Earlier this month, more than 220 OpsStars—leaders from marketing, sales, and customer success—gathered at the #OpsStars event in Boston. Sessions and workshops focused on the emerging category of revenue operations, which calls for all revenue teams to unify under the umbrella of revenue operations for better internal processes that make for an optimal customer experience and accelerate growth. Here are the top three takeaways to consider as you continue strategic planning in your business (and don’t forget to register for the San Francisco OpsStars event coming in November!).
Revenue Ops is Happening!
There have been a lot of exciting changes happening in organizations over the past two years. Revenue Ops is on the rise and companies are trying to figure out the right structure and framework to implement in order to achieve Revenue Ops success.
Important to remember: Revenue Ops is all about alignment for a better customer experience. So whether you designate a CRO to lead Revenue Ops or decide to align operational functions across teams, marketing, sales, and customer success organizations need to work together under a shared vision and strategy. Even more, they need to make working together a continuous process with alignment across GTM planning, execution, and metrics that keep them accountable—and help track towards revenue goals.
The CMO Role is Changing
It’s no secret that marketing is considered part of the revenue team. And with the rise of Revenue Ops, this is changing the role of the CMO. CMOs today are essential Revenue Ops partners and help guide—and influence—GTM motions in a way that enables their team to work cross-functionally with sales and customer success.
They are bringing a new level of transparency to the process that loops in their counterparts from beginning to end. With better alignment and buy-in at the planning stages and through execution, the CMO is helping to unify customer-facing teams in order to achieve revenue goals.
Focus on Revenue Ops Metrics
Revenue Ops requires alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success. The only way to effectively do that is to develop shared revenue metrics. Of course, planning and execution are key, but what good are they without the right measurements in place to ensure you are tracking favorably against why we are all here in the first place: revenue growth.
Every business has a million data points that they can leverage as key measurements to improve their processes, but this is useless if we don’t have quality data. Start by making sure you have good data to preserve credibility and ensure actionability. Don’t try to measure everything; focus on what matters most and agree on what these metrics are cross-functionally.
Customer Experience is the Goal
Gone are the days of the handoff. A seamless customer experience doesn’t happen when marketing passes leads to sales and sales passes customers off to the customer team. To successfully retain lifelong customers, businesses are building smooth transitions between business units. All teams that influence customer behavior and satisfaction—marketing, sales, customer success—need to be aligned to not only earn new business, but to retain it as well.
When prospects convert to customers, marketing and sales need to continue to work with customer success organizations to build cross-sell, upsell, and renewal campaigns.
Join us at our next OpsStars event in San Francisco to learn about the latest in Revenue Ops, how your ops teams can work together to accelerate revenue goals, and network with fellow OpsStars!
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