Sales teams play an indispensable role in driving an organization’s growth. They’re responsible for nurturing leads and converting them into paying customers to drive revenue and business growth. But as we’ll soon see, today’s complex business landscape presents several challenges for sales team members.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how revenue operations, also known as RevOps, help sales teams address these challenges. We’ll also examine how RevOps leaders use sales pipeline data to accelerate sales cycles, streamline sales team workflows and skyrocket efficiency. Let’s get started.
The Challenges That Sales Teams Face
Buyers now use multiple channels to learn more about your offerings before making purchase decisions. They expect seamless interactions at each touchpoint that are tailored to their preferences and needs. This helps to build a sense of brand familiarity and affinity, which, according to data from TrustRadius, is a key factor for more than half of today’s business buyers when selecting vendors.
Moreover, consumers are often spoiled for choice, whether they’re looking for manufacturing equipment, office supplies, or cloud storage solutions. In other words, you must prepare to face stiff competition, irrespective of your business’s niche and size.
Then there’s the ever-evolving ecosystem of sales tools and tech innovations. Keeping up with the fast-changing tech world, and making the most of sales enablement functionalities, can be difficult for sales executives and managers.
What exacerbates these challenges is that there’s barely any cross-functional collaboration with other departments, including marketing and customer success. It results in silos that derail sales processes and take a toll on conversions.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to eliminate these silos and help sales teams work more efficiently? That’s where RevOps steps into the picture.
RevOps is a business function that unifies sales, marketing, and customer success teams under a common goal – to generate and maximize revenue. Embracing RevOps helps companies build a holistic and data-driven approach to managing the entire revenue cycle.
Revenue Operations and Data: Understanding the connection
RevOps provides a framework for businesses to think about departments that drive the revenue engine as a whole. In other words, marketing, sales, and customer success teams no longer chase individual targets. Instead, they work together to maximize business growth.
It’s only natural that the use of centralized RevOps in the B2B sector grew from 15% in 2019 to 40% in 2021. But how does RevOps facilitate such seamless cross-functional collaboration?
One of the most crucial steps is to collect accurate and up-to-date data from various departments and store it in a centralized repository. RevOps is responsible for tracking, measuring, and analyzing various metrics to ensure your organization’s goals are accomplished.
Commonly used RevOps metrics include:
- Lead generation and conversion rates
- Churn rate
- Average deal size
- Customer lifetime value
- Customer acquisition cost
- Gross margin
- Sales cycle length
Monitoring these metrics helps RevOps managers determine whether an organization is on the right track to revenue growth and what processes have the most potential for improved flow. It also provides various departments with deeper insight into how their efforts are contributing to the overall revenue generation process. RevOps teams typically use a broad spectrum of software, including CRM platforms, business intelligence tools, and financial analysis solutions, to track and analyze data.
It’s worth noting that RevOps data serves as a single source of truth across different departments. That, in turn, helps individual teams make better-informed decisions, optimize performance, and improve efficiency.
How Sales Teams Can Leverage RevOps Data
Globally, three-quarters of the highest-growth companies will deploy revenue operations by 2025. Here’s how sales executives and managers can use RevOps data to streamline their workflows:
Improving Transparency and Accountability
With RevOps, you get real-time visibility into the entire revenue cycle. It provides a clear picture of how leads move through the sales funnel, interacting with marketing collaterals and reps in different departments.
Collecting and processing lead engagement data can help attribute each conversion to specific team members.
This kind of transparency fosters better coordination and holds teams accountable for their contributions to revenue generation. It can be instrumental in boosting efficiency and productivity.
Identifying and Harnessing Opportunities
RevOps allows sales team members to use cross-functional data to tap into new business opportunities. For instance, insights from the marketing department can help you identify regions with potential customers where your products or services aren’t available yet. It can help you devise strategies to break into new markets.
Additionally, you can also use RevOps data to spot precise points of friction in the customer experience and harness missed opportunities. The best part is that your knowledge isn’t restricted to the decision stage of the sales funnel. Instead, you get a comprehensive overview of how each customer was treated before they entered the funnels and after they made a purchase.
This information can help you determine precise touchpoints where prospects are likely to disengage before (or even after) purchasing. Improving interactions at these touchpoints can help drive conversion rates and revenue growth.
Similarly, you can identify inactive customers who might have purchased from you earlier but never returned. Using the right nurturing strategies can help reinstate a relationship with these customers and compel them to make new purchases.
Efficient Use of Technology
Most sales teams already use a variety of tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, sales force automation (SFA) tools, etc. However, the challenge lies in integrating these tools seamlessly into workflows. When sales and marketing teams work in isolation, they might end up using separate tools with overlapping functionalities.
RevOps data provides the context needed to determine which technologies are truly beneficial. Instead of adopting tools in isolation, RevOps ensures that technology investments align with the broader revenue strategy. You can leverage data-driven insights to select the right tools, automate repetitive tasks, and focus on high-value interactions.
Let’s say you’re using a CRM with marketing automation features to qualify leads, deliver price quotes and monitor nurture interactions. However, the marketing team might be using a different platform to automate their email marketing campaigns. Besides doubling expenses, the use of separate tools creates a siloed view of customer interactions.
RevOps data can help you identify and bridge these gaps. In this case, using a single integrated CRM and marketing automation platform is the most efficient solution. It minimizes duplication of efforts and ensures every touchpoint is optimized for maximum impact.
Final Thoughts
In today’s competitive and fast-changing business landscape, streamlining sales workflows is integral to growth and success. RevOps can help accomplish this by facilitating cross-functional collaboration and data-driven decision-making. Leveraging RevOps data can help sales teams transform workflows, enhance efficiency, and drive revenue growth.
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