5 Steps to Building a Revenue Operations Team

Effective revenue operations take aligning sales and marketing, along with other customer-related functions like support and finance. And yet, RevOps managers often overlook marketing’s role when building revenue operations team.

Revenue operations are geared towards driving sales-related goals. So, it is natural for this to emphasize sales strongly. However, marketing is fundamental for driving the early stages of the pipeline. As such, marketing operations should be considered integral to building any RevOps team.

Here are five balanced steps for building revenue operations teams.

1. The RevOps Management Structure

Start by building out a RevOps team structure. This will involve four core roles: operations management, enablement, insights, and tools. All four need to be covered to facilitate this method. However, you can decide how to distribute these responsibilities.

The size of your team will primarily influence this decision. You might want to assign multiple roles to one person, assign one role per person, or put several people under one group.

Operations Management

RevOps operation management handles the traditional responsibilities of gathering the resources necessary for efficient production. In RevOps, this work is focused on providing sales and marketing with whatever they need.

Their responsibilities can include process innovation, improving team collaboration, project management, change management, sales management, and sales compensation.

Team Enablement

The RevOps enablement concept was initially lifted from sales enablement. This is all about facilitating high-velocity revenue generation and reducing any operational friction. Sales, marketing, and customer support should all receive enablement assistance.

How can you equip sales and marketing teams on their core roles? Do everything you can to streamline their work and remove unrelated tasks.

When building a revenue operations team, you will see that, in practice, this is a flexible discipline that includes a bit of HR, coaching, professional development, workflow analysis, process management, change management, and more.

Related: What Is Revenue Forecasting Software and Why Is It So Valuable?

Insights

The insights role is about gathering data and converting it into usable, actionable, strategic intelligence. This role can perform the same tasks as a data scientist, business analyst, or database developer.

They may need to do data management, take charge of data quality, facilitate information access, develop strategic insights, and provide operational advice.

Tools

This role takes charge of the tools and technology used by the entire team. At the very least, this means understanding what solutions are needed and having the management skills to procure them. This person should be familiar with your CRM, marketing tech, sales tech, business processes, and how to create a solid tech stack.

They should have enough technical know-how to procure and take responsibility for the tools used. On certain teams, this role may also require development and systems administration skills.

Integrating the RevOps Roles

As you can see, none of these four core roles speaks directly to sales or marketing. This approach is a new management framework that looks to facilitate their work. However, it also doesn’t provide direct guidelines for enabling or equipping sales, marketing, or customer service.

This is one area where you can pull from other, more established business disciplines. Sales enablement should always inform RevOps enablement. However, you can integrate marketing operations strategies across insight development, tool management, enablement, and operations.

Structuring a Team

The RevOps responsibilities have cross-functional oversight and responsibilities. However, individual departments or teams can still exist and retain ownership over their role while collaborating with others.

These marketing and sales teams can be restructured to accommodate revenue operations. Each relevant department may want to include a team lead, platform team, and analytics lead/team.

·         The team lead takes the place of the department head when relating to other RevOps teams

·         The platform team refers to the set of people responsible for working on core technology platforms

·         The analytics lead or team is responsible for keeping an eye on business intelligence reports and making sure everyone is staying on track

Related: Benefits of a Revenue Operations Platform

2. Hiring or Training for Revenue Operations

Successfully building a revenue operations team and achieving teamwork takes a special kind of person who can work well with others while remaining independent, highly initiative, and responsible. Core traits and skills include:

• Technical level: everyone has to pull their own weight and deliver results.
• Collaborative: look for people who work well with others, practice respect, are helpful, and communicate well.
• Open to learning: anyone on this team should be open to learning, trainable, and willing to try new things.
• Ownership: RevOps team members have to take responsibility and ownership over their work.

RevOps includes ongoing learning, rapid adaptation, active professional management, workflow optimization, collaboration, and independent work. Everyone on this team must be self-driven, focused, quick to learn, and easy to work with.

Building revenue operations teams can always start off with assessing and training current employees for the RevOps method. However, there’s always the chance that you may need to hire a fresh set of employees or consultants.

3. Evaluate Current Revenue Generating Operations

Get a clear view of your current revenue-generating operations to understand how things work, your processes, any inefficiencies are, what’s doing well, and what needs to be improved.

This means evaluating your:

• marketing funnel
• sales cycle
• deal pipelines
• workflows
• internal processes
• current tech stack performance

This can be done with questions, spreadsheet analysis, KPI evaluations, or analytics reports. Do a complete marketing and sales evaluation to find any trouble spots, performance gaps, and lost or missed opportunities.

If you want to speed up this stage, use a tool that can provide end-to-end analytics on your complete buyer’s journey from marketing to sales to customer support.

RevOps includes continual performance assessment. But this needs to be done before you build out your revenue operations team since it will inform you on what to prioritize and where to place more resources.

4. Align the Team on Goals, Targets, and KPIs

The previous step should identify your RevOps team’s priorities. Now it’s time to align the RevOps team on the basis of core marketing and sales goals.

RevOps is cross-functional teamwork. Nothing should happen in isolation, even when team members are working on their own.

Everyone onboard should understand what they’re working towards and come to a consensus on what’s important and where things are headed. This is the first step to aligning interdepartmental or cross-functional teamwork.

You can facilitate cross-functional team alignment with tools and technology. But effective collaboration can only take place once there’s complete agreement among team members and once everyone’s contribution is acknowledged.

This is one area where RevOps team leaders often slip up due to a tendency to focus purely on sales activities. Keep in mind that sales drive the later stages of the funnel. If you want to hit revenue growth targets consistently, the RevOps team will need to rely on consistent marketing operations.

5. Eliminate Silos

Eliminate any informational, technological, or organizational silos. It will be impossible to align your teamwork and coordinate operations without doing so.

Data silos are always problematic. This is when information is trapped within a solution, team, or department. It can be caused by tech limitations, poor management, organizational bureaucracy, or a poor internal working culture.

Silos significantly reduce business efficiency, performance, collaboration. They also impair decision-making. Silos cost some organizations millions of dollars every year and can absolutely cripple any RevOps plans.

You should have eliminated management, bureaucratic, and working issues by laying out a RevOps structure and working culture.

The next step is to put the technology in place that will eliminate data siloes and free up application data for cross-functional use.

Gartner names data sharing as an absolute necessity for accelerating digital business. It lists this as critical digital transformation capabilities for any business. And it’s even more vital for revenue operations. If you want your RevOps team to be a success, your internal data sharing must be fluid, seamless, and always available on-demand and in real-time.

Marketing teams should be able to grab the latest reports from bottom-of-funnel sales performance or e-commerce conversions. Sales should have access to the marketing department’s customer insights, profiles, and segments. Customer service should understand the journey of any customer being helped and provide feedback to other team members.

This can’t be done by handing over updated reports or sharing spreadsheets. It requires leveraging leading-edge technology that can eliminate data boundaries and facilitate seamless RevOps teamwork.

Align Marketing and Sales for Effective Revenue Operations

Are you in the process of building a revenue operations team? No matter what your final goal is, this always requires aligning several departments and unifying their working operations.

That can be nearly impossible to pull off unless you’re using an innovative new tool like Vertify – an intelligent application connector and data integrator.

Vertify unifies internal operations with ease by linking applications and freeing their data for boundaryless collaboration. Request a demo today and get a one-on-one product walkthrough.