Tag: Customer Success

I Need to Build a RevOps Function—Where Do I Start?

Posted on by admin

Hi Jo,

I’m hoping you can help me.

My executives tasked me with building out the Revenue Operations function at our company, and I’m not quite sure where to start.

Should I be talking to my peers across sales and marketing? Or should I be doing a lot of external research?

I’m not even sure that all my colleagues know what RevOps is—and I really want to make sure they’re bought into the changes that will come down the line.

What should I do first?

Thank you,

Directionless Dana

pink separator line

Hi, Dana. This is really exciting!

You’ve got the chance to define what RevOps looks like at your company and build out the capabilities that make the most sense for your teams.

How cool is that?

But you’re right, being successful will require thoughtful engagement and planning before you can make any changes. Checking in and asking for advice is already a great first step.

To help you make the most of that momentum, here are three other strategies you can use to set a solid foundation for your RevOps team.

 

1. Define RevOps

You mentioned that your executive team has tasked you with this initiative—but are you all on the same page regarding what RevOps is and what it looks like?

Setting a definition that everyone can agree on will help ensure alignment and prevent any confusion (and headaches!) down the road.

Let’s define RevOps: Revenue operations is a business function that’s built to maximize an organization’s revenue potential across the funnel. Instead of having your revenue operations capabilities live under sales, marketing, and customer success, you can have them operate as a single cohesive unit with accountability throughout the full customer journey. This centralized approach helps build a culture that’s intentionally focused on operationalizing revenue—rather than having it be a byproduct of other important work.

Once you’ve defined RevOps within the context of your organization, you can move on to the next step in the planning process. Read our post ‘How to Explain RevOps to Your MOPs Team‘ for more advice.

 

2. Identify your capabilities

Identify where your RevOps capabilities are—and where they aren’t.

It’s more than likely that your company already has some revenue operations capabilities distributed across your sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Your job will be to:

  • look at these teams
  • identify where the work is happening, and
  • create a roadmap for how those siloed functions can move into your new RevOps structure.

This is also an opportunity to understand how tasks are currently completed. Our posts on finding the right reporting tools for your RevOps team and how to optimize content can help.

Ask questions like these to get started:

  • What tools are your teams using?
  • Are two teams using different tools for the same tasks?
  • How are your peers talking about revenue operations in each vertical?
  • What data are they looking at and how are they using it to make decisions?

 

With a clear picture of the current state, you’ll have an easier time mapping out the necessary changes to centralize your activities and align incentives across the board.

 

3. Build your RevOps network

Like with any big initiative that requires a lot of change, you will need stakeholders on your side.

My advice? Have one-on-one conversations with leaders across sales, marketing, and customer success to talk about the value of RevOps.

Talk to them about what they’ll get out of this new team, and paint them a picture of what the organization could look like over the next one to five years.

Don’t forget: you’re running a very strategic project.

You’re reshaping how your company thinks about revenue and creating a resource for making the data you collect more impactful.

So don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it and have important conversations with other leaders at your organization.

You’ve got this,

Jo Pulse

What Your CRO Should Know About CX

Posted on by admin

TLDR: Now that subscription business models are commonplace, customer retention is something you maintain by making proactive investments in CX. CX is all about how your business engages with customers at each point of interaction. To keep customer confidence high, your RevOps team should consistently collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points. Make CX a dedicated, long-term investment, and you’ll enjoy greater customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI.

 

Businesses often prioritize generating as much revenue as possible, as fast as they can. This encourages Sales and Marketing teams to pursue quick wins and short-term goals. Measuring Sales against quarterly quotas, for instance, drives Sales and Marketing to focus more on leads from which they can quickly close deals. 

There’s a logic to this short-term thinking: to keep costs low and be as profitable as soon as possible, pursue business you can easily win. But to sustain revenue long-term and maximize the ROI of each client engagement, you want to be equally dedicated to client retention.

In the age of subscription business models, customer churn has never been a greater existential threat. Retention’s something you maintain by making proactive investments in Customer Success and quality customer experiences; this Tough Talks Made Easy will help you explain what good CX looks like and the value it provides to your business.

 

Close the feedback loop

CX is all about how your business engages with customers at each point of interaction. Every instance where Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success interact with a customer is an opportunity to build goodwill and keep people interested in your brand, from campaign ads and content to the sales process to customer service and relationship management.

The latter part—when customers have already signed a deal—is where businesses typically fall short with CX. For self-service products where users sign up independently, invest in an accessible UX with support channels and documentation to address more complex use cases. Make it as easy as possible for people to use your service, and they’ll probably continue to do so. 

For managed products and services, where clients have specific needs to address, Customer Success reps play a vital role in encouraging retention by regularly checking in with clients, listening to their goals and challenges, and helping them use your products and services to achieve their aims. Even if a customer isn’t using your product for all its intended features, quality customer support will encourage them to stay. Where Marketing gets peoples’ attention and Sales gets them to sign, Customer Success is why people remain loyal to a business.

In the spirit of active listening, you want to discover and resolve any issues before customers lose confidence. Collecting customer feedback through NPS surveys or simple Q&As integrated into products is important to understand where you’re succeeding and what improvements to prioritize in your roadmap, but siloed communication limits how quickly you can solicit and react to feedback. If Customer Success and customer support teams have no visibility into the social channels that Marketing manages, for instance, then implementing a process that encourages transparency becomes a high priority for RevOps.

For your CRO: To keep on top of CX, your RevOps team needs people to consistently monitor and address feedback. Budget the time for people across RevOps to collect and integrate feedback from every channel and discuss it regularly as a team, including the likes of BDRs and the Product team. You can then strategize together on how to address the realm of issues clients have, whether that means tweaking customer support or creating content to clarify certain processes and technical capabilities of your product. 

Because ultimately, your retention of customers, reputation as a business, and ROI from each customer engagement are threatened less by complaints than by failure to engage with criticism. Each of your channels and customer touchpoints should be conceived as an opportunity to collect feedback—as long as business memberships to sites like TrustPilot run tens of thousands of dollars each, it’s more costly to rebuild your reputation than to deal with issues at the root. Listen to what your customers and prospects are saying at the first possible opportunity and here on after. You’ll find out from their feedback where you need to make investments, and can rehabilitate potentially-damaging issues into demonstrations of care that inspire greater trust in your business.

 

The value of CX

The beauty of RevOps is its capacity to focus on CX in a proactive, planned manner. Take every opportunity to collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points. Make CX a dedicated, long-term investment, and you’ll enjoy greater customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI.

For any guidance you need in RevOps, get in touch.

What’s My Role in the Shift to RevOps? 

Posted on by admin

Hi Joe,

I’m a marketing ops professional and I’ve just been told that my company is moving towards adopting a RevOps model. I actually think it’s a great idea—I’ve read about the approach and think there are a lot of benefits to bringing typically siloed teams together under a combined goal. However, I’m not quite sure how to help make it happen. Do you have any advice?

Thanks,

Helpful Harriet

Hi, Harriet. Let me just say: it’s so great that you’re asking this question. As things keep changing in the marketing ops world, we need people that are willing to put their hands up and be enablers. Thank you.

You’re right that, while still a relatively new concept, RevOps has a lot to offer. It’s the notion that marketing, sales, and customer success teams can operate better when they’re working towards a collective goal—helping their clients and prospects succeed—rather than as disparate silos. Plus, it relies on an integrated tech stack that easily shares customer data and lets prospects flow through the customer lifecycle with a personalized experience. Sounds great, doesn’t it? 

While it might sound easy, getting to this integrated place is a long-term project. First off, you need to do a lot of work to ensure alignment between these three teams. That means a lot of conversations around goals, metrics, and performance to get rid of any discrepancies. There’s also a technology and data aspect here. To build a RevOps tech stack, you need to look into where there are gaps or redundancies, and make decisions accordingly. 

All that said, there are also things you (as a MOPs team member) can do at an individual level that will make a big difference, and help things move faster. 

 

Expand your knowledge 

If you want your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to be fully aligned, it can’t just happen at the executive level—you need alignment on the ground as well. Start this off by learning more about how things are done in those teams, including how they communicate, what their metrics are, and how they measure performance. Talk to a colleague and ask if you can shadow them for a couple of days; you can observe them as they go through their daily tasks and join them in team meetings. 

 

Become a champion for the RevOps approach

You know it, we know it: Marketing and Sales aren’t always best friends. In fact, we often find ourselves in a rather antagonistic relationship. So, once you’ve taken the time to learn more about what your sales team does, and why they do it, share that knowledge within your team. These insights should help build comradery and make it easier to collaborate better down the line. 

You’ve already done the work to learn about the benefits of the RevOps model—so make sure you share that as well. People tend to be wary of change, but a lot of the time that comes down to a lack of understanding. Empower your team with the knowledge they need and it might make for an easier transition when the time comes.

 

Keep putting your hand up

As I mentioned before, rolling out RevOps is going to be a long process—and your leaders are going to need help. Talk to your manager about how you can actively contribute to the project. You never know, they might need someone to bring the MOPs perspective to the decision-making table, or they may be looking for someone to champion the project and help communicate it’s value. Good thing you’re likely already doing that last one!

You’ve got this, 

Joe Pulse

Why RevOps Should Look Under the Hood of Seismic

Posted on by admin

TLDR: Seismic is a boost to RevOps teams who’re looking to surface content more efficiently and better understand how content contributes to revenue. But the platform is most successful when paired with ongoing efforts to produce and organize content to a high standard.

Content lets organizations tell the story of their value to customers and prospects. RevOps teams often struggle to surface the value that content provides and double down on what works.

Without reliable insights into how content performs with its audience, marketing leaders find it difficult to prove how content contributes to the bottom line. 

Sales also needs content analytics to determine how best to personalize their story for each prospect. Without a well-organized system to categorize and manage content, sales risks sinking hours into searching for and sending out pieces that are outdated or ill-suited to the customer.

If your RevOps team struggles to optimize content, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you.

With a single source of truth to categorize and analyze content, RevOps teams can make decisions that help to close deals—and prove it. That’s the essence of what Seismic offers, and this piece will help you discuss the need-to-know aspects of the tool with RevOps.

 

Surface your best content

Seismic is a sales enablement platform that provides automated content management and analytics to makes RevOps’ lives easier. 

Admins can set permissions so sales only needs to search through content relevant to their accounts and campaigns. Then, sales can identify which pieces of content to deploy based on a series of categorizations that describe the properties of each content piece at a glance (e.g., asset types, relevant personas and products, sales stage to be deployed).

Seismic will save sales a few headaches if you have a well-developed content library but lack the processes to efficiently surface the most appropriate pieces.

Rather than clinging to a few pieces of content and deploying them past their expiry dates, sales gets an easy way to explore the deep bench of your library and engage prospects creatively with various pieces. 

Seismic also cuts down the significant amounts of time that reps spend just trying to get their hands on content. No need to trawl through a disoriented database or chase content people to ask for pieces.

Teams can actively surface the most relevant, useful content to serve to prospect by searching for content via filters like:

  • client type
  • topic, or
  • customizable options.

 

Connect content to dollars

The platform also tracks and reports on how prospects and opportunities engage with the content your team sends them. Seismic’s analytics let sales and marketing gauge how well each piece resonates with recipients and draw a direct line between content interactions and deals. 

For marketing, Seismic clears the uncertainty of how content contributes to the bottom line.

Marketing can map content engagement stats onto close rates and gain a stronger grasp of what types of content win deals from different prospect segments. 

With clear insight into how content provides value, RevOps teams can rethink for the better how they create content and personalize their outreach to each prospect.

 

Before you sign

For the ways that Seismic helps RevOps, the platform isn’t a silver bullet for poor organizational systems.

Seismic will be organized similarly to your source information on SharePoint or Drive, meaning that the platform’s presentation and categorization of content will be just as clear as your original folder structure.

In other words: if you’re in a mess, clean it up before you get Seismic.

To do that, RevOps needs to answer a few questions:

  • What are your naming conventions?
  • How will you tag and categorize content?
  • Where will content live depending on its category—e.g., persona groups, internal or external?

Your team should work through these details until you can confidently identify content by three key properties:

  • what each piece is
  • who it targets, and
  • the situations you intend to use it.

From there, Seismic allows RevOps to categorize, present, and analyze the performance of content—but it isn’t going to boost the underlying quality of that content.

If your bottom-of-funnel pieces aren’t inspiring opportunities to buy what you’re selling, then your RevOps team should consider doing an audit for quality.

Ask your team if the pieces:

  • Well-written and presented?
  • Relevant to your persona and industry groups?
  • Conveying the right level of information for the stage in the sales cycle? 

As much as Seismic’s analytics let RevOps spot trends and steer the direction of content to capitalize on engagement, the execution of those insights is always going to split the difference between landing a deal or not.

 

The bottom line

Ultimately, Seismic is a boost to RevOps teams who’re looking to surface content from their libraries more efficiently and better understand how content contributes to revenue.

As long as RevOps puts in the work to organize content and produce it to a high standard, teams can use the platform’s analytics to create and deploy content in a way that wrings more dollars from customer engagement.

For any advice on assessing sales enablement platforms or connecting content to revenue, Revenue Pulse is here to help.