In the midst of challenging economic conditions and rapid tech disruption in 2024, company leaders are finding ways to cut costs and streamline operations. With an increasing need to do more with less, there has never been a better time for organizations to take advantage of revenue operations (RevOps). We define RevOps as a flexible system that integrates into your business model. It is designed to connect, analyze, and improve the lifecycle of revenue realization across an organization. Built to improve customer experience by consolidating and streamlining repetitive internal processes, the business approach creates a clear path to revenue growth while allowing you to save costs.
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 this article, the fourth in our series, we will dive into the specific challenges our methodology solves for and how we used it to help two tech leaders transform their customer experiences.
Finally, our fifth article will give you pointers for securing executive buy-in for implementing RevOps in your organization.
Why you need a holistic go-to-market strategy
We define a ‘go-to-market strategy’ as not only the various routes-to-market your solutions take, but also the plan your organization undergoes to define and manage relationships that allow you to build winning customer experiences. RevOps is deployed as a mechanism to maximize your go-to-market strategy’s efficiency.
In today’s digital age, it’s often the case that companies fail to focus on their go-to-market strategy as a competitive advantage and instead prioritize product innovation. After helping hundreds of companies maximize their revenue potential, we can definitively state this can be a costly mistake. Product innovation is important and it’s how many successful companies are born. But as a market matures, innovation becomes harder to sustain. While innovation may get you a seat at the table, a vendor’s go-to-market approach is often what closes the sale and sets them apart from the competition over time.
Prioritizing both innovation and competitive differentiation, our end-to-end go-to-market approach starts with strategy development and resource mobilization, leading to execution, then performance management, and finally, continuous optimization. Our subject matter experts specifically work across marketing, operations, channels, and data and application design, ensuring all components of the go-to-market motion are functionally intertwined.
We view RevOps as a critical staple of your go-to-market strategy. Further, when your go-to-market strategy is strengthened through RevOps, it becomes more attainable to build a sustainable competitive advantage and long-term success.
The role of RevOps in your go-to-market efforts
Companies who have implemented RevOps into their business model continue to see an increased return on investment (ROI). In fact, a study conducted by Forrester shared organizations that deployed RevOps grew revenue three times faster than those that didn’t.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve built an expertise across the RevOps stack that combines our unique go-to-market philosophy and diverse skillsets. Our framework prioritizes five elements that each solve for a distinct challenge faced by our customers when it comes to revenue acceleration and customer experience optimization. The elements and the challenges they solve are as follows:
#1: Revenue activation
The challenge: No matter the company’s type or industry, all leaders look to consistently find new ways to drive revenue and better activate its existing routes-to-market. The three areas we focus on to maximize revenue growth are:
- Revenue enablement: Organizing content, defining roles, and improving processes related to employee skilling, onboarding, and operational design
- Revenue enhancement: Improving financial performance by finding new ways to increase sales, improve growth strategies, and reduce costs
- Channel optimization: Identifying the most effective channels to reach customers and build their effectiveness by refining how you conduct business with partners
#2: Enterprise architecture
The challenge: The solution architecture for every company is complex. Your processes and solutions must be tailored to the unique needs of your organization. Sometimes it’s difficult to know where to focus your improvements. We work to unify your enterprise architecture through:
- Revenue automation: Using the right technology and automated tools to better support customer and partner relationships, sales and marketing alignment, data flow, and revenue generation activities
- Process reengineering: Redesigning internal operations by analyzing existing processes, streamlining their steps, and improving operational task flows
- System integration: Ensuring siloed hardware, software, and technology systems are connected as a larger, single functioning entity
#3: Customer optimization
The challenge: Your customers are at the center of RevOps and understanding them is vital. You don’t know who your customers are without developing the right tactics to research their needs and what they care about. We focus on the following three specific components to achieve this:
- Customer intelligence: Improving the customer experience by collecting, analyzing, and applying customer data to make informed decisions about the buyer’s journey
- Customer engagement: Building and nurturing the connection between you and your audience using engagement channels that build customer loyalty
- Product positioning: Differentiating your product from competitors’ by establishing a unique identity that resonates with your target market and addresses your customers’ needs
#4: Decision science
The challenge: Data is the lifeblood of RevOps. You need to know how to best connect your data so you can use it to make intelligent decisions and focus resources on your highest priorities. The three factors that will strengthen your data and decision-making include:
- Data connectivity: Ensuring different software applications, databases, and platforms are seamlessly integrated to improve the exchange and communication of data
- Revenue intelligence: Analyzing, assessing and forecasting revenue performance based on existing customer behaviors, historical trends, and market research
- Resource optimization: Maximizing the efficiency of tools, processes, and people with effective planning, scheduling, and resource allocation
#5: Connected services
The challenge: With RevOps, efforts are always in place to grow revenue and improve the customer experience. However, it’s often the case that one-off initiatives are not aligned with core business priorities, well connected with each other, or smoothly implemented within your organization. To better help connect your execution and services, we prioritize:
- Change management: With our specific Landing and Adoption Readiness approach to change management, we focus on ensuring your organizational changes in strategy, processes, and technology are understood and adopted by your teams to maximize impact and adoption
- Governance: Establishing accountability and processes that support the productivity of your marketing, sales and customer success programs
- Strategic alignment: Aligning your revenue growth strategies and functional plans with business objectives to facilitate efficient cross-functional communication
Our RevOps philosophy in action
Now that we’ve broken down how our specific approach to RevOps solves for a number of common challenges faced by company leaders, we want to showcase our work in action.
We’ve supported hundreds of clients across many different facets of the RevOps landscape. Some efforts are small and focused — others are wide-reaching and comprehensive. Here is how we supported two leaders in the tech industry to better connect their internal teams, form strategic goals, grow revenue, and elevate their customer experiences.
Case study #1: OKRs align teams and create path for revenue growth
Our first case study highlights how a large technology client solved many of their RevOps challenges through several projects during a multi-year collaboration.
A common challenge we see among our clients is a lack of cross-team alignment, and we realized this was the case in our client's organization. Our client dealt with misaligned product and customer messaging, an inability to connect the disparate work efforts across their marketing team, and disjointed priorities. Initially, we were collaborating to solve these challenges by developing a process design and execution focus for their team. Over time, however, we uncovered a need to define strategy across several teams supporting the customer journey. We particularly pivoted our focus to streamlining the tech leader’s various marketing channels, including channel and direct sales, as well as achieving alignment on the right priorities.
To bridge the tech company’s silos, we first helped create specific objectives and key results (OKRs) for each team. We clearly defined objectives based on what our client’s teams wanted to accomplish on both organizational and group levels. Once the objectives were determined, we established specific measures of success by which progress to meeting those objectives would be measured by. Then, once the key results were created, we built a process to ensuring consistent updates and review to drive the business forward.
Making incremental changes across a multi-year journey resulted in better connected teams, stronger content and messaging flow, better program implementation, and a more closely aligned set of organization and group objectives. Developing OKRs team by team also ensured employees could continue to invest in their own work with a deeper understanding of how it is connected to the entire customer journey. Lastly, clearly defining OKRs for multiple teams of stakeholders across the organization allowed our client to build a holistic and clearly defined path for revenue acceleration.
Case study #2: Internal functional improvements upgrade the customer experience
Our first case study covered a project that involved several collaborations across a large organization and how it impacted teams working across different parts of the customer journey. This next case study is about a single collaboration that spanned several teams working across different pillars within the RevOps framework, including marketing, sales, and customer service.
For this project, we were asked to help another tech leader, who was experiencing significant growth, to help scale their lead-to-cash process. Our client’s specific goal was to improve both the partner and customer experience, which were facing challenges due to the company’s expansion.
To accelerate the lead-to-cash process and improve the experience for all stakeholders, we first performed analyses that spanned across the company’s strategy, data, process, people, and technology. The analyses helped form a better view into the solution stack across the sales organization and ultimately uncovered a need to improve their configure, price, quote (CPQ) processing. To refine our client’s CPQ processing, we developed a compelling business case for change and outlined the prioritized list of actionable recommendations that would address key technology and process gaps.
With our RevOps perspective, we armed our client with insights on internal optimizations that could upgrade their customers’ overall experience. These small, incremental changes targeted the internal functionality of organization as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the external customer and partner journeys.
Both case studies highlight how RevOps, when thoughtfully applied and executed, has the potential to transform organizations from the inside out. Our unique methodology allowed us to take key components of their existing growth strategies into consideration, then assess and refine them to transform the customer experience. Taking an end-to-end approach rather than placing our efforts into one area of our clients’ businesses ensured they maintained long-term success.
How we can help
So what makes Spur the best partner for building out your RevOps strategy?
For one thing, we understand the complexities of revenue realization given the wide range of potential routes-to-market. We possess an in-depth understanding and wide skillset that gives us the ability to identify which route-to-market is best for your business and why.
We also know every company’s RevOps journey is different depending on a multitude of factors, including company size and industry. We support clients who are just starting to prioritize RevOps as well as clients who have focused on it for years. Our low barrier to entry gives us the ability to adapt and pivot quickly.
Finally, our breadth of expertise allows us to support your RevOps journey however you need. We’re happy to support one specific stage of the process such as strategy, but we typically see the biggest impact when we collaborate with clients end-to-end, supporting them all the way through execution and KPI tracking. With the right team and guidance in place, you can break down silos and transform the customer experience, supercharging your business towards achieving its goals.
This blog is the fourth post in a five-part series on best practices in RevOps. Check out the third post to learn our unique methodology for RevOps implementation and how to apply it to your business model.
Wondering about how to take the next step in your RevOps journey? To schedule a free consultation with one of our revenue operations experts, fill out our intake form here.
You can also watch our previously recorded webinar featuring our firm’s leading experts to learn the four steps on how to transform your customer journey with RevOps here.
