is key to any business and team's success.
The next step is to map out the entire customer journey from start to finish. If you're looking for ideas, it's always useful to "secret shop" competitors and note their sales processes, what you like, how it could fit within your business, and what hiccups you run into along the way. Once your customer journey is mapped out and in place, take the time to go through the process yourself firsthand to ensure it runs smoothly.
What does a unified Revenue Operations look like?
Shared organizational goals across marketing/sales/CS and alignment of revenue growth goals across all aspects of teams. Teams should also have sub-goals, but a good portion of what success looks like for them, whether that's financially, at work, or whatever the case, should be tied to the something that everyone can measure together.
With the alignment of teams, a shared source of truth becomes imperative to success. Dashboarding the metrics from the financial plan and having them easily accessible for everyone to see on a weekly basis keeps teams unified and working towards the same goals.
Finally, make sure to always problem solve with a customer-first approach. Keep in mind that you're not solving an MQL operation rate but how and where people are getting stuck in the sales process. Use an empathetic approach to solving these problems on your prospects or customers' behalf.
Applying RevOps to the Flywheel
Flywheel: A model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience.
Mapping your Flywheel
Let's think about the flywheel from a momentum perspective. Current customers are very involved in your marketing process. Such things as case studies, testimonials, peer reviews, and sharing are super important. Knowing this allows you to empower your customers to speak on your behalf, to upsell their experience with your product, and can be a very important part of your marketing process.
When mapping your flywheel model, consider points of acceleration and points of friction. So a flywheel powered by acceleration points is attracting people to your website, getting them to book a demo, engaging them through the sales process, and then delighting them as customers.
How does your company attract people?
How does your company Engage people?
How does your company delight people?
Optimizing Force and Friction
Think about Force as the places your company makes investments and Friction as a tool to measure what you'll be doing in RevOps.
From a force perspective, we've talked about a bunch of ways to accelerate people moving through the fly flywheel and how to measure a booked demo to closure. Make sure that you've set up systems that do not hold the customer back from their optimal experience because you're trying to stay in alignment with some of the measurement systems that are in place for your business. Make wise investments in software and tools that help you work towards your goals, not hinder and overcomplicate the customer journey.
From a friction perspective, you're identifying the places that can be more challenging, while critically thinking about business. When thinking about removing friction, keep in mind that you want to provide tools and programs to serve your teams and customers as best as possible. Make jobs easier, and empower teams to solve a customer problem that will reflect the removal of friction.
If you're interested in attending more events like this, we invite you to join the Women in Revenue HUG group.
