Building Organizational Resilience Through RevOps

The 2002 sci-fi hit “Minority Report” worked from the premise that much of what happens in life is predictable. In the past two decades, digital technology has enabled what in the movie required drug-altered clairvoyants, at least for enterprise revenue growth. Unfortunately, most companies aren’t taking advantage of these developments to their fullest potential. Those that do will gain a decisive competitive advantage.

The Power and Promise of Revenue Operations (RevOps)

In the past few years, we’ve seen Revenue Operations or RevOps gain momentum among astute B2B companies as leaders, regardless of their size or maturity, look to the recurring revenue business model to solve siloed inefficiencies, boost operational productivity, and drive strategic growth. This process uses automation to identify new marketing and sales opportunities without damaging vital relationships. It involves a stack of digital tools and platforms integrated with analytics to generate predictions about prospective customer behaviors, how they think and feel, and what influences their perceptions. RevOps, hand in hand with account-based experiences (ABX), helps marketing, sales, and customer success professionals make sense of the flood of data to identify a client's need, a client’s preferred channel, and alignment with how the client typically buys.

Thus, if a potential customer visits a website, RevOps will automatically assess the lead and recommend sending a certain next value-add, such as a position paper or a video. If the prospect downloads the document or watches the video through, an invitation to a webinar follows; if not acted upon by the prospect, a different package goes out. While it takes an investment, it’s a big help to sales teams shifting to the new modes of digital interaction.

By combining diverse sources in an integrated stack, RevOps can deliver unparalleled sophistication for predictive behaviors. But it has implications far beyond the organization’s marketing and sales functions. As the cost to acquire customers continues to rise and conversion rates continue to decrease, the power and promise of RevOps to help understand how to keep and grow strategic relationships are enormous.

Recent research shows that an estimated 48% of companies now have a RevOps function, up 15% from last year, while Gartner estimates that 75% of the highest-growth companies in the world will deploy a RevOps model by 2025. The fundamental drivers of adoption continue to be RevOps impact on revenue growth, revenue productivity, and dramatically more robust marketing and sales alignment. It’s also encouraging to see amongst our global clients and venture capital/private equity portfolio company relationships that RevOps is embraced in the early days of the Annual Recurring Revenues (ARR) – often between $5-20M or shortly after that in the $20-50M range.

AI-powered Conversational Intelligence technologies, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, are deployed to analyze and optimize customer interactions across various channels. As a result, conversational intelligence enhances customer experience, drives engagement, and generates valuable insights in a company's marketing tech stack. From lead generation and nurturing – where systems ask relevant questions and gather essential information allowing marketing and sales teams to prioritize high-quality leads and tailor their communications accordingly, to personalization – a better understanding of user preferences, browsing history, and past interactions to present highly relevant content, offers, and product recommendations, omnichannel engagements – integrating various communication channels, such as social media, messaging apps, and emails, to create a seamless experience, CI is consistently differentiating competitive peers.

Throughout the entire RevOps function, chatbots and virtual assistants can handle routine inquiries and tasks, reducing the current pressures on understaffed customer support teams. CI platforms also collect and analyze unprecedented customer interaction data to provide valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and sentiment. These insights help marketing, sales, and customer success teams refine their strategies, optimize content, and make data-driven decisions to improve overall revenue growth performance.

Data-Driven Visionary RevOps Leadership

The hallmark of world-class RevOps functions is regularly scheduled metrics, analysis, and planning sessions to identify top challenges and prioritize improvement opportunities. Regrettably, less than 15% of our global clients have a regular cadence meeting to analyze the RevOps data meaningfully and strategically and agree on course corrections, further highlighting the visionary stewardship of marketing, sales, and customer success by leaders who do. According to SiriusDecisions, acquired by Forrester, organizations that focus on alignment achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth.

An estimated one-quarter of our global client Business Unit leaders or CEOs lead marketing, sales, and customer success alignment, supported by their Chief Revenue, Marketing, Growth, and Customer Success leaders, highlighting the need for an organization-wide mandate to enforce lasting change. Although many organizations have a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) position, the title doesn’t correlate to stronger RevOps, as the role is broadly interpreted. In addition, less than 10% of our global client CROs are responsible for their organizations' entire sales, marketing, and customer success functions highlighting continued fiefdoms and internal political jockeying for control, resources, and influence.

Customer Success – the Forgotten Value Enabler

In many organizations, the Customer Success function is the proverbial red-headed stepchild. Research shows that companies with the highest net revenue retention rates (NRR) reported investing 10% of their revenues in customer success (CS) and CS Ops teams. Additionally, 60% of our global clients report having a well-defined CS ops function or are building one. This indicates that CS is becoming a more strategic asset to value creation in many companies. More than half of our global clients report that their CS organization owns the renewal responsibilities, taking on more direct revenue responsibilities and transforming the CS function from a value enabler to a value creator in its revenue engine.

RevOps has a long way to go, particularly as a disciplined transformational enabler of the organization’s strategic growth. We’re seeing in the market visionary leaders who believe that their organizations must balance performance with learning. RevOps can be the data-driven, credible single source of the truth in how the organization performs today and its resiliency toward future potential disruptions without drug-altered clairvoyants in Minority Report.