How Financial Service Orgs Should be Thinking About RevOps Strategies for 2023

Developing a RevOps strategy is a continual business goal for growing organizations, and it’s far more than just a trend. According to a study by Forrester:

“Organizations that deployed revenue ops in some form grew revenue nearly three times faster than those that didn’t. Public companies with revenue ops also had 71% higher stock performance.”

But tapping into these success rates takes some work. RevOps strategies need to be executed well to see short-term and long-term value. When your financial services team is thinking about adopting a RevOps structure, you will face many of the same obstacles and inertia as other service organizations. Start the process by reading through some of the factors to keep in mind for building a solid strategy and deciding how to manage your revenue operations’ data and integration facets. 

First, Frame RevOps in Terms of the Priorities That Matter Most for Your Business

RevOps is a strategic focus on unifying all the traditionally separated teams in the revenue arm of a business—marketing, sales, customer success, and some parts of financial operations—to create a more cohesive series of business processes. There are plenty of different reasons for adopting this approach:

1. The traditional approach is lackluster for everyone involved: Customers would be pulled into a marketing funnel and dropped into a sales to-do list. Then, if they signed on the dotted line, they’d fall into the customer service to-do list. This led to many lags and inconsistent service from the customer’s perspective, and it’s disjointed and inefficient from the business standpoint.
2. Today’s business focuses on customer retention: Securing customer loyalty through a great experience and a strong product is a critical business strategy. A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a nearly 30% increase in revenue. That means companies can’t just push customers through the sales funnel and start looking for new leads; they must provide ongoing service and outreach. That works better when sales, marketing, and customer service teams are all in sync.
3. Data is critical for every business: Companies that aren’t in a Big Data business rely on accumulating large masses of information about all their stakeholders and prospects. When the revenue teams are divided, that data sits in individual CRMs and files. RevOps-style processes ensure those tools are integrated, and your on-staff data analysts can uncover profitable trends and insights.

No matter your reason for switching to (or refining) your RevOps strategies for 2023, the basic process for building your RevOps team is the same: 

1. Plan out the management structure.
2. Hire, promote, or train the right team.
3. Carefully assess your revenue-generating opportunities to uncover opportunities for growth and processes that are holding you back.
4. Prioritize team alignment with goals and KPIs, focusing on integration and teamwork, not just revenue.
5. Continually chip away at silos.

RevOps strategies aren’t a one-and-done operation. Even if your organization switched to a RevOps structure last year, expect lingering fragments of silos and separate processes. That’s why it’s essential to think about RevOps strategies with the mindset of it being a continual improvement process. Your team may need different incentives, or you may need other technology. No matter what issues you want to tackle in 2023, focus on incremental change and improvements, and the rest will come.

Related: Where to Begin with a Revenue Operations Framework

Are RevOps Strategies About the People or the Processes?

Change is at the heart of every RevOps strategy: you’re moving from traditionally siloed departments to more cohesive structures, or you’re adjusting in-between workflows to be more RevOps-focused. However, many organizational leaders might worry that because things need to change, that means something is currently going wrong. Are the incorrect leaders spearheading the efforts? Do they need to find employees already familiar with RevOps strategies? Are legacy employees resisting change too much?

Process-oriented strategies work best here. Rather than replacing legacy employees or focusing on new hires as a quick culture fix, take a closer look at how technology might be hurting or helping your processes. Four critical factors might be keeping your organization siloed, blocking your efforts to run RevOps strategies smoothly:

1. Lack of integrated technology
2. Growth that surpassed your past data-sharing processes
3. Decentralized IT and completely separate tech stacks
4. Competitive gatekeeping

As your leadership team is crafting a RevOps strategy (or strategy adjustment) for 2023, try working on those obstacles from the top down. The top priority is improving your processes, getting teams the necessary technology, and moving to automated and integrated data systems. Competitive gatekeeping is about techniques: realign KPIs and performance reviews to incentivize RevOps rather than departmental success, and competitive employees will reorient themselves.

Of course, fundamental, straightforward changes with significant impacts are the best approach. That’s why we recommend starting every strategy with a focus on data.

Above All Else, Consider the Data

The biggest threat to the success of your 2023 RevOps strategy is data silos. Data silos are any data set only one department can access while others can’t or don’t even know it exists. This is hazardous to your business’s revenue efforts and customer retention practices.

Transparent, well-integrated data matters, even on a surface level. Consider marketing teams preparing to launch a campaign toward current customers about the success of a new product feature; if a key account has been struggling with that feature, the last thing they want to hear is that you’re prioritizing it. Conversely, if your sales reps have noted which B2B accounts are likely to grow by their renewal data, it would be a shame for your marketers to miss those opportunities completely. As data silos disappear, even stronger possibilities will become visible, allowing your company to fine-tune its efforts based on big-picture and concrete facts.

So, put data first in your RevOps strategies by focusing on these four steps:

1. Clean Any Historical Data

If you’re still operating with multiple different disconnected platforms, the first step to integration is cleaning all of that historical data. Clear out bad information, get your teams to upload all of their off-platform notes and insights, and try to remove or resolve any errors in the data. This ensures inaccurate insights won’t flood the system later on.

2. Centralize It Within an Accessible System

Now, it’s time to build a tech stack that covers the needs of your entire RevOps team. Even if they plan to use different tools (marketers might spend a hefty chunk of time in MailChimp while customer success teams might never open it), those tools still need to speak to each other and allow all groups access to critical customer insights. There are two main approaches to this:

1. Build a tech stack with a head: Your organization might have a CRM such as HubSpot that is the critical nexus for your business operations. Everyone’s tools will integrate with it and pull from it.
2. Create a headless design: This option is much more fluid. Everyone can have their preferred tools and operational platforms, but an integration platform runs seamlessly to power integrations and automation.

Your organization can adopt whatever approach is the right fit for your business. The key is ensuring that different teams can see customer insights from all parts of the customer lifecycle and that all RevOps team members can easily feed data into the tech stack.

Related: Data Integration and Automation for Mid-Market Marketing Teams

3. Start Collecting More

More data is always better, especially if you have the tech stack that can handle it. As more business platforms include AI tools, you can build a more robust picture of customer movement, ongoing trends, and ideal target markets when there’s more information to parse through. Incorporate your business tools more solidly into the integrated tech stack.

Also, focus on automation. Automated processes allow your RevOps team to reach more people, stay on top of more client tickets, and reduce tedious manual tasks that take time away from building relationships. Along the way, they effortlessly collect more insights about what does and doesn’t work.

4. Get Rid of Silos

This point bears repeating: silos are the biggest obstacle to a successful RevOps strategy. Your team needs to assess all the different platforms in your tech stack thoroughly, ensure all the data is shareable between departments (laterally, if not vertically), and make strengthening and sharing data part of everyone’s job responsibilities.

Build the Foundation for Your 2023 RevOps Strategies

Reassessing your RevOps approach for 2023 lets you look through the process with fresh eyes. You can see what areas for improvement are lingering from last year, shop for better tools with the latest technological breakthroughs, and invest more deeply into automation. At Vertify, we provide businesses with an automation platform built for RevOps. You can integrate multiple CRMs and a variety of cloud apps, prioritize upselling and cross-selling throughout the customer lifecycle, and centralize your data for interdepartmental insights. Contact us today to schedule a demo and see how our platform fits your next RevOps strategy.