What Is RevOps? And How Do CEOs Leverage it to Scale Revenue?

Throughout our company’s growth and the work we’ve done for our clients over the past 3 years, we’ve identified new ways to scale companies, sometimes, by learning the hard way.

I can think back to our early work in 2018 when our silo-focus was on rebuilding sales departments. I had just finished my second successful stint of a B2B midmarket sales career with a Fortune 1000 company. I had performed well in sales and my mission as an entrepreneur was to train up as many salespeople as I could. Within 18 months, we realized that without having a say in our clients’ marketing or technology stack, the sales teams were always going to be held back.

Thankfully, one of our team members took on our new RevOps division in 2019 and built it from the ground up. After reviewing over a dozen CRMs and automation tools, she chose HubSpot as our core technology. From there, we’ve added 13 other partners and technologies to our RevOps ecosystem. Why? Because marketing, sales, and customer success teams should not do work manually that could be automated, simply put.

For CEOs who are ready to scale, their unshakeable revenue ecosystem must have a tech stack built for automation, efficiency, and visibility into key data, providing the business intelligence required to make complex business decisions.

CEOs who stopped subscribing to siloed technologies that didn’t integrate with each other and made the investment in RevOps quickly realized how profitable their revenue engine could be by stripping out manual processes and duplicated efforts.

But RevOps isn’t just the tech stack.

We define RevOps as the technology stack and the operational workflow that support the life cycle of your customer. RevOps is a newer term and concept that corporations are starting to adopt.

To build your RevOps function, you can first audit your current tech stack, tech stack spend, tech stack usage by team member, tech stack alignment to your customer journey from marketing to sales to customer success, and the overall tech stack integration and ratio against optimal performance for each revenue department. This helps you see the gap between your current state and your desired future state.

The most common RevOps gaps are:

1. Misuse and underuse of technology by all revenue team members in your marketing, sales, and customer success departments.
2. Lack of integration between technologies, resulting in duplication of work and potential mistakes.
3. Overlap of functionality between technologies without clear SOPs of what is to be done in each system.
4. Lack of alignment between your customer’s buying journey and each revenue team’s behavior and involvement in their portion of the funnel and ongoing support.
5. No formal training or enforcement of tech stack usage by management.
6. Overpayment and wasted spend on unused licenses, expired discounts, and unnecessary technologies. 
7. No one “owns” the tech stack internally, resulting in the need for expensive consultants for customization and support.

After reviewing your gap analysis, your team should align on recommendations, and create an agreed-upon action plan to enhance your existing tech stack, optimizing it for maximum usage, and potentially implement new technologies or integrations.

Fun fact, every client we’ve helped with their RevOps function was over-paying in one way or another on their tech stack before we got involved. We have optimized their tech stack spend and brought forth substantial process improvements, automation, and lowered labor costs by eliminating hundreds of hours of manual work.

And, your customer experience will forever be changed when you invest in RevOps. By aligning your tech stack with the operational workflow of your customer’s lifecycle, you increase each team member and revenue departments’ visibility into past conversations and key information used to progress the relationship with the prospect through the funnel and through their ongoing customer experience.

Lastly, when your RevOps reporting and dashboard functions are set up properly and operating fully, your leadership team will be able to view and understand the most important key data metrics required to make intelligent business decisions.