Slutmålet med att implementera RevOps är att skapa en enhetlig front mot kunden, bryta ner interna silos och säkerställa att alla delar av organisationen jobbar mot samma intäktsmål.
Resultet blir en mer effektiv och resultatorienterad organisation samt ökad tillväxt, lönsamhet och kundnöjdhet.
RevOps är ett välkänt begrepp internationellt men har nu börjat hitta in till svenska företag också. Ett av företagen som har varit snabba på bollen och har ett välfungerande RevOps-team är Funnel.
Vi har träffat Tim Hurst, VP Revenue Operations på Funnel och kursledare på Breakits nya kurs, för att ta reda på lite mer om vad en RevOps-avdelning innebär.
Hi Tim! Tell us, when was your RevOps department created and why?
Funnel originally created Sales Operations in fall 2019. I was hired as a one-person department with the goals of aligning and improving sales processes, gathering and analyzing sales data to improve performance and to coach salespeople. From there the role and team grew rapidly. Originally working only with Sales, quickly I began working with Marketing and CS. 6 months later the team was three people covering Process, Tech, Analytics for the three teams.
What have been the biggest benefits for you so far?
Four areas:
1. Understanding our business, we now have a much more indepth understanding of our revenue metrics, processes and behaviours. We can more accurately forecast and explain trends and unexpected events. We can confidently make data driven decisions at all levels of the business and have key metrics always up to date when needed.
2. We have built core processes and automations to ensure consistency and efficiency for our customer facing teams. We have made it easier for Sales to create contract drafts with the click of a button in CRM and we have a mechanism to alert customer success managers when a customer meets an expansion criteria or contraction risk.
3. We have aligned business leaders across GTMs on metrics that matter so that strategy can be more aligned and holistic. As a result the conversation moves away from trusting the numbers and MQLs vs Pipeline towards actions that we can take and their intended outcomes.
4. We have built robust systems and tech stack that can move data to where it needs to be, in and out of our CRM, product, support chat etc. This reassurance that the insights we see on customers and prospects are accurate and useful for decision making, this also powers the automations we mention above.
How have you handled the challenges of integrating different systems and processes into one and the same department?
There is certainly a challenge of focus when it comes to moving from separate operations to Revenue Operations.
Firstly we have hired a team with different expertise. We have backgrounds from Sales, Marketing, CS within the team as well as a range of disciplines, Process Design, Automation, Data Analytics, Systems, Enablement. We try to focus our time on the highest impact areas across the business. By making improvements in the right places we can have a large impact relative to the time spent.
While there is a challenge of working across so many different areas there is also a benefit. We have built a holistic understanding of our customer journey and associated systems and processes, this means we can create solutions that are more efficient and robust. We can use what we learn from one project with the Sales team and apply it to a separate but relevant projects with Customer Success for example.
RevOps is about being flexible to the needs of the business, so there is no off-the-shelf implementation.
Are there any specific insights you have gained about the work of optimizing revenue with your strategy shift to RevOps (ie has it opened up some doors you didn't have access to before)?
There are some great feedback loops that appear within the work of RevOps. One that we leverage a lot is that by improving our process and process adoption, we can get better data about our revenue processes, we use that data to make better process decisions.
Through a close collaboration with our BI Team (where we even leverage our own product as part of our stack) we have been able to move almost all of our analysis and reporting out of manual spreadsheets and into our BI stack so that we always have up-to-date analysis, even on some very complicated metrics. This saves us data prep time and makes sure we have data we can trust that is available for data driven decisions.
Another opportunity is the idea of being “predictive” in customer management. Rather than waiting for customers to come to us, or being proactive and pulling a list of e.g. underusing customers once a week, we can instead send an “alert” to a specific rep when a specific customer takes a specific action. This could be focussed on retention, expansion or something else. But, it means that instead of spending energy thinking about which customer to talk to, our customer teams can spend their energy on how to give the best customer experience to the customers.
What is your best tip for companies that are thinking of making the same journey as you?
Map your existing capabilities and needs. It could be that you have a great tech stack and poor processes. Maybe you already have a great analytics team, but process adoption is low so their data is not in a usable state. RevOps is about being flexible to the needs of the business, so there is no off-the-shelf implementation. If you do not yet have RevOps, it is likely that you have operationally minded people across different teams, get them working together rather than separately.
För er som är i startgroparna att implementera ett RevOps team, har Breakit tillsammans med Funnel skapat en RevOps-kurs. Vi kommer, bland annat, djupdyka i hur man kan implementera ett RevOps team på företaget.
Kursen hålls digitalt på distans den 5e december. Läs mer om kursen och anmäl dig här >>