Let’s talk about Revenue Operations, simply the process of generating revenue for a company. The market is just now coining the phrase RevOps, and, with Gartner on board with the term, it is taking off. That’s fine. Let’s call it RevOps. That’s what we’ve been doing to accelerate growth for B2B technology companies since 2001.
What happened in 2001? If you were in business at that time, you know it was the internet bubble burst. I am an electrical engineer by background, and at the time I was running a consulting division for an analytics company. When that company had a financial restatement, I went to work for the COO to salvage what was a solid company at its core. I ended up restructuring marketing, taking a 120-person marketing and product management organization to 40 people.
The good and bad news was that the 120 people were all A players. I had 30 days to learn all the functions of strategy, marketing and sales, and determine what we needed to move the company forward. Those people taught me everything about marketing, at least how the traditional marketing department operated.
However, if you put an engineer in marketing, we will build an engine. It’s just what we do. We approach the function as an optimization equation. How can I use the resources and dollars I have at hand to produce the highest number of revenue dollars?
Here I will stop talking about optimization equations. I’m happy to talk to you about them for hours, but our marketing team won’t let me talk about them here.
Suffice it to say that this approach, along with the art of good messaging and competitive positioning, was the key to the big turnaround for this company. It was one of the best-performing stocks in the ensuing 5 years.
Over the next 15 years, I used this approach for many B2B companies, with almost universal success. For the last 10 years, I have run a strategic consulting firm based on this approach.
We called it Revenue Engineering at the time… which has now become RevOps. What problems does RevOps solve? If you are in a B2B technology company, at least some of these problems should sound familiar.
- Whiplash bookings performance – up one quarter, down the next
- Stagnation in annual growth
- Missed bookings targets
- Unpredictable forecasts
- Siloed marketing and sales functions
- Arguments over the value of various marketing and sales programs and investments
- Disconnects in customer communications
RevOps, at least our approach to RevOps, combines several disciplines that solve these problems and sustain the improvements over time.
- Clear articulation of strategy – just enough, not too much
- Definition of an end-to-end standardized RevOps process – from marketing to inside sales to sales to account management
- A model of the RevOps process that will hit your bookings target – with goals at each step, required resources (such as number of sales reps), and quality feedback mechanisms
- Analytics to compare your actual performance to the model
- Feedback from your analytics to improve your strategy and model
If you think about it, other enterprise functions have been run this way for decades (at least). Finance has budgets and actuals. Operations has project plans and tracking software. Manufacturing has product design and production. We approach the growth function in the same way. We have a metrics-based plan, we translate that plan into production automatically, and we measure our performance against the model to improve areas that are below target.
What are the outcomes we have seen from every company that implements this approach successfully?
- Accelerated revenue growth
- Predictable bookings performance
- Alignment of marketing and sales teams
- Collaboration at the executive level based on quantifiable performance indicators
- Transparency into the effectiveness of marketing and sales investments
I’ve seen some articles on how to put together a good RevOps function. They suggest securing consultants, defining processes, and implementing systems. The good news is we’ve built all of our RevOps best practices into a single platform, ayeQ. ayeQ is command central for the B2B growth function. It provides systematic support for
- Go-to-market strategy development
- RevOps process definition
- Bookings modeling
- Closed-loop performance analytics
We are pretty excited about our platform, especially now that “RevOps” is getting broader attention as a required function for high-growth companies. If we call it RevOps, then we are the market leader in that segment.
Find out more about our approach to RevOps, and our complete RevOps platform, ayeQ. Request a demo today!
