Revenue Operations, or RevOps, started with large enterprise companies. Savvy leaders realized that siloing their sales, marketing, and customer success teams was resulting in disjointed goals, bloated budgets, and poor results. RevOps is an approach that drives revenue growth by aligning your sales, marketing, and customer service activities. Eliminating the silos.

But what a lot small business owner’s don’t realize is that this approach doesn’t work just for enterprise. It can be adopted and utilized profitably for small business as well. In fact, in my experience helping businesses implement RevOps as a foundation, I find business reach profitability faster than conventional silos.

So, take a few minutes and read through this introduction carefully we’re about to grow your company’s revenue and increase efficiency.

What Is Revenue Operations?

Good business owners realize that silos are dangerous to the development of accountable businesses. To break down silos and encourage inter-departmental collaboration, many owners have adopted ‘cross-functional teams’ that bring employees together from different departments to work on a single project. By working together, employees learn more about each other’s roles and can create better strategies for serving customers and achieving organizational goals.

Cross-functional teams also allow companies to get the most out of their resources. Instead of each department doing its own thing, they’re able to leverage the talents of everyone involved in a given project to maximize efficiency and ensure success.

For example, if a company wants to launch a new product, they can put together a cross-functional team made up of representatives from marketing, sales, customer service, finance, human resources and more. This way, everyone has input when it comes time to make decisions about messaging, pricing and customer support rollouts.

In today’s fast-paced business environment it’s essential for organizations to break down silos between departments and have their employees collaborate as much as possible for maximum success. Cross-functional teams are an excellent way for companies to achieve this goal.

Here’s a great example in action

A firm hasn’t yet implemented RevOps thinking into their business. They’re revenue goal for the year is $5 million. So they start setting KPIs with each department leader.

Sales already has it’s goal, $5 million. But, what about marketing?

The marketing department looks at win rates of 20% and average deal size of $5,000. They say great. That’s a 1000 deals for sales to close. With a 20% win rate that means marketing needs to generate 5000 leads for the sales team.

So, they go out and generate 5000 leads. They provide these leads to sales and then celebrate a job well done.

But, sales is struggling, the leads are completely cold, they don’t know anything about the company, some of the leads aren’t in business anymore, some are out of their buying cycle, most are not going to be closed in the timeframe marketing has given to sales.

Sales misses their revenue target and blames marketing. Marketing says, “We gave them 5000 leads, that was our job, it’s their fault they can’t close.’ But, it’s the business that loses. The division between the departments created misalignment and a lack of accountability. Yes, sales didn’t reach their goal but marketing didn’t understand what kind of lead they were supposed to give sales, creating a very bad feedback loop.

Owners and leaders can eliminate this common problem but adopting RevOps in their business.

At this stage, you may be thinking, is RevOps right for me?

Here are some signs you should develop a RevOps strategy for your small business:

• Your revenue targets are consistently missed.
• Your marketing, sales, and customer success teams don’t work together.
• You paid for an expensive CRM system, but nobody knows how to use it.
• You don’t use a CRM at all.
• Employees are consistently confused or lacking focus on their goals.
• You don’t have regular sales meeting and aren’t really even sure what’s going on with the sales team.

If your experiencing the above points, you’re probably in need of RevOps. Book a call with us today to start learning more about how it works.

Problem Solving with RevOps

A lot of client’s ask me, “How can you tell when RevOps is working.” Which, to be honest, is a pretty complicated question. However, over the years I’ve refined the answer down to a simple 2-step equation.

Before RevOps: You never know how much money you’re going to make from one month to the next because there is no consistency in your business. This keeps you up at night and causes huge amounts of stress.

After RevOps: You have a pretty good idea how much money is coming in the door each month. You know where it is coming from and you know where it is going. RevOps is working because it has created predictable business growth.

Further, your people are happier. Your team does their job and there is less chaos. You, as the owner, are not putting out the same fires again and again. Sure, there are fires, but they’re new, more challenging, and more fun; they also bring in a lot more money.