The Evolution of Revenue Operations Platforms
As business models change and customer expectations increase, it has become more critical than ever for companies to streamline their processes and eliminate departmental siloes. One function that has gained significant traction in recent years is revenue operations or RevOps.
Many organizations have started incorporating a dedicated DevOps team or executive overseeing the strategic coming together of marketing, sales, and service departments.
What is RevOps?
DevOps involves a shift in how departments interact, trading siloed strategies for collaborative ones. This impacts all go-to-market teams, from marketing to sales, finance, and customer success. With a DevOps platform, these teams can optimize their infrastructure, automation, and reporting for better results faster.
Revenue solutions centralize data systems to eliminate inconsistencies and errors across the organization. This improves process efficiencies, accuracy of revenue forecasting, and cross-functional alignment. For example, the Boston Consulting Group reports that companies with an active RevOps strategy reduce their overall go-to-market (GTM) costs by 30%.
Marketing and sales departments may also experience increased efficiency with RevOps. They can use data to optimize their digital strategies and improve customer experience. This enhances revenue generation for the company and builds brand loyalty.
Measuring and predicting revenue growth is a vital part of any business, and the best RevOps platforms allow for easy-to-use reporting and data visualizations to help teams make more informed decisions. Marketers can use tools like a DevOps dashboard to track key metrics, including sales cycle time, pipeline velocity, and win rate, to see how their efforts contribute to the bottom line.
Richard Makara, Principal Growth Engineer at Paddle, a SaaS payments infrastructure provider, knows how important it is to have integrated information and seamless collaboration between marketing, sales, and products. He doesn’t want to run a business with isolated team structures, and he believes that the right DevOps tool can solve the problem of disconnected information.
How do RevOps Platforms Work?
DevOps platforms connect all revenue-generating departments to share data and work toward the same goals. They also automate processes, reduce bottlenecks, and streamline reporting and analytics. In short, they turn your sales funnel into a well-oiled machine that can handle much business and keep customers returning for more.
The best DevOps teams have members who can see the bigger picture and understand the nitty-gritty details of their job. They can act as strategic partners to the C-suite while managing day-to-day operations and projects.
The structure of a DevOps team depends on your organization and its maturity level. In many mature organizations, key roles — like revenue ops, sales enablement, insights, and systems — are centralized under one department led by a chief revenue officer (CRO).
In addition to reducing silos between departments, the best DevOps teams work with a platform that integrates all their tools. Successful teams link their marketing, customer success, and sales ops tech stacks to prevent duplicated efforts and eliminate manual data re-entry.
Effective DevOps teams also utilize a revenue execution platform that can help them forecast accurately and consistently. This enables them to make more confident decisions about their growth strategy and invest in what will drive sales growth. This is important because reaching your revenue growth goals is only possible if you operate with accurate or complete data.
What are the Benefits of DevOps Platforms?
There are several benefits to using DevOps platforms. The primary one is that they provide a centralized platform where all revenue-generating departments can store and access customer data. This makes it easier for teams to collaborate and share information. It also helps ensure that all processes are consistent and efficient. In addition, it can reduce the time and effort spent managing different software systems.
Another benefit of DevOps is that it can help improve the overall quality of customer experience. Ensuring that all revenue-generating departments are aligned and working from the same information makes it easier to ensure that all customers receive the best possible service. In addition, it can increase the amount of revenue that a company generates.
Finally, it can reduce the time and money a company spends on marketing and sales operations. By making it easier for sales, marketing, and customer success to collaborate, it is easier to increase the overall efficiency of your business.
When choosing a RevOps platform, it is essential to remember that the platform will only be as good as the data it uses. Therefore, selecting a platform that provides high-quality data and can be used by multiple departments is essential.
How to Choose a RevOps Platform
If you’re a CSO who wants to take your revenue-generating teams to the next level, introducing a RevOps function early can make all the difference. 21% of companies implementing a DevOps function experience increased alignment between sales and marketing and higher revenue growth.
A successful DevOps strategy requires a complete understanding of your organization’s internal systems and how different software platforms communicate (or not, in some cases). It also means auditing existing tools, integrating systems that influence similar data and impact processes further down the funnel, and providing multiple teams with a single real-time data source.
The best DevOps platforms connect the tools that your marketing, customer success, and sales departments use to eliminate siloed work, automate repetitive tasks, and reduce time-consuming and error-prone manual data re-entry. They also help you align your teams and improve forecast accuracy, win rate, and revenue growth.
When selecting a RevOps platform, look for one that has an easy-to-use interface and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. It should also have an automated task tracker that helps teams focus on their goals and priorities and offers a clear overview of their revenue performance. It would help if you also considered how the cost of the software fits into your budget and whether you can strategically reinvest profits to cover the monthly subscription fees over time.
