Spur Reply | Thought Leadership

How to Gain Executive Buy-In for Your RevOps Strategy

Written by Dan Overgaag | May 29, 2024 8:49:01 PM

Every organization is built upon a mission. It can be anything from revolutionizing an industry or advancing sustainability to supporting employees or building a legacy. Whatever the mission is, growth is required to achieve it.

There are many paths to growth such as mergers and acquisitions, outside investors, or debt, but when it comes to revenue growth specifically, we believe an organic approach is the most simple and sustainable path to success.

To accomplish this, many organizations are turning to revenue operations (RevOps). However, because RevOps efforts often span across many business units, support from your leadership team is vital. This blog will teach you how to secure that support.

Spur Reply’s years of experience partnering with clients to drive and optimize their growth have allowed us to develop a set of best practices to help you accelerate your organization’s revenue and grow its profitability. We’re sharing our tips with you in a five-part blog series.

In our first article, we covered what we believe traditional definitions of RevOps leave out, how we define it, and the positive outcomes this business approach can deliver for your business.

Our second article tackled the reasons your organization needs RevOps and why you should invest time and resources in it.

In the third article of the series, we broke down our unique methodology for RevOps implementation.

In our fourth article, we dove into the specific challenges our methodology solves for and how we used it to help two tech leaders transform their customer experiences.

Finally, in this article, we will give you pointers for securing executive buy-in for implementing RevOps in your organization.

Securing executive support for RevOps efforts

From our past blogs, you now know that RevOps can add value to your organization and you’re ready to implement it. But, how do you get your executives on board? 

We recommend the following five steps to show your leadership team why RevOps is essential to maximizing your revenue, and why you should invest time and resources into it.

Step #1: Highlight current business challenges

It’s no secret that friction between teams limits revenue realization. One of the most common business challenges we’ve seen RevOps help solve is organizational alignment. When your teams and channels are siloed, you are likely delivering inconsistent experiences to customers, stemming from your misaligned business goals and objectives.

When teams are siloed, they often own lots of small, targeted projects. Those small projects will, in turn, make small impacts on business revenue. To make a large-scale impact, RevOps helps knock down those silos and unify team objectives, maximizing revenue impact and streamlining the customer experience.

When making the case for RevOps to your leadership team, be sure to highlight current challenges in your organization that RevOps can solve, such as siloed teams and inconsistent customer experiences. Emphasize the potential impact that can come from better alignment across your teams and more effective systems and processes.

Step #2: Put yourself in the execs’ shoes

To gain executive buy-in, you need to frame it in terms they care about. Execs want to bring the “big picture” into focus so they can continue to find new ways to drive growth. Thankfully, RevOps is a cross-functional play that drives wide-reaching change across the entire business.

Additionally, revenue is a top concern for execs. It’s the lifeblood of any business. The more revenue growth your organization sees, the more stable it becomes. In times of macroeconomic uncertainty, maximizing revenue, efficiency, and ROI become even more vital. 

When communicating the importance of RevOps adoption to your execs, outline the revenue impact it can achieve. Prioritize how different business units and functions will work together to convert more prospects into customers, allowing your organization to exceed your sales targets and thrive.

Step #3: Quantify RevOps’ value and end results

The third step is to make your case more compelling with evidence. One way you can do this is by leveraging case studies with real-life results that showcase RevOps’ overall impact on other companies. You can also facilitate conversations between your execs and RevOps professionals with experience implementing it who can speak to the success of their past projects and results.

Take the time to do the math. Run projections to pinpoint the revenue impact you will be able to generate and compare that with the investment costs. When executed effectively, RevOps projects pay for themselves multiple times over. That’s why, according to Gartner, 75% of the highest-growth companies in the world will deploy RevOps by 2025.

To gain their buy-in, highlight case studies and calculations that demonstrate strong, reliable growth. Specific examples and sound projections will help your executive team gain confidence in RevOps.

Step #4: Position yourself for success

The fourth step to securing executive support is to paint a picture for the future. It should lay out a clear plan for how your business will adopt and implement RevOps, as well as how it will help you evolve going forward. Assess how your organization is currently meeting its goals and what you can target in the future.

Within your plan, address the top current challenges you covered in step one and the specific ways RevOps will solve them. Additionally, clearly define what success looks like at every level and timescale and include a roadmap that shows how you will get there.

Step #5: Build a winning team 

The last step in securing executive buy-in and launching a successful RevOps effort is assembling the right team. 

RevOps, by definition, is wide-reaching. You’ll need a team with deep cross-functional experience and leaders from multiple business units (product, channel, web, etc.). 

What you need is a coalition. Assemble a team that represents as many business units as possible. This results in two outcomes: 

  1. By involving each business unit, you can achieve greater buy-in from team members who are more likely to participate, thus increasing your odds of success. 
  2. By building a diverse coalition across the organization, you make a stronger case to your execs that your organization’s people see the value of RevOps and how it can transform your business. The more sponsors and advocates you have, the more likely the exec team is to support your efforts.  

Once you’ve secured executive buy-in, congratulations! You’ve cleared a large hurdle to RevOps implementation. Now comes the fun part: securing support from the rest of the company and launching your initiatives. 

RevOps, like all large efforts, requires buy-in from everyone. Nothing big works if it’s only top-down or bottom-up. Support must be bilateral. 

Securing support across the business can be tricky because RevOps comes with change, and that can be unattractive to some. The best way to secure front-line support from your organization’s people is to show them the vision; show them the positive impact RevOps will have on the business, and on them. When teams are better aligned, customer experiences are improved, and revenue growth is accelerated, everyone in the organization wins. 

Make your RevOps vision a reality

Finally, it can also be beneficial to bring in experts with a successful track record for RevOps implementation to act as your strategic partners. That’s where we come in. We can help you at whatever stage you’re at. 

  • Need help building your coalition or your case for RevOps to leadership? 
  • Want help calculating the impact that RevOps can drive for you, or mapping out your path to success?
  • How about support for launching your RevOps initiatives? How about messaging it, executing it, and tracking your progress?

We’re happy to guide you every step of the way.  

RevOps is hard, but it can be transformative. We’ve been guiding clients through these processes for years. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. 

In this five-part blog series, we’ve covered our perspective on RevOps and how it can help your business, the reasons we think it’s worth the investment, our unique methodology for implementation, some of the challenges it solves for, and now how to get your leadership team on board. 

If you want to discover the best way for you to maximize your revenue with RevOps, we’d be honored to partner with you and guide you on your journey. To get in touch with us, please fill out our intake form here. 

This blog is the fifth post in a five-part series on best practices in RevOps. Check out the first post to learn what we believe traditional definitions of RevOps leave out, how we define it, and the positive outcomes this business approach can deliver for your business.

Ready to take a deeper look at how to use RevOps as a key growth amplifier for your business? Download our comprehensive guide here.