Research Brief
Revenue Operations: The Financial Rationale for Aligning Sales, Marketing and Customer Success Around the Revenue Cycle
Revenue Operations is a management system that aligns marketing, sales, and service teams – and the systems, operations and processes that support them – around the entire revenue cycle to unlock more predictable and scalable organic revenue growth. Revenue Operations has emerged as a VP and C-level job function that orchestrates aspects of the operations to get better control over the end-to-end revenue cycle, including aspects of sales operations, marketing operations, service operations, sales enablement, training and development, customer analytics and customer experience management. 90% of organizations
A Revenue Operations strategy seeks to coordinate the systems that support the revenue cycle including Marketing automation, CRM Software, sales enablement, and Customer Success. Overall, the average organization has over 25 tools and services that support the revenue teams. Usually these are spread over a dozen different organizations. Capital and operating investment in this growing commercial tool portfolio is expected to exceed $10,000 per front line seller at high growth organizations. In the past 18 months, VP of Revenue Operations titles increased by 300% in the last twelve months with over 35,000 jobs currently posted by a wide range of businesses. Over 90% of organizations are actively changing the way they lead and align revenue teams and the operations that support them according to Revenue Operations. 75% are tasking their sales enablement and operations team to re-configure their commercial enablement technology investments with an eye for simplifying the seller workflow, improving the quality of engagement and reducing administrative costs.
Revenue operations has emerged as a board level issue for a simple reason – it directly impacts their primary fiduciary responsibility to protect and grow firm value in the new market reality. This is because six mega trends have changed the formula for growth so much that traditional structures for managing the people, processes, and technologies that support revenue growth are no longer effective at driving sustainable and scalable growth in the current marketplace. Organizations that continue to use outdated functional approaches to growth are struggling to manage growing complexity of technology enabled selling systems, deliver a competitive customer experience, adapt to changing customer buying behavior, or make the transition to a cloud based business model. On a practical level, the executives and managers trying to squeeze more growth from their revenue teams in the face of these secular trends are driving a car that won’t go fast enough because it is only firing on two cylinders, gets terrible gas mileage, and needs a wheel alignment and a tune up.
A new management system is needed. One that does a better job of generating greater returns from commercial selling teams, processes, systems, and operations. This management system is most commonly described as Revenue Operations. The goal of Revenue Operations is to better align the commercial teams, assets, systems, and processes around a coherent set of customer and company goals to accelerate revenue, profit, and value growth.
To help boards, CEOs and CXOs evolve their commercial models to better align sales, marketing and CX teams around the customer and accelerate revenue, profit, and value growth, the faculty of the Revenue Enablement Institute has published a new book: Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales and Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth. The book provides a comprehensive 72 point Revenue Operations blueprint. This blueprint can help organizations large and small evolve to a better leverage their commercial assets to accelerate revenue, profit, and value growth. This definitive book provides the in-depth education, examples and understanding you will need to help make Revenue operations a reality in your organization. It provides a menu of smart actions that any organization can use to “stairstep” their leadership and operations teams on the path to commercial transformation.
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You can learn more about ways CFOs CEOs, growth and operations executives are aligning their revenue teams – and the operations, systems, processes and data that support them – to drive more scalable and consistent growth below.
On September 21st, Green Thread – the B2B practice of Horizon Media – will be hosting a members of the Revenue Operations community will participate in open discussions about the specific ways to integrate the solutions that support learning, enablement, coaching, and development.
To help business leaders get their commercial transformation initiatives launched and Revenue Operations teams to achieve “escape velocity, our experts have developed a ninety day program to help your Revenue Operations Initiative achieve “lift off.”
Learn eight reasons why boards, CEOs, and growth leaders are moving to a Revenue Operations model is essential for growing revenues, profits, and firm value in the 21st Century marketplace.
