Are you looking to use revenue operations (RevOps) as a catalyst to optimize your customer journey and grow your organization’s success?
By adopting a holistic approach to revenue acceleration, companies can bridge silos, identify new opportunities, and realize full market potential. But where do you start? Implementing RevOps into your business model may seem daunting, but with our proven, comprehensive approach, you will be able to easily pinpoint where to focus your efforts. Our RevOps methodology will help you find your footing in your journey to successfully accelerate revenue and optimize your customer journey.
Dan Overgaag and Josh Anway, leaders of RevOps at Spur Reply, sat down to discuss the approach and how to effectively execute it across your organization.
Dan is a managing director of Spur Reply’s business operations practice. He specializes in advising organizations on their business transformations and has 15+ years of consulting experience leading projects and strategic initiatives enabling the successful adoption and transformation of Business and Revenue Operations priorities. He enjoys using a process-driven and analytical approach to enable companies to maximize their effectiveness and draw clear, actionable insights that help meet their goals.
Josh is a Client Delivery Manager in Spur Reply’s business operations practice. He has 10+ years of experience helping B2B enterprise, tech, partner, and nonprofit organizations meet their strategic goals. Josh is a key leader in creating collaborative solutions to drive business growth. Specializing in RevOps, he is passionate about bringing together cross-functional stakeholders across large organizations to optimize key drivers for revenue acceleration.
Dan and Josh overview how to better align your organization’s teams, stakeholders, and processes, break down silos, closely connect your RevOps execution efforts, and lastly, shape your RevOps journey to define goals and a clear path for future success.
Check out the transcript below.
Transcript of the conversation
MIKALA FLYNN (WEBINAR HOST): Hi everyone. Thank you for joining today. We're excited for today's discussion on our RevOps methodology and how it can help you accelerate revenue and optimize your customer journey.
I'd like to start by introducing our speakers for the day. We have Josh Anway, one of our Client Delivery Managers of Business Operations, and Dan Overgaag, our Managing Director of Business Operations.
If you have any questions during today's sessions, please drop them in the Q&A section of the chat. We will be answering questions at the end of the discussion. If we run out of time before getting to a question, we will make sure to get those answered in a following communication along with the webinar recording. With that being said, let's get started. Dan, I will pass it over to you.
DAN OVERGAAG: Okay. Thank you, Mikala, and thank you, everyone, for joining today. Before we get started, I wanted to quickly run through what we intend to cover today. We'll do a quick round of introductions, then, lay a little bit of foundation in terms of how we think about RevOps and how we define RevOps. [We’ll] walk through a common scenario that we often see in organizations that we work with. We’ll outline our methodology and how that can impact the customer journey and your customer experience, then go into a quick overview on how to even think about getting started with RevOps, and then run into the Q&A that Mikala just referenced. So yeah, if we can jump to the next slide…
Again, my name is Dan Overgaag and I'm one of the Managing Directors at Spur Reply and I focus on our business operations and business transformation practice area.
JOSH ANWAY: And I'm Josh Anway. I'm a Client Delivery Manager here at Spur in the Business Operations practice area. For the last several years, I've been focusing on business operations and also on change management, and now, revenue operations. Excited to be here.
DAN OVERGAAG: Excellent. So let's start by setting a foundation and kind of breaking down a bit what RevOps is and what's the goal of focusing and working towards strong RevOps.
RevOps is a term that you've probably heard more and more about. It's becoming very popular. And you know, 18 months—a couple of years ago—we started thinking at Spur Reply about RevOps and [were] trying to understand, ‘What does it mean?’ [and] ‘What does it encompass?’ And everywhere that you look there's a different definition and a different perspective.
And so, we set out to answer that question for ourselves and spent several weeks just researching and trying to understand, ‘What is this thing called RevOps?’ And here's where we landed.
We believe RevOps is a system that's designed to connect and analyze and ultimately, improve your entire lifecycle of revenue realization as an organization.
With that definition in mind, it's important to recognize that every company that recognizes revenue in some capacity—which you know all companies do—has RevOps. What really changes [with RevOps] is the quality of that system that's working together.
So now, with that definition in mind, we then begin to think…’ Alright. What's the mission? What's the goal of focusing on RevOps?’ And again, for us, the goal is to better align and integrate your sales, your marketing, your different routes to market, and customer success units for repeatable revenue growth and profitability by ensuring that all the business elements that you have from your strategy to the people, the processes, technology, your data—[that] they're all working toward a common goal.
With that in mind, we then tried to create a mental image [and] visualization of how all of these different components of RevOps work together and relate. And with this visualization, you can see RevOps is pretty broad. It's very all-encompassing.
But what we wanted to do, again, is kind of create a framework or a structure to show all these different elements interplaying from your different business functions, from marketing to sales, and specifically within sales, the different routes to market you have. And then your customer success units are overlaid by the different business elements that you have.
It's important to note that each company [and] every organization is unique. They may not look exactly like this map, but this is a good starting point to understand all of the different components of RevOps, and how they interplay.
JOSH ANWAY: Yeah so I think now that we've got a sense of just what revenue operations is in concept and we think about how it might apply across a business theoretically, I think it'd be great for us to jump into something more concrete and start with a real-world example about how revenue operations can apply.
So here's a hypothetical situation that's really well aligned to what revenue operations can do to benefit a business.
Imagine that your tech company just launched a new product. Sales are lower than expected, and so you start digging into it, and you find that your dedicated sales, product, marketing, and customer service teams operate more or less in silos and only see their own data.
And so some of the challenges that come out of that situation [are that] you're going find that your sales team maybe wants to hone their pitch and the product team wants to make improvements but customer service actually owns all the feedback data.
Or you might find that your sales team needs leads right away but they don't have full visibility into marketing’s systems to know what's coming. You might also find that all your teams are scored and incentivized according to different metrics leading to low collaboration between teams.
And if you combine all these together, which is also the case often, that all of these result in a suboptimal product, frustrated customers and missed sales quotas. And so, in summary, valuable data is being underutilized for the business. So these are common, interconnected challenges that organizations face and we hope that by unpacking some solutions for them through the light of revenue operations, you can start to make an impact in improving your customer journey today. Next slide.
DAN OVERGAAG: I think that that scenario that you just outlined, Josh, is all too common and something that we see a lot in our work. So, the big question[s], then, [are], ‘How does RevOps help us address some of these common challenges that Josh just walked us through?’ and ‘How does RevOps help us actually focus on that customer journey?’
What we want to share today is what we call our ABC's methodology. This is a methodology that you can apply to your business in order to optimize that customer journey. And the steps are—that we've outlined and kind of starting in that top left quadrant there—align on your value drivers as an organization, break down silos between the different functions that you have as a business, connect your execution elements within your organization, and then shape your RevOps journey.
So now, what we're going to do is walk you through each step and then apply that step to the scenario that Josh just outlined to see what it looks like in action.
So the ‘A’ in our ABC's framework focuses on the alignment of your organization's value drivers. Value drivers in our minds are those key points where there's a value interchange across your organization or across your customer journey.
And for us, there are four elements to really focus on and pay attention to. First, align[ing] value drivers requires you to prioritize and develop a deep understanding of the different factors that contribute to revenue growth and profitability and also those high-impact customer interaction points, such as your website, your marketing campaigns, or maybe your renewal motions.
Optimizing key sales process handoffs is a second key element. These are the organization's most crucial moments in that customer journey from an internal perspective as they indicate a point in time where your prospect becomes a lead, and then eventually a customer, and once you've identified them, you can work to remove points of friction along that customer journey as customers are passed from marketing to sales and then on to the customer success teams.
The third focus area is your high-value process connection points. Also coming from an internal perspective, your process connection points indicate how your teams integrate their organizational systems and processes to achieve your goals as a company. You want to document those connection points that serve as the greatest factors in bringing your efforts across the finish line. This ensures both clarity and consistency within your daily operations and allows you to really optimize those operational activities.
And then, lastly, really focus on your cross-organizational processes. Anytime that you have process or data or systems that are working cross-functionally—that's a potential friction point. So again, you want to identify those points and focus your efforts on these particular areas in order to have significant gains. Ultimately, aligning your value drivers will ensure that you are focusing on the really high-impact elements and that'll really help drive that customer experience.
So now, let's, apply the ‘A’ in our methodology to the scenario. If you remember back to what Josh previously outlined, one of the challenges was teams working to share data with each other, thereby limiting visibility.
So the first thing we do is prioritize the customer integration points. This means getting our customer service and sales teams better aligned. They need to start sharing customer data so sales knows how a product is landing and they can adjust their pitch accordingly. And customer service needs to pass the feedback that they're hearing onto the product team so they can improve it in the next…upcoming iterations.
Next, we optimize those key handoff moments. Now that our teams are sharing data and seeing the bigger picture, we're able to streamline some of those handoffs during the sales process, thereby creating a smoother customer experience on the customer side.
Step three—we document those high-value process points. By doing this, we make our sales process more consistent, which ultimately accelerates employee onboarding [for] new employees that are coming on board, reduces your churn costs, and again, overall enhances that customer experience.
And, finally, we identify those cross-org opportunities for improvement. After seeing results from collaboration between, let's say, the customer service and the sales teams, the company can then review other areas for cross-org collaboration, again leading to a smoother experience for the customer.
Now, the ‘B’ in our ABC's framework refers to breaking down silos that often cause friction in that revenue realization process, and ultimately in your customer experience. By breaking down silos, you can eliminate the barriers between different teams within an organization.
The first thing to consider is establishing executive and stakeholder alignment early. It's really essential to prioritize that alignment as you start to implement RevOps into your business model. Involving stakeholders from different teams ensures that everyone is clear in their role and how they'll work together to optimize that customer journey. Early stakeholder support ultimately enables better cross-team collaboration and communication in the long run.
Secondly, institute a people-first bilateral communications approach. What I mean by that is a people-first approach focuses on collaboration and teamwork among different departments, teams, and groups. Bilateral communication allows people to proactively exchange ideas, information, and feedback between those different teams.
A third action is to focus on the impact of change by audience. RevOps done well requires change. So, by focusing on the impact of a particular change by audience, you can ensure that you're always putting together an approach that will guide you or lead you to success. And it's really important to remember that your customers are also an audience. So, always consider the change's impact to them and prioritize the impact that that change will have on your customers.
And then, finally, streamline those interaction points that span across business units. During the last step—the ‘A’ that I referenced earlier—you've already documented and detailed these interactions. Now, it's time to really address and focus on them.
Your interaction points can be the channels [through] which individuals communicate both inside and outside of your team, your organization or your business unit. But they may also include established processes or structures and potentially solutions and technologies. So, by really focusing and breaking down these organizational barriers that you'll have, you'll be able to drive a more streamlined cohesive customer experience with your customers.
So, again, let's now apply ‘B’—the ‘break down silos’—to our scenario.
So, remember another one of the challenges that was highlighted was the challenge of sales not having access or good access to the different leads that marketing was uncovering and developing. First, we establish executive and stakeholder alignment. To do this, we're going to have sales and marketing executives, for instance, set common customer experience-related objectives and key results (OKRs) for their teams. This ensures that both teams are working toward the same goal. They're working toward the same endpoint, which is customer satisfaction, perhaps.
Next, we institute that bilateral communication between teams. And it just so happens that, for instance, sales recently realized that the marketing leads weren't automatically being routed or shared with them. Once this issue is raised, marketing can adjust their processes to address that challenge which ultimately leads to enhanced visibility, lead variety, and ultimately the speed at which sales can respond to a customer in that cycle.
Next, we focus on the impact of change by audience. So, for instance, we just change the lead management and the lead distribution process, which means that the marketing team likely has to get trained on that new process, which potentially means additional work for your human resources (HR) or your training team [or] whoever might do training. By understanding that impact, you can then prioritize that change and that training and deprioritize other things that are on the plate. When changes like this are made, even if it is simple, it's crucial to think through all of the downstream effects so that your org can better balance the work and the impacts.
And then, finally, streamlining those interaction points that span business units, we can have customer service and sales and marketing make, for instance, a simple Teams channel called ‘Customer Journey,’ where you can share ideas and thoughts and feedback around how to really optimize that customer experience.
So, Josh, do you want to take us through the next couple?
JOSH ANWAY: Sure. Thanks, Dan. And I think one of the key callouts here, as we're getting through each of these steps, is to mention too that…each of these steps you can do independently of one another or not in any order that you want, but I think they are linear in the sense that they build on each other.
And so…once you align value drivers, you can identify what helps break down those silos. And then, moving into this next step of connecting your execution, you're really set up a lot better once you have those items already established.
So, we'll get into ‘connect your execution.’ This part of our framework represents connecting across all your revenue operations efforts. Driving revenue growth through your tactics and strategies starts with bringing together those stakeholders and functions across your organization, especially teams like sales, marketing, and customer success.
So, to get started, what you want to do is emphasize simplicity. RevOps is very expansive but the point is simplicity. Your processes, systems, and communication channels are all operational elements that need to be as simple as possible.
Identify and streamline these components within the elements that could be automated, better organized, or improved. Simplifying daily tasks in revenue generation boosts efficiency, reduces errors, and encourages teamwork in your organization.
Next, design your RevOps projects to be flexible, agile, and connected. The business landscape is constantly evolving, as you know. It's critical to set up organizations and teams that are positioned to shift their strategy and approach based on customer behaviors or market needs. Having this agility is one of your strongest assets to staying aligned with these market realities and delivering exceptional customer experiences.
And so, third, what you want to do is create and strengthen feedback loops. Implementing RevOps encourages a continuous improvement mindset. Feedback loops provide a mechanism for collecting insights, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing necessary changes. Create platforms in which regular feedback on RevOps efforts can be provided between collaborating teams and at the individual employee level. Growing in how you seek and incorporate feedback adds to your agility and effectiveness as an organization.
Finally, build and establish a single source of truth that contains all relevant data to your RevOps efforts. And I know that sounds really great. But it is often easier said than done. It's still a worthy goal for many reasons. Maintaining a central data location ensures that your different teams are using consistent and accurate information to create informed decisions. When there are multiple data sources, discrepancies and inconsistencies can arise, leading to confusion and errors in decision-making. By consolidating information, organizations can avoid data silos and maintain data integrity.
So let's take that and apply it to our scenario. We know that critical product feedback from the customer is not being communicated or leveraged effectively. So, what can we do? If we're to think about what to emphasize in terms of simplicity across these efforts, we maybe focus on our customer feedback motion. Rather than haphazardly collecting customer feedback with various surveys throughout the whole sales process in random places, customer service sets up a new, simple survey that's sent out to customers every quarter.
Next, in order to design projects to be flexible, agile, and connected, this could look like a revamp of our customer ticketing system. We're going to ensure that our teams are connected, have visibility into customer tickets, and that when issues arise they get automatically routed to the right people and teams at the right time.
To create and strengthen feedback loops across all activities, we set up a system where both our new feedback tool and customer ticketing system that we just set up are linked up, and the info is shared with product, customer service, and sales so they all get the visibility they need to make improvements.
Finally, we drive toward a single source of truth.
To action this, we're going to have the product team integrate our new feedback and ticketing system directly into the product so customers can flag anything they need wherever they are. There are a number of different solutions here that individually improve the customer experience at the end of the day. But when you connect them in their execution, it's even more powerful.
So now we move into the final step here in our ABC's framework—shape the journey.
It's about shaping your RevOps for future success. This is about the habit of strengthening partnerships and relationships involved in your revenue generation process. Improving the return on investment (ROI) of your RevOps efforts relies heavily on tracking progress. So, this stage prioritizes consistent communication, goal setting, and adjusting initiatives accordingly to meet your goals.
First, you want to ensure stakeholders understand how their tasks link to larger goals. Knowing how work aligns to vision fosters alignment, transparency, motivation, and accountability. So communicate regularly on how teams contribute to success and see a more cohesive approach to revenue generation.
Next is to create common accountabilities. Define objectives, OKRs, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for business units. Communicating goal tracking encourages interdependence and emphasizes the collective responsibility for revenue growth. Regular review of metrics fosters a data-driven, collaborative environment.
Third, maintain focus on the interconnectivity of each business unit. All business units involved in RevOps need to share common goals and objectives and regularly strengthen alignment around revenue-related targets. You can facilitate cross-functional discussions on a regular basis to keep all stakeholders unified, improve decision-making, encourage new ideas, and quickly pivot tactics and strategies when necessary.
Finally, to expand your effort, continue to implement a wide-reaching RevOps perspective across your ongoing business efforts. All revenue generation initiatives should play a role in one broad effort, working to meet established company goals. A holistic approach will provide a comprehensive view of the entire revenue lifecycle from lead generation to customer retention and expansion. Continuing to apply the broader organizational context to your growth tactics and strategies will foster a collaborative, data-driven, and customer-centric approach to revenue generation.
The point is, don't lose sight of the big picture. Maintaining a habit of holistically applying RevOps across your business areas for yourself and others pays dividends.
So let's take that and let's apply it to our scenario.
We know that even with all the previous improvements that this organization has made (that we've gone over already), it's a continual effort to keep teams from being siloed and make sure everyone is working towards the same goal.
First, we need to ensure that our stakeholders know how their work impacts firm objectives. To do this, one of the things we can do is establish champions within each team that will define a cadence of engagement for their teams and show them what customer-centric habits look like.
Next, we create common accountabilities to measure and share progress. To action this, we can have leadership set one customer satisfaction metric to be shared by the whole firm as an OKR and review during each team's business reviews. NPS, net promoter score, could be a good one right here.
Next, we maintain focus on the interconnectivity of the business units. In practice, we'll make this a yearly retrospective of our customer journey across all business functions. We’ll share successes, targets, and opportunities for improvement in the customer journey.
Finally, we expand our efforts. As we make progress, we must remember to continue to expand the scope by looping in additional stakeholders and business functions to scale our impact. Remember, the central theme of RevOps is, as some of our favorite RevOps leaders, Stephen Diorio and Chris Hummel say, the team that connects the most dots wins.
DAN OVERGAAG: Thank you, Josh. And I recognize that that was a lot of information to try to take in and absorb. Don't worry. You'll have access to this content post-webinar. You [also] may be thinking, ‘Alright, boy. RevOps sounds complicated. How do I get started on this RevOps journey?’ And we have a couple of suggestions on where to start.
First and foremost, it starts with making a plan and establishing your vision for RevOps and how you want to really optimize your customer journey. You need to ultimately know where you're going if you're ever going to reach that destination.
Like this photo suggests, getting everyone rowing in the same direction is imperative as you move forward with your RevOps journey and optimizing your customer experience. Once you have that vision in mind for a connected business, keep these four points in mind.
First, shift your mindset. Success in RevOps ultimately hinges on being able to put the customer front and center of your business and your efforts. Secondly, build your coalition. Remember, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. So really focus on building that coalition. Thirdly, execute in increments. I think we understand that everyone wants to make a big impact on revenue within their organization. But you ultimately can't boil the ocean out of the gate, so start small and then expand.
Finally, embrace the change. You're not going to change your revenue realization without really significantly changing your business and this can be scary, honestly. So, you want to show people the vision, the path to get there, and how you're going to approach it. In no time, you'll have an army of supporters behind you [and] carrying the way with you.
So let's quickly expand on each of these, starting with the shifting your mindset component.
There are a lot of businesses out there that often operate with these key issues. And we see this quite often in the work that we do. [The] first [issue] is having siloed business units. We touched on that earlier—insufficient cross-organizational alignment, disjointed data, disorganized customer connection…and often, we see a mismatch in terms of how a company is organized and how customers experience [it]. This ultimately causes wildly inconsistent customer experiences leading the customer to perceive your business as kind of being all over the place. And what you need to do then is really shift your mindset and put the customer front and center.
And you do this by prioritizing the customer and their experience, first and foremost. You also then need to take a really broad strategic, holistic view of the customer and not perceive customers from only a marketing lens or only a sales lens. You also need to recognize that customer experience should influence how you approach and organize yourself as an organization and not the other way around.
And finally, it's really important to align internally [on the fact] that customer experience is key and that all the functions that make up your RevOps systems should be prioritizing customer experience.
So, moving on, let's talk about building your coalition as another kind of key component to getting started.
And this starts with first building internal support, which involves aligning leadership. It involves building sponsors in or other organizations—so sales, marketing, customer service, [or] anyone that's company or customer-facing. It involves continually emphasizing your message and continuing to shout that out.
It also involves securing both top-down and bottom-up support because you can't just have executives demanding change, or individual contributors (ICs) and employees pushing for improvement. You really need both.
Next, it helps to leverage experts. You can find experts internally within your company. You can look for outside support from folks that can help you on your RevOps journey. You can attend webinars like this and ask questions…and those are a really great way to set yourself up and build that foundation ultimately for success.
And then, finally, there are a lot of really good RevOps resources out there. We encourage you to use them. And we've outlined here some of our favorites, including a content library that has a lot of good information, a training course that you might be interested in, and different communities that you can explore to bounce ideas off of or learn a little bit more about RevOps.
And so, Josh, I'm going to turn it back over to you and maybe you can walk us through the last couple of points on how to get started with RevOps.
JOSH ANWAY: Yeah, thanks, Dan. So, you mentioned ‘execute in increments’ as our next step here, just as a takeaway. One of the benefits of revenue operations can also be what sometimes makes it feel overwhelming—its scope. So, remember to execute in increments. Start on this journey and take it step by step. Maybe after you do an assessment of your own areas of influence, there are some quick wins you can take on before you try to convince, say, your CEO to hire a chief revenue officer.
Perhaps there's a high-impact project that you realize is really meaningful to take on to show the value of RevOps to your company. There are a lot of ways to get started because there are so many interconnected things to consider. But the point is to just get started.
Consider the way that we look at RevOps across the business here on the slide—the one we showed up at the top of the meeting. But now...we've added some next steps.
This isn't comprehensive and it doesn't connect all the dots. But it's about finding a space in the organization for a meaningful and manageable move to make.
And, finally, embrace the change. It's not just about small steps. It's recognizing that something like RevOps is often new to a lot of people, and not only is it new, it's likely a big change to make.
It's going to be a journey for you as well as anyone else involved. And you're going to encounter resistance, which is a natural human response. You're likely familiar with this change curve here. It's a process and everyone's on a different stage of this curve.
But what's important is to also execute in increments as you help people along the way and not expect instant adoption. It's a process. One of the things we find helps is continuing to keep the vision and the ‘why’ front and center. ‘What's in it for me?’ is often the question people ask, even if they might not say it out loud.
We went through aligning value drivers—the first step in the ABC's method. And this really helps you clarify the answer to this. Sharing that case for change and regularly communicating progress towards the vision will help align people to the real goal, improving the customer journey and the customer experience.
So, we're at time today and we've covered a lot of ground. If there's anything you remember from today, let it be this: the four steps of our ABC's methodology for RevOps are:
- A: Align value drivers
- B: Break down silos
- C: Connect your execution
- S: Shape the journey
And there are four takeaways to keep in mind as you begin your RevOps journey to get started:
- Shift your mindset. Put the customer and their experience at the center of everything you do.
- Build your coalition. If you want to make a big impact, you'll need a big team.
- Execute in increments. Start small and scale your impact from there.
- Embrace change. Big results require big adjustments. But if you're thoughtful and patient in your approach, we have no doubt you'll get there.
DAN OVERGAAG: Okay. And with that, we thank you very much for your time today and for letting Josh and I walk you through our approach to RevOps. As you continue your RevOps exploration and your journey, feel free to reach out to Josh or myself and we'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
And I think we have about nine minutes to address any questions. So, thank you very much. And Mikala, if you want to tee up some questions for us, we'd be happy to answer them.
MIKALA FLYNN: Yeah, so we have a few questions that have come in. Let's just get started with that. Dan—question for you. How does your approach change based on different business models?
DAN OVERGAAG: Yeah, I think by business model, probably referring to those different routes to market. And so, if you think back to that visualization slide—the map of RevOps—sales and revenue can come through multiple channels, whether it's direct to customer like an online presence, whether it's through a marketplace, whether it's through channel, or direct sales, even. There are various routes to market.
And so, the short answer to the question is, the approach doesn't really change. The ABC's methodology can be applied to any of those routes to market. What's really important to note, though, is that each route to market—if you have multiple routes to market—should be really thought through and [it’s important to] specifically understand how those different routes to market work in collaboration and aren't in conflict. So, I think that's piece one.
Secondly, I think when you think about the customer experience, the customer, and how you engage with the customer might be different based on the route to market, whether it's through partner or whether it's direct. And, so, as you look at each individual route to market, it's really important to think about, ‘How is the customer being interacted with through each channel?’
So, the methodology remains the same. The approach remains the same. But what you focus on might vary based on the different route to market or route to customer that you have. Great question.
MIKALA FLYNN: Great. Thanks, Dan. I have a question for Josh. You mentioned that it's important to find a common RevOps metric across multiple business functions. Do you have an example of what that might look like?
JOSH ANWAY: Thanks. Mikala, yeah. Great question. I think we mentioned net promoter score as one to start with. That's a great one. There's of course, customer satisfaction score—CSAT.
The thing about it is that you want to find something that people can align around across teams, right? First off, these are a little bit easier to implement than some other ones, potentially. And they're survey-based metrics that transcend marketing, sales, and customer service.
And they can help you align your teams. It's really, again, about prioritizing customer satisfaction —the loyalty throughout the customer journey.
Another unifying metric that you could consider is customer retention rate. It [asks], ‘Did what we promise to the target market—via marketing and sales—line up with the continued expectation of the product over time, which is sales and customer service teams, right?
Other metrics to consider—you could try customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value as defining metrics to start to bring across teams as something to talk about.
MIKALA FLYNN: Great. Thank you. And we have one more question. Dan, how does someone pitch this to senior leadership—you know, ‘this’ being RevOps—if they themselves are an individual contributor?
DAN OVERGAAG: Yeah. I think there are two components on how to approach RevOps as an IC and not having potential budget or authority. The first thing I would say is [that] it starts by building that coalition that we talked about earlier and gaining support across different functional areas. What that might look like is putting yourself out there first, sharing information and data, and really taking the first steps with peers or other champions in other organizations. And then, working with them to kind of create this ground swell of support for the interconnectivity for the breaking down of silos across different functions. I think that would be step one.
I think step two is as you're thinking about something like RevOps and the change that it potentially requires, the biggest thing that you can do is work to get resourcing and investment or prioritization and putting that effort in terms of what you know the executive leaders will care about.
So, ROI—what's the ROI on a particular effort? So, the more that you can pivot your ask or your investment toward an ROI, the better you'll be and the more support you'll end up getting. So that would be my two-part answer to that question.
MIKALA FLYNN: Great answer. I think those are the only questions we have for today. So, I think we can end it here. I want to thank our speakers. Thank you, Dan and Josh, for a wonderful presentation. And thank you all for attending.
DAN OVERGAAG: Yeah, thank you. If you do have questions, please reach out. We'd be happy to talk RevOps anytime.
JOSH ANWAY: Thanks everyone.
MIKALA FLYNN: Thanks. Have a good one.
DAN OVERGAAG: Thanks, everyone. Bye.
MIKALA FLYNN: Bye.
The transcription has been edited for clarity.
