Marketing operations, sales operations and customer success divisions are all familiar. But what about revenue operations? Revenue operations (or RevOps for short) aligns sales, marketing, accounting and other departments for operational efficiency across the customer life cycle. This strategically-driven division is helping organizations drive revenue like never before.
Revenue operations is a modern model for effective revenue-aligning efforts, engaging efforts throughout the organization. From lead generation to closing the contract, renewals through customer service, revenue operations breaks down silos among traditionally independent divisions, uniting teams towards a stronger bottom line.
That’s great, but where’s the revenue?
The mandate of revenue operations is revenue.
But if you take a closer look at the emphasis on vendors and content in the space, the focus is very much on getting net new deals booked. How do leads get attributed? What about the MQL-SQL handoff? And how do we optimize the opportunity flow and get quotes generated faster?
That’s all very important, but what happens after the first deal is signed and those bookings start translating into actual revenue?
In today’s economy, it’s absolutely essential that revenue operations prioritize the protection and growth of install base revenue. With IT budgets being cut, contracts can be at greater risk. And it’s much easier to engage your current customers to expand than starting a net new conversation in today’s virtualized selling environment. Unfortunately, this area has traditionally been overlooked relative to the emphasis on net new deals.
So, how can revenue operations help?
RevOps should be focused on how bookings translate into revenue, and how to create a consistent experience at each step of the process and customer life cycle. To bring that to life, it all comes down to commercial relationships—what your customer has contracted for, under what terms and price and what they have purchased against that contract—and how your organization navigates them post-signature.
In most companies, this information is haphazardly managed with no centralized view and tasks spread across account management, customer success, finance, renewals, deal desk and legal. This lays a shaky foundation and creates an inconsistent customer experience, wasted effort and missed revenue.
If you want to improve this area and truly realize the revenue in RevOps, here are five things to consider:
- Does every member of my customer-facing teams have identical, accurate and complete information on the current state of our commercial relationships? And can they access it in minutes?
- Are we billing our customers correctly? And are we actively and correctly applying all contracted pricing, like uplifts and minimums?
- Do I know my customers’ SLAs and non-standard contractual terms?
- Do I know my precise renewal forecast for upcoming contracts and product renewals? And do we know which accounts could be at risk?
- Do my account teams know what the customer has under contract, what they’ve purchased against the contract and where there is white space?
At its best, RevOps can be a critical revenue and install base growth engine for your company. And people across your organization can thrive with a holistic perspective.
What’s your next step toward more revenue?
Getting your arms around the full picture of your commercial relationships is critical, but often challenging. The details your team needs are spread across multiple systems and locked in PDFs and spreadsheets.
Companies typically uncover a lot of manual work behind the scenes, with departments relying on different and sometimes conflicting data. Equally dangerous, those groups may interact with the customer based on wrong or outdated information, making an unprofessional and disorganized impression on your valuable customers. But there are solutions to closing this information gap and eliminating revenue leakage across your business.
By filling this gap and gaining a complete view of your commercial relationships, every team member from sales to account management to commercial strategy will have access to the same set of customer information.
Ready to uncover your commercial relationships?
Shifting your organization from focusing only on “getting revenue from net new customers” to “growing and retaining the revenue from your current customers” starts with filling the information gap. What would it look like if your organization knew every detail of every customer relationship? What revenue could you realize if every customer-facing team had access to essential information across the contract lifecycle?
