Today we’re taking a ride in a time machine and going way back in the annals of history. How far back? Well, before Sauce Marketing and The Selling Agency combined forces and became Sauce Agency.
So, like, 2020.
If we bent the fabric of time and space and zapped open a lens into 2020, here’s a little of what we’d see (ok, there was a lot going on in 2020, but here’s a tiny part of that gigantic picture):
Sauce Marketing was generating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, engage, and delight our clients' ideal customers. And it was working!
Meanwhile, The Selling Agency was kicking butt with super sales training, lighting a figurative fire under clients’ stone-cold sales pipelines.
This sounds like a success story, and in a way it is. Because we were successful at driving revenue for our clients.
But we knew there was a missing piece to this business puzzle. That we could do more for our clients if we weren’t just a marketing agency or just a selling agency.
We knew our combined expertise in sales and marketing and business development could be the tinder for a flaming hot, revenue-generating RevOps optimization agency. But in order to do that, we needed to step outside of our agency silos and gain cohesive visibility into our clients’ operations, tech-stack, sales, and marketing efforts.
Ok, back to the future—ahem, present. Here’s [the abridged version of] one of the important lessons we learned as we helped businesses align sales, marketing, and customer success functions to create a scalable RevOps organization:
RevOps optimization is the key to aligning your business behind a single goal, which sets your business up for scalable success.
RevOps is everywhere these days. In fact, according to Gartner Research, the RevOps business model is spreading like wildfire; they predict that by 2025, 75% of the highest-growth companies will operate with a silo-dissolving RevOps model.
But RevOps isn’t new. The term itself was kinda-sorta new in 2020, but the concept itself is as old as businesses (so basically prehistoric). Because if your business has Revenue and Operations, it’s doing RevOps.
But RevOps Optimization is unique to us here at Sauce. And it’s positioned to support companies as they scale and grow.
How does RevOps help companies scale? By harmonizing the processes, systems and data used by customer-facing teams. We cover each of these four pieces in depth:
With RevOps, the focus is on streamlining and optimizing sales, marketing, and customer success processes. It highlights bottlenecks, axes redundancies, and establishes efficient workflows.
In the Sauciverse, we call this a darn good recipe for scalable growth. And it all starts with your processes.
To optimize your processes for growth through a RevOps model, you first need a rock-solid ecosystem to support your revenue and operations functions. And that includes a tech-stack that’s designed for automation, and provides metrics and data reporting into your efforts that can help you make data-informed decisions.
Our clients have been surprised at how siloed their technologies really were. How their tech-stack created road bumps from failed integrations, their manual processes created redundancies, and how their processes didn’t map across the entire company. In short, their revenue ecosystem was way off-kilter.
The upshot? Friction, friction, friction. And not just for customers (although they’ll feel it, too). This is the kind of process-to-people resistance that causes employees to jump ship, causing high turnover rates.
When your processes are optimized, your company’s operational efficiency skyrockets, productivity improves, sales cycles shrink, and time-to-revenue speeds up. You’re set up for growth, and you have the processes to grow with you.
Oh, and instead of feeling like they’re swimming upstream against processes, your teams are more efficient, your employees are equipped to outperform themselves, your people feel supported and set up for success—and tend to stick around longer as a result.
At Sauce, we call these Systems that Scale.
Essentially, you optimize your systems through a RevOps model by creating a technological map that plays well together. Your tools and systems are integrated to support revenue generation, and business growth across all those imaginary departmental boundary lines.
Think about how mighty your CRM platforms, marketing automation software, customer success management tools, and other types of technologies would be if they were leveraged together. Individually, they’re pretty impressive. But together? Watch out, world.
We’re talking about enhanced revenue growth, eliminating waste, streamlining your processes and supporting your people to achieve repeatable, scalable success.
Because when systems work together, they grow revenue together—at scale.
If your systems and processes are your roadmap, data is your dashboard. It indicates when you need to take action and informs how you should do it.
But if your dashboard is broken and your data is incomplete, (or just plain wrong), you could veer off in a dangerous direction.
The good news is that now that your systems are synchronized, your data stream is humming right along. You have a plethora of data to inform your decisions. You can feel confident that your data is good, because your systems are good.
By leveraging analytics tools and implementing robust data management processes, RevOps helps you identify growth opportunities and optimize strategies—based on real data.
You have crystal-clear visibility into the effectiveness of sales, marketing, and customer success efforts, which means you can identify areas of improvement and make data-driven adjustments. The results: continuous measurement and optimization cycles support scalable growth by fine-tuning strategies based on real-time insights. No more guessing at what tech to purchase, what strategy to try, or where you’re under or over-performing.
If you’re in a canoe race and it’s up to you and your 3 teammates to get your boat across the finish line first, the worst thing you can realize is that you all have different ideas about which direction to row in or worse yet, you realize some of them don’t even have paddles!
In business, this happens all the time. Marketing, sales, service, even operations usually have at least 4 different goals they’re aiming for. Departments are siloed off from each other, and collaboration grinds to a halt (if it ever existed).
RevOps breaks down silos between sales, marketing, and customer success teams. It’s the ultimate collaboration and alignment instigator. And because your systems, processes, and data are working together, it makes teamwork and collaboration even more effective.
The Sauce RevOps Optimization process also includes training that transforms teams into those superstar collaborative performers by ensuring that each team member is empowered with the skills and resources to be able to pull their weight—or paddle the boat—and contribute to the organization’s overall success.
With a RevOps model, your teams are set up for cross-functional communication, which ensures everyone is working towards shared revenue goals and customer satisfaction.
Knockout collaboration leads to more efficient operations and faster decision-making, making growing at scale even easier.
The thing about scaling your business is that the entire business needs to move in the same direction (forward) all at the same time. When your systems, processes, data, and teams are moving at different speeds in different directions, business growth isn’t happening.
You need a holistic approach to business growth in order to scale successfully, and that’s what RevOps optimization is all about: enabling you to scale operations and drive sustainable growth.
When these four aspects of your organization are optimized through RevOps, you can achieve a consistent customer journey across different touch points, improved lead generation and conversion rates, and optimized customer retention and expansion strategies. By implementing a RevOps approach, companies can achieve higher efficiency, improved collaboration, and accelerated revenue growth, leading to sustainable and scalable success.
Processes, systems, data, teams, oh my! It can seem like a lot because, quite frankly, it is. RevOps isn’t for the faint of heart, but the effort is well worth the results as we (and our clients) know very well.
The good news is that you don’t have to climb the steep path to RevOps optimization alone. Team Sauce is your experienced guide in all things RevOps. We’re doing it for ourselves, we do it for our clients, and we'd love to do it for you, too.
Whether you’re curious about RevOps, ready to jump head first into RevOps, or want to tell us how wrong we are about RevOps Optimization, we want to talk (although if you’re planning to chew us out, we should warn you that our results make a strong and compelling claim)! Start scaling your business and #GrowSmarter—schedule a call with a Certified Growth Guide today!