Creating and maintaining a business is challenging, especially in a highly dynamic and rapidly changing environment. What worked up to this point may be less effective than it once was. Yet, it can be unclear exactly what to change. This uncertainty can also impact the confidence with which you allocate time, money, and people to solve persistent operational challenges that limit growth.

If you’re looking for a way to align teams, simplify technology, eliminate complexity, and drive revenue, then the solution is revenue operations. 

What Is Revenue Operations?

A solid framework for the current environment and business growth is revenue operations (RevOps). Revenue operations is the modern approach to business. Moreover, leaders who want to break down silos and develop more agile teams continue to shift to RevOps. Companies that use it experience explosive growth. The reasons are simple — they reorient their companies to the modern business climate.

With RevOps, leaders erase silos and create dynamic teams and systems. Information gets passed throughout companies based on unbiased data and metrics. And cross-functional teams, who have a broader understanding of business goals and objectives, work together — instead of against each other in units — to achieve growth and success.

Revenue operations encompasses four primary functions: 

1. Sales Ops executes the sales paybooks and pipeline management. 
2. Marketing Ops oversees marketing efforts and activities. 
3. Content Ops strategically develops and measures content performance across all channels. 
4. Data Ops provides processes and systems for data analytics, metrics, and performance processes and systems. 

Cross-Functional Teams and Technology at the Core of Success

While the four above functions are at the core of RevOps, two critical elements underpin the approach. One is that all RevOps teams are cross-functional and multi-disciplinary. So, unlike in more traditional businesses, a “hub and spoke” or “flywheel model” exists. RevOps exists as the nerve center of the company. And their “clients” are the marketing, sales, operations, etc., units.

Multi-disciplinary teams in RevOps are vital because they bring the knowledge base and experience to everyone else in the group. Experts in marketing, sales, data, and content within RevOps support the entire company. Further, by its very nature, silos get eliminated because the RevOps group has cross-functional business professionals.

The second crucial element for the RevOps team is data and technology. All business leaders recognize that tech, data, and key performance indicator (KPI) metrics are vital. The RevOps team ensures that they amass large data sets to ensure the company is driving business and generating growth. 

AI and machine learning require enormous data sets. For example, the RevOps team obtains data acquisition and funnels the data to inform leaders of actionable intelligence.  

How Should Businesses Focus on Revenue Operations?

Because of the flywheel model of RevOps, businesses have a true nerve center. As many business leaders realize, the old model simply shifted responsibility. When things went wrong, it was the marketing team’s or sales team’s fault. However, with RevOps at the core of the business, business leaders genuinely have an accountable core unit. It is through RevOps that everything processes throughout the company.

Revenue operations are a comprehensive process encompassing all activities involved in generating revenue, including pricing, fulfillment, marketing, finances, and risk management. This means that c-suite executives get the complete picture through RevOps. When they make decisions, they act on dashboard reporting and information from RevOps. When they review company-wide metrics and performance, they do it through the RevOps lens. 

If you want to improve your business, RevOps is the best approach because it streamlines everything. One of the best places to begin is to align your sales and marketing teams with your revenue operations team. Sales and marketing usually focus on bringing in more leads. However, revenue operations concentrates on closing deals by getting customers what they want and need.

It’s the role of revenue operations to determine the KPIs most important to your business. This could mean focusing on customer retention or lifetime value. And by amassing enormous data sets from internal and external sources, RevOps determines what drives your customers to stay and grow with your company. 

Three Ways Revenue Operations Helps Businesses Grow

As mentioned, revenue operations streamline and align. Everything driving business success and profitability flows through one central point, ensuring cohesion. Leaders have a more holistic and all-encompassing view. They don’t just consider a portion of the picture when making critical decisions. Instead, they get to see everything that affects business growth. 

Three core reasons exist for how revenue operations could help any business experience exponential growth once fully implemented:

1. More revenue: The revenue operations process encompasses all the activities involved in generating and capturing revenue. It includes pricing, fulfillment, billing, customer support, and financial risk management. Because of the centralization of data, you can make strategic, smart decisions to increase revenue.
2. Streamlined operations processes: Aligning sales, marketing, content, and data through revenue operations streamlines operational processes. Moreover, by eliminating data and worker silos, a business saves time and money. With marketing and content, RevOps removes the friction of traditional company structures. As a result, marketing teams get lean, focused, and effective.
3. Long-term success: Every business gets founded to create profits. Revenue operations are an essential aspect of a company’s long-term success. However, the modern business climate has massive risks and uncertainty like pandemics, war, economic shocks, and disruptive technology. Therefore, success depends on alignment and using streamlined data to be immensely agile.  

Revenue Operations Unblocks Business Growth

Revenue operations is a strategy to develop and execute the steps necessary to manage and increase revenue. Though it is a growing approach to business, more companies need to adopt it. The reality is that companies that use RevOps models achieve unbound business growth because of friction elimination and centralization. 

Because of the streamlining and alignment, they have more flexibility to adapt and reinvent. They become much more competitive to challenge competitors in a continuously shifting environment. 

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. It’s hard to manage your time and maintain a successful business. That’s why it’s crucial to find new tools and methods to help. 

RevOps and modern tools make it easier to drive growth. With so much happening and so much data, RevOps brings it together. It takes all the pieces from what seems like a broken mirror and puts it back together. As a result, leaders get to see everything — not just bits and pieces. And that’s the core reason why you should consider RevOps. You must know everything that’s happening in your business. RevOps allows you to view it all, and that’s priceless.

Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions, a next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm focused on helping ambitious leaders align teams, simplify technology, eliminate friction, and drive revenue. He is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion having served organizations from $5MM to more than $500MM in revenue for more than 18 years. Ben’s written and edited dozens of books on leadership and growth and is a frequent speaker, podcaster, and guest for business and industry groups. His most recent book, Master the Pivot, was released in 2020. Ben and his wife and two boys live in the Nashville, Tennessee area.