If you’ve been in the B2B space for any time at all, you’ve likely heard the term "RevOps". In the past few years It's become what can seem like trending jargon. Having seemingly become a buzzword, it has many business leaders wondering “What is RevOps?",  "Is RevOps just a fad?”, and "Is RevOps important for my company or do I just have FOMO?"

If you’re asking yourself these questions, you’ve come to the right place. Buckle your seatbelts and hold on tight—we’re about to embark on a RevOps Optimization crash course.

What is RevOps?

First things first–RevOps is short for Revenue Operations. 

RevOps is all about how your business makes money so if you own or work for a business, here's the good news– you're already doing RevOps because everything you do each day to generate revenue is a part of your Revenue Operations. 

Whew! Okay, so since you're already doing it... no reason to keep reading, right? Unfortunately, that's a no  because while every business is already doing RevOps, most businesses are not doing RevOps OPTIMIZATION. Optimization is key.

What Is RevOps Optimization?

First let me start by sharing the common symptoms of what un-optimized RevOps often looks like: 

• Misalignment between sales, marketing, and customer success teams: This misalignment often creeps in as a business grows quickly and teams "divide and conquer" to keep up with increased demands. While this approach can serve a short-term purpose, it causes long-term misalignment. Lack of coordination and alignment between these teams results in inefficient processes, missed opportunities, increased expenses, and ultimately, revenue that falls short of the goal. 
• Inconsistent or inaccurate data: If your business struggles with inconsistent or unreliable data across different systems and departments, it can hinder decision-making and lead to inefficiencies.
• Ineffective lead generation and qualification: If your business is struggling to generate high-quality leads or struggles with lead qualification, RevOps optimization can help streamline and improve these processes.
• Low conversion rates: Poor conversion rates across the sales funnel can be an indicator of underlying issues that need to be addressed through RevOps optimization.
• Lengthy sales cycles: If your sales cycles are longer than desired, it could be a sign that there are bottlenecks or inefficiencies within your sales processes that need to be addressed.
• Limited visibility into revenue performance: If your business lacks clear visibility into key revenue metrics, such as pipeline health, revenue attribution, and customer lifetime value, RevOps optimization can help implement better tracking and reporting mechanisms.
• Siloed systems and lack of integration: If different departments within your business rely on separate systems and lack integration, it can lead to fragmented data, inefficiencies, and increased manual work.
• Inconsistent customer experiences: If your customers have inconsistent experiences across different touchpoints and interactions with your business, RevOps optimization can help ensure a cohesive and streamlined customer journey.
• Inefficient processes: If your sales, marketing and service teams struggle with manual, time-consuming processes or lack standardized workflows, RevOps optimization can help automate and streamline these processes.
• Limited scalability and growth potential: If your business is facing challenges when it comes to scaling operations, expanding into new markets, or launching new products/services, RevOps optimization can provide the necessary infrastructure and processes to support growth.

To solve these issues, companies often hire more employees, bring in specialized consultants, hire expert trainers, invest in new technology, invest in costly integrations between siloed technologies, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, this approach often compounds the issues rather than solving them because it focuses on symptoms rather than the root cause(s) of the issues.

While hiring the right people, training them well and investing in the systems to support their work are all a part of RevOps Optimization, the key to success is in alignment. When your people, processes, systems and data are aligned to work as efficiently as possible, you can scale more easily, you can close more sales and churn fewer customers (and employees– by the way), meaning you can increase revenue.

In short, businesses that do RevOps Optimization are:

 Alignment paired with data-driven strategy allows decision makers to stop guessing and start prioritizing the initiatives that will accelerate revenue growth. 

To be clear, Individual departments are still responsible for their own systems and processes, but they are expected to align with leaders and stakeholders from other departments to ensure friction is reduced for customers and decision makers have the end-to-end transparency needed to prioritize high-impact initiatives.  

Related: What Is RevOps? Reduce Friction and Streamline Communication By Implementing Revenue Operations Today

At this point RevOps is sounding pretty good and also like a lot of work, right? It’s a system that quite simply makes sense if you understand how to implement it well. 

So now let’s have a look at RevOps implementation. RevOps Optimization is a process—a series of repeatable actions—taken by any team with go-to-market functionality. Think: sales, marketing, customer service, or product development. Every step of the process works toward improving accountability, strengthening departmental cooperation, efficiently driving revenue and most importantly, (have I said this enough already?) reducing friction for customers to provide a delightful experience for them no matter who they are working with in your business. 

Unlike other operational models, RevOps takes a customer-centric approach that all teams can align around. It encompasses the entire customer’s journey from awareness to decision and beyond, so that your teams have a consistent approach and customers have a consistently excellent experience. 

Who Needs RevOps Optimization?

Is RevOps Optimization for every business? Not necessarily. 

Businesses of all sizes in all industries can benefit from the streamlining effect of RevOps. After all, the benefits of transparency, accountability, and efficiency are evergreen—and universally appealing, but this work is not for the faint of heart. If you plan to venture forth into RevOps Optimization and you aren't already a fan of Brené Brown, you should become one. Now, if you're thinking, "Kim, I thought we were talking about optimizing a business, so where does a researcher and storyteller who's spent two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy come into the equation?

Well, let me tell you that an often overlooked but maybe the most important part of RevOps Optimization is the work of aligning, guiding, coaching, supporting, encouraging and sometimes disciplining the people in your company. In order to do that really well, you are going to have to get really comfortable with mustering the courage to be vulnerable, and fostering a psychologically safe culture where other feel free to be courageously vulnerable as well. 2 pieces of advice here:

1. Have your leadership, at the very least, but your entire team if possible read Dare to Lead by Brené Brown and fully embrace her methodology of "Living B.I.G."
2. Add BetterHelp for business to your company benefits– even if it's your only benefit to date. It's one of the best things we ever did at Sauce. Here's why- our world isn't a psychologically safe place and as you try to lead people to operate in a way that embraces the psychologically safe company culture you are building, they are going to have their own individual work to do in order to grow and embrace this. (as a side-note, unless you're already seeing a therapist, you're probably going to need to use this benefit too. I do every week and I've found it's important for me, as a leader, to walk the walk and do my own work. ;-)

So, now that we have the need for thoughtful work to help the humans in your company established, assuming you are still interested in RevOps Optimization, here's who it's good for...

Businesses That Want To Scale

No matter where you are in your journey to scale, RevOps provides the supporting framework and processes to help you continuously improve in a manageable way. RevOps Optimization is the ultimate example of how to eat the elephant one bite at a time, and it's not just about one bite at a time. It's also about knowing which bite will enable you to eat your elephant faster than your competition.

Businesses That Have Broken Processes

If your business has processes that work, but no one follows them, bad news—your processes don’t actually work very well. For most businesses, this happens because the processes themselves don’t reflect the needs of all your teams or customers. It’s a rule that no one follows because the rule doesn’t make sense. 

Faulty processes are the problem, so what’s the RevOps solution? Streamlined, efficient processes that are regularly updated to meet the needs of both your customers and your teams. Under the RevOps model, all teams are on board with new process development, making them easier to align around. 

Businesses That Don’t Know What’s Working

If you can’t articulate what’s working, you can’t make what’s working into a repeatable process. This is the ultimate form of guessing and stressing. 

Issues surrounding churn and marketing ROI are notoriously difficult to solve. But with a well-organized RevOps team, you have a holistic view across every department to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. 

With the operational transparency that comes from RevOps Optimization, you can identify what’s working and what isn’t, making it easier to grow revenue and scale. 

Related: How To Reduce Customer Churn and Prevent It From Happening 

Where Do I Go to Get Started with RevOps Optimization?

So now it's probably clear that while RevOps has become trending jargon, for businesses that embrace it fully it's a means to #ScaleFaster and #GrowSmarter. When it comes down to it, there’s nothing that sparks excitement like the promise of revenue growth. 

Implementing RevOps Optimization on your own is an arduous process. Not only is it a hefty time commitment, it takes careful planning and dexterity to implement well. The outcomes of growth and revenue are worth the effort, but it’s a challenging path to travel alone.

Sauce Can Help!

As a RevOps Optimization Agency, we help businesses do RevOps Optimization and we’d love to find out if we're the right fit for your company. Schedule a Connect Call with a certified Growth Guide to begin the conversation.

In the meantime, fill out the form below to claim access to our Recipe For Results Blueprint so you can #GrowSmarter with Sauce!

Hungry for more RevOps? Take a deep dive into RevOps optimization within your organization. Explore everything we've written about RevOps by clicking the button below.