RevOps is an eye-catching buzzword that’s been doing the rounds for a while. But is it just another load of over-hyped bollocks, or does this concept actually have some substance?
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Marketers are often described as ‘Magpies’, flitting from one fad to the next. But this label is a bit unfair. The wider industry - experts, analysts, tech companies and agencies - constantly promote new concepts, demanding marketers take note and drop what they are doing.
Being an early adopter is often how marketers can gain a competitive advantage and get the best returns. But too often this dynamic is exploited by those peddling their own agendas. The pressure on marketers to ensure they don’t miss a trend worth focusing on is relentless. But on the flipside, it’s important not to get distracted by a marketing red herring that could turn out to be a complete turd - like Google Plus or the Metaverse.
Clearly, you can’t possibly explore or experiment with everything. So you should rightly be sceptical and selective about any new go-to-market strategy, tool or concept. When considering any proposed breakthrough, think about your current level of maturity and how easy it would be to embrace that new thing, without derailing everything else.
This brings us to RevOps (a.k.a. Revenue Operations). RevOps actually became a recognised approach somewhere between 2018 to 2020. So it’s not exactly new, but it does seem to be gaining a lot of traction. Nevertheless, it has some of the hallmarks of yet another here today, gone tomorrow marketing sensation:
- Industry analysts coined it
- Experts are over-hyping it
- It has a REALLY wanky name
- Agencies and tech companies are overly promoting it
- Job titles are starting to include it
So is RevOps just another bullshit fad, or does it have any legs?
What is RevOps?
<Something>Ops is the new standard for branding a concept. We’ve already got DevOps, GreenOps, FinOps and SecOps. It was almost inevitable that marketing would want an ‘Ops’ all of its own at some point too.
However, the whole theory behind RevOps goes far beyond marketing. RevOps is a business function that aims to maximise an organisation's revenue potential by bringing together all of its customer-facing teams - from across sales, marketing and customer service. It’s about getting more from the full revenue cycle through a 360 degree view of the customer, a singular customer data set, data-driven strategies, streamlined processes, integrated systems and improved collaboration across relevant teams.
Arguably, a well-run business should already be doing this, so why does it need a name? After all, the underlying principles of aligning your revenue-generating functions has been around for many years. So is this just another classic case of the Emperor's new clothes? Normally, we’d say yes, but with RevOps we’re not so sure.
The 'Ops' branding actually serves an important purpose. It formalises these functions, emphasising their operational nature. It promotes the integration of different operations, underscores the focus on efficiency and supports the general business trend of cross-functional collaboration.
‘Ops’ symbolises the need for deliberate, specialised approaches to optimising processes and technology. It also encourages the C-suite to give these functions the backing they need to succeed. Furthermore, it elevates the professionalism and expertise required to make it all work, putting revenue-generating teams on par with IT functions who are synonymous with rigour.
RevOps is basically sales, marketing and CX alignment, with great big space-hopper balls.
Why is RevOps important?
RevOps comes into play as businesses grow to the point where the high-touch approach to customers starts to become a real pain in the ass. In other words, when you are scaling beyond the stage where a ‘white-glove’ service is unsustainable.
Typically, the approach to this problem is to throw more bodies at it - employing more and more people to maintain the service experience. But the bigger you get, the harder and more expensive this becomes, especially when you factor in recruitment, management overhead and training costs.
So the crux of the problem RevOps is designed to solve is to help companies scale their operations, without sacrificing customer experience or going bust.
An effective RevOps function will help you maintain a personalised experience, from the top of the funnel to the bottom, through automated and asynchronous communications. By providing relevant insights and information to customers when they need it, companies can maintain strong relationships without the need for constant one-to-one, human interactions.
In effect, your data, systems and processes do more of the touchy-feely stuff for you.
The single customer technology platform
Without a shadow of a doubt, the single most critical success factor for RevOps is the quality of customer data. And herein lies the problem for many companies.
There are so many different tools and applications used across marketing, sales and service, that customer data resides in an array of disconnected siloes. In most cases, it’s a fucking mess. So the opportunity to turn customer insight into increased revenue is non-existent.
Moving to a single customer platform enables all departments to work with the same, up-to-date customer information, in turn reducing data gaps. You’ll get a more holistic view of the customer journey across all touchpoints, so you start to see a more complete picture. As you start digging into the data, it will reveal how customer interactions are actually happening and you’ll see opportunities to improve your revenue processes.
Here’s a very practical example where data enables proactive customer retention. A longtime customer who typically renews their annual software subscription hasn’t logged in for a couple of months. In a siloed system, the customer success team could miss this drop in usage.
With a unified platform, success teams can see this change in behaviour alongside other data points, like support tickets and email engagement. This holistic view allows them to proactively reach out to the customer, address any issues, and potentially stop them leaving, before the renewal date approaches.
RevOps is not bullshit
It’s tempting to roll your eyes when you see a term like RevOps. And because it sounds like a load of bollocks, it could easily be dismissed. But don’t make that mistake. We don’t think it’s a passing craze, but nor do we think it should be another trigger for the ‘Magpie Effect’.
RevOps is not about ripping everything up and starting again. Instead, it’s about taking your current customer operations to another level of maturity. RevOps is the art and science of operationalising a set of business functions that have traditionally been manual, siloed in nature and process light. But obviously, you need to already have a degree of data and tech sophistication before going all in on RevOps.
When you’ve been around the block for a while you get a sixth sense for these things. Fads typically explode from nowhere, and then quickly fizzle out - whereas lasting trends tend to build more gradually. RevOps is definitely more like the latter.
So, we think the concept is bang on. It’s just when you say RevOps out loud, it does sound a bit wanky.
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