For B2B organizations, where buying cycles are longer and customer relationships are highly nuanced, having the right RevOps strategy is especially valuable.
But what is B2B RevOps?
And how do you get started?
By aligning departments and consolidating data for seamless insights, RevOps can optimize team performance, enhance the customer experience, and promote sustainable growth.
In this guide, we dive into the essential strategies and best practices for building a robust RevOps framework tailored to B2B needs, helping you optimize every step of the revenue journey and stand out in a competitive market.
Ready to dive in?
Let’s start with some basics.
What is B2B RevOps?
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is an organizational structure that integrates all revenue-related operations components – marketing, sales, customer success – and aligns their processes to optimize efficiency and revenue.
Instead of looking at these components as separate silos, RevOps looks at them as one revenue-generating team working toward the same objectives.
Traditionally, each function has its own structure. Marketing has a head of marketing or Chief Marketing Officer, marketing team members, marketing operations team members and maybe some specialists, contractors or interns. Sales and customer success follow similar structures. With a true RevOps model, the operations people from each team are pulled into one department.
“RevOps is about creating a unified, data-driven approach to revenue that breaks down silos and amplifies each team’s strengths. It aligns everyone from marketing to customer success on one clear goal: consistent, scalable growth.” — Meg Cintorino, Director of RevOps
The RevOps team focuses on the operational part of the revenue-generating process so that individuals in each department can continue to focus on their expertise (marketers on brand awareness and lead gen, sales people on building relationships, customer success on helping existing customers, etc.) while still working toward the overarching revenue goals.
Why is RevOps Important for B2B Businesses?
Often, different teams within an organization work in silos, working toward siloed goals. Sales operations team members are focused on supporting the sales team in closing customers. Marketing operations is focused on helping marketers with lead generation while customer success operations are focused on helping support customer satisfaction and adoption.
RevOps breaks down these silos and creates a unified goal for all operations members: optimizing revenue. By tearing down these barriers, RevOps can lead to:
1. Increased Efficiency
When teams work together, they eliminate duplicative efforts. For example, when the sales team sees which marketing content drew in a lead, they gain a better understanding of what is important to that lead, letting them add value faster by building onto the content rather than starting at square one. In fact, B2B companies report that RevOps has led to a 10% to 20% increase in sales productivity.
Another example is when marketing is trying to plan a campaign, they use data collected by the RevOps team to understand which messages have influenced revenue conversions or resonated well with target audiences. This allows marketing teams to be more data-driven and efficient in their approach.
2. Enhanced Customer Experience
The sales cycle for B2B organizations can be long. A prospect may find a social media post that takes them to your website, where they do their own research and then contact your company. A sales rep then works with that lead and their team, and if the lead decides to purchase your product or service, then customer success answers questions and maintains the relationship.
RevOps can help smooth transitions and provide value sooner as the customer moves through the buyer’s journey. Marketing ops ensures the sales team knows what products or services each lead is interested in. Sales ops ensures customer success has all relevant information to provide tailored assistance to the organization more quickly. And this translates to real results - B2B tech companies that have implemented RevOps have reported a 30% reduction in go-to-market expenses.
3. Optimized Revenue Growth
The overarching goal of RevOps is revenue generation. This can be done by both eliminating efficiencies to save costs and improving the effectiveness of the sales, marketing and customer success teams.
So does this actually work? The data points toward yes.
Companies that implemented RevOps processes had up to 10% greater revenue growth over a five year period.
B2B RevOps Best Practices
Now that you’re familiar with what RevOps is and why it’s important, let’s talk about key strategies and concrete steps to build your own RevOps structure.
Best Practice 1: Align Your Teams
One key strategy for successful RevOps is to get departments – namely marketing, sales and customer success – aligned. Here are the initial steps I would take to get everyone on the same page.
Step 1: Develop Shared Goals and KPIs
The first thing you need to do when aligning teams is create shared goals with clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These goals will likely be tied to revenue (it is RevOps, after all) or parts of the buyer journey that lead to revenue (for example, number of marketing qualified leads).
Shared goals can create greater buy-in because individuals understand how their work is contributing not only to team goals, but also to the company’s overall goals.
And this translates to, well…more revenue. Companies that align their sales and marketing teams generate significantly more revenue from their marketing efforts. Don’t skip this step!
Step 2: Develop SLAs and SOPs for Accountability
Understanding ownership and accountability across the customer lifecycle helps different members of the RevOps group know which tasks are their responsibility and which team owns each part of the customer journey. It’s important to have this clearly defined and easy to reference. This is where SLAs and SOPs come in.
SLAs, or service level agreements, are shared agreements on responsibilities. This delineates who is in charge of what and sets up shared definitions for the customer lifecycle.
SOPs, or standard operating procedures, are agreed-upon processes that help uphold the responsibilities laid out in the SLA.
Basically, these documents outline who owns what tasks and holds people accountable for completing their tasks and handling processes correctly. Having these clearly outlined can make collaboration between departments easier on everyone.
And these are not “set it and forget it” documents. Especially in the early phase of your RevOps work, they may need frequent changes as people work out the snags in the processes.
Step 3: Set Up a Process for Collaboration
With the new SLAs and SOPs in place, individuals may be doing different tasks or working with new colleagues. There should be an easy way for them to collaborate (no one wants 500 Slack messages a day).
And this collaboration ties directly into productivity (and, tangentially, revenue). Employees who feel included in more detailed communication are nearly five times more likely to report increased productivity. Clear communication is also needed to uphold SOPs.
Technology can make it easier to work together. A project management platform (think Monday.com or Asana) supports collaboration and visibility among coworkers. This is helpful both within and across teams and departments.
Best Practice 2: Get On The Same Page About Data
RevOps relies heavily on data. Visibility into data and customer insights helps sales react to prospects' needs, marketers test and optimize strategies, and customer success representatives know the right time to connect with customers.
This, in turn, makes the journey more seamless for customers and more efficient for your team.
“Data is the foundation of RevOps. When teams have shared access to insights, they can respond to customer needs in real time and optimize strategies faster, keeping us agile in a competitive market.” — Meg Cintorino, Director of RevOps
Step 1: Specify How to Use Data to Track Goal Progress
If you just tell your team to “use data to find customer insights”, you’re probably not going to get good results. Start by looking at your company’s overarching goals and break those down into measurable objectives for marketing, sales and customer success. Once you have these objectives, you can create KPIs for each one.
For example, let’s say your company is trying to increase revenue by $5M. What steps do the sales, marketing and customer success teams need to take to support that goal?
You may decide that marketing has to generate X amount of qualified leads, sales needs to convert Y number of those leads into the pipeline and customer success needs to grow their account base by Z%. Alternatively, you may find it beneficial to create benchmarks based on historical data to show steady progress.
However you set this up, the goal is to have data to show concrete evidence of your progress towards your goals.
Step 2: Integrate Data Models
It’s great to have lots of data that shows valuable insights on leads, customers and your goal progress. But if everyone on the team cannot access this data easily and in a timely manner, then the insights don’t really do anything.
Integrating your data models and technology is crucial to ensure that the entire RevOps team can access data at the right time to guide their decisions and choices.
Step 3: Align Your Data Definitions
How many times have you been in a QBR and marketing and sales had different reports that shared different realities of the same data set? Neither team was likely wrong, they were just looking at the data for different purposes.
Defining the data you are looking at helps ensure that marketing, sales and customer success are all speaking the same language when looking at reports. For example, you may determine you need to generate 150 marketing qualified leads in order to hit your revenue target. Whatever the definitions are, make them consistent so that you all are on the same page about progress and results.
Best Practice 3: Create A Tech Stack To Support Your Goals
You may have noticed that the first two strategies require technology to support team collaboration and data sharing. Having a modern, right-sized tech stack sets you and your team up for success.
Step 1: Evaluate Your Current Tech Stack
Start by assessing your existing tools and workflows. Identify gaps in communication, data or performance tracking. Talk to employees to see where pain points lie. And if there are things working well, take note of that, too.
Once you know what you’ve got and what you’re missing, it’s time to think about what new tools you need. Below are a few of the main ones; however, your tech stack should reflect your process and priorities:
- Customer Relationship Management tools (CRMs): Manages all of your company’s interactions with leads and customers
- Ex: Salesforce
- Marketing Automation Platforms: Automates marketing tasks and optimizes workflows for better efficiency
- Ex: HubSpot
- Data Integration Platforms: Brings together data from multiple sources so that it can be viewed and analyzed collectively
- Ex: Zapier
- Website/Visitor Analytics: Provides information on website visitors across devices and platforms
- Ex: GA4
- Customer Data Platform: Unifies your company’s customer data from marketing and other channels
- Ex: Treasure Data CDP
- Collaboration Platform: Allows your team to work together on tasks and track progress of projects
- Ex: Monday.com
- Business Intelligence (BI) Tool: Combines and analyzes large amounts of data to show a more complete picture of trends and insights
- Ex: PowerBI
Step 2: Choose Your Tech Tools
After evaluating your current tech stack and needs, you may find that your organization already has all of the tools you need. If that’s the case, you should focus on defining what each tool is used for and how to integrate them.
However, you may realize that you need to find a new tool or two to round out your tech stack. You may need a lot of different specialized technologies, or you may look for multi-functional tools that help with integration and lower costs.
Here are a few of the key considerations when selecting technology:
- Budget
- Team needs
- Scalability of the tools
- Ability to integrate with other tools and softwares
- Ease of use
The right tools are different for each organization. Spend the time to figure out what is best for your team.
Step 3: Train Your Team
With new technology and processes, it’s important to train your team. This training will look different for different companies. You may need to train on the new technologies and software you’ve purchased, as well as how all these tools integrate. You may also need to offer training on how to use them within the processes defined in your SOPs.
Best Practice 4: Optimize Your Performance
You’re doing a lot of work with your RevOps endeavor, and you want to be able to track how it’s going so that you can share it with your team and the company as a whole. So how do you go about this?
Step 1: Set Up Dashboards to Track KPIs
You’ve already created shared KPIs, and you’ve got your tech tools working together. Now it’s time to set up dashboards to collect data to help you track KPIs. Your dashboards may be different based on what your KPIs are.
In addition to tracking KPIs related to revenue generating activities, you may also want to have dashboards that can track adherence to your processes, which can help with accountability.
One thing to think about is how you want to view your analytics and reports. Data visualization tools such as Tableau or Power BI are a great way to share data, as they are typically easy to understand.
Step 2: Evaluate, Adjust and Repeat
Once you’ve got your RevOps initiatives set, plan to regularly evaluate performance. I’m not saying refresh your dashboards every day. But create a plan for how often different metrics are viewed. Set aside time to review these metrics and use the insights to update and optimize your strategies.
“RevOps isn’t static; it’s a continuous loop of learning and adjusting. Regularly reviewing KPIs helps us refine our strategies and stay aligned with evolving business goals.” — Meg Cintorino, Director of RevOps
Continually iterating on your RevOps processes can increase efficiency and cost-effectiveness while reducing risk, ultimately translating to optimized revenue generation.
Step 3: Set a Regular Cadence for Review
Set up a normal cadence of meetings for the RevOps team to review your progress. You might be thinking, great, another meeting. I get it. But this could not have been an email. It’s an opportunity to collaboratively assess your progress and get aligned on what adjustments to make, if any, so you can hit your goals.
The frequency of these meetings is up to your team. You might meet weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. But keep the meetings frequent enough that you can talk about problems as they arise and keep everyone on the same page when adjustments are made.
We’re B2B RevOps Experts
RevOps strategies help your go-to-market teams – marketing, sales, customer success – stay aligned on goals to reduce friction and increase efficiency. While this all may seem daunting, I recommend starting with small steps, such as assessing current systems or choosing the right tools for your business.
Alternatively, you can reach out to a partner that can help walk you through the process and help set up the right strategies for your business. Implementing RevOps solutions can set your organization up for long-term success.
Contact our team to see how we can help you get started with RevOps today.
