10 High-Impact Ways RevOps Can Help B2B Technology Companies (With Examples)

Fact: Businesses need to make money to stay afloat. RevOps can help increase revenue by improving sales and marketing efficiency, reducing customer churn, and increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities. RevOps is the combination of people, processes, and tools that streamlines how businesses run. It brings together disparate teams and data to create a cohesive, well-oiled machine that can move quickly and efficiently.

For technology companies, RevOps is essential to success. Too often, these companies underinvest in operations, leading to reactive busywork and data messes that could have been avoided with the right RevOps strategy. How does it help? Let's look at ten benefits and illustrate them with concrete examples of how RevOps can assist B2B technology companies.

1. Uniting Sales & Marketing

More often than not, sales and marketing teams are siloed, with very little communication or collaboration. Sales often complain about how marketing is not providing enough leads for them to chase, while marketing feels like sales goes off and do their own thing anyway, so why bother asking? This can lead to duplicate efforts, wasted time, and frustrated team members. RevOps can help by aligning these teams and their goals so they can work together more efficiently and effectively by making it easier to see where gaps and inefficiencies exist.

For example, to improve communication, collaboration, and therefore alignment between the two teams, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is essential. An SLA is an agreement between a business and its customer that establishes consequences if the service provided falls below expectations. When discussing sales and marketing, this becomes a two-way promise, with marketing promising to give a certain number of leads to sales, and sales in turn agreeing to reach out within a certain time frame.

2. Cleansing Data & Improving Data Quality

According to HubSpot, the average mid-market firm utilizes 137 distinct SaaS applications, whereas enterprises use an average of 288 (Blissfully, 2020). Keeping track of all that information and keeping it synced, clean, and flowing across all your departments is a full-time job. RevOps provides the tools and processes necessary to cleanse, normalize, and aggregate data from multiple sources. This gives businesses a single source of truth (their CRM) that can be used to make informed decisions.

For example, if your call pick-up rate is very low, it is a good idea to investigate why. Data shows that, on average, 85% of mobile numbers stored within a CRM don't match the lead's signature. Cleansing and improving the data quality to increase the amount of correct phone numbers will significantly improve pre-sales qualifications.

3. Increasing Sales Efficiency

The goal of any business is to be as efficient and effective as possible, which is especially true for technology companies. There are a lot of moving parts and pieces that need to come together for things to run smoothly. RevOps can help by providing visibility into the entire sales and marketing funnel. This data can be used to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies so that they can be addressed. Additionally, RevOps can help by streamlining processes and automating repetitive tasks.

For example, only 8% of sales reps attempt to reach out to a lead more than six times, yet according to Wordstream, it takes up to seven follow-ups before conversion. Previously, you would have to manually create each step for a sales follow-up, including the emails, tasks, and reminders to call. With RevOps, you examine which sales-follow-up process was the most successful and why, and replicate it. Then you can create a sales sequence that includes all necessary elements. This not only saves time but also ensures that all of the campaigns are consistent and meet your standards.

4. Improving Customer Experience

Customer experience is one of the most important factors in determining whether or not a customer will do business with you. In fact, a study by Oracle found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience (Oracle, 2017). RevOps can help improve the customer experience by providing visibility into the entire customer journey and identifying areas where improvements can be made.

For example, let's say you want to improve your customers' onboarding experience. With RevOps, you can track how long it takes for customers to complete certain tasks, such as setting up their profile or adding their payment information. This data can then be used to improve the onboarding process to be more efficient and user-friendly.

5. Better Understand Your Customers

RevOps can help by providing visibility into the entire sales pipeline. This data can be used to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies so that they can be addressed. Additionally, RevOps can also be used to create targeted campaigns that aim to reduce customer churn or increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

For example, sending out a quick NPS survey after each key touchpoint of their customer journey (e.g., completion of a demo, signing of a contract, completion of onboarding, 90 days after going live, 90 days before renewal) lets you take a quick pulse check on how your customer's experience was at that moment in time. This will give you valuable indications of which processes cause customer delight (accelerating your Flywheel) or frustration (creating friction).

6. Streamlining Processes

One of the biggest benefits of RevOps is its ability to streamline processes. By automating repetitive tasks and consolidating data, businesses can free up time and resources that can be better spent on strategic initiatives. In fact, According to Boston Consulting Group, revenue operations helped top B2B IT businesses grow faster by increasing sales productivity by 10% to 20%. However, marketing teams also benefit greatly by seeing a 100-200% boost in their digital marketing ROI.

For example, once you have defined your ideal customer profile, you can use marketing automation tools like HubSpot to automatically score your leads (using that ideal customer definition) and highlight the most valuable leads so you can prioritize them. You can also create marketing automation workflows that will nurture a lead over the span of weeks with helpful, high-quality content related to their original conversion topic. This automation stops when the workflow ends or when the lead requests a sales follow-up, such as a demo. This ensures that when a lead is handed over to sales, they are ready to talk to sales.

7. Reducing Costs

Minimizing spending is a priority for most B2B Technology companies. RevOps can help by streamlining processes, automating repetitive tasks, and consolidating data. By reducing the need for manual labor, businesses can save money that can be reinvested in other areas. In addition, it will help not only by providing visibility into the entire sales and marketing funnel, but also by allowing you to use this data to identify areas where costs can be reduced. The goal is to enable you to scale without additional costs.

For example, if you find that you are constantly sending the same email to leads, you can create an automated email campaign that will do this for you. This will save you time and money.

8. Increasing Revenue

In addition to reducing costs, RevOps can also help increase revenue. By improving the customer experience, businesses can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. This leads to repeat business and referrals, which can help drive top-line growth. As a result, operations teams have to spend valuable time and resources manually cleaning up data instead of driving insights that can help the company improve its sales process.

For example, to understand how vital RevOps is for B2B technology companies, one only needs to look at the sales process. Salespeople enter win-loss reasons into CRM as free text, which leads to inconsistency and makes data analysis impossible. A client of mine had almost as many different reasons for why a deal was lost as losses themselves — if a reason was entered at all. Making it compulsory to enter a reason for winning or losing a deal using a predefined taxonomy allows you to identify why you are successful in some deals and not others. It gives you undeniable evidence of who you are up against. Hint: it might not always be a competitor that you think of, but a partner who lost you a deal or a customer who decided to take the project in-house rather than buy a software solution.

9. Improving the Customer Experience

The best way to kick-start your brand's RevOps journey is not from within, but instead by starting with your customer's experience. Creating a customer journey map helps you understand how they interact with and see your brand. It should be based on real customer feedback so that their voices are heard too. By aligning sales and marketing teams, providing visibility into the entire sales funnel, and streamlining processes, businesses can provide a better customer experience. This can lead to repeat business and referrals, which can help drive top-line growth.

For example, if you want to improve customer satisfaction, you can use customer feedback to understand what is working well and what needs improvement. You can also use NPS surveys to gauge customer sentiment and identify potential advocates. Once you have this data, you can make changes to your product or service that will improve the customer experience.

10. Driving Strategic Initiatives

Last but not least, let's talk about how RevOps can help you drive strategic initiatives. By streamlining marketing and sales processes, which results in higher transparency and better data quality, businesses can identify areas where they can further improve these processes. This can lead to increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

For example, you could A/B test a landing page that contains different messaging to determine which messaging will resonate better with your customer base. Or you can identify potential competitive advantages by analyzing gaps or missed opportunities in your customer journey map or sales process. An example of a missed opportunity for many SaaS and B2B Technology companies is not placing a short and simple but well-produced 5-minute explainer video on a product page. Remember that your product is most likely highly complex, which makes it hard to understand your value proposition, so a video greatly helps.

In Summary

RevOps can help businesses achieve their goals in a number of ways. By aligning sales and marketing teams, analyzing data, and streamlining processes, businesses can improve their sales process and drive top-line growth. In addition, RevOps can help businesses reduce costs and improve the customer experience. If you want to improve the performance of your business, RevOps is the answer.

What examples have you seen of RevOps in action? Let us know in the comments below.