When we speak about Revenue Operations or RevOps, we often associate the activity with large businesses, which is a real miss for small companies as the benefits are universally applicable. In fact, when done properly RevOps may even act as a flywheel for smaller business that are experiencing fast growth. In this article we explore RevOps as a function and why it deserves the attention of businesses of any size.
Understanding Revenue Operations
Revenue operations is a strategic approach that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success functions to streamline processes, optimize performance, and drive revenue growth. This function often deals with anything such as processes, automation, data & analytics and other supporting activities that aim to accelerate revenue performance.
Over the past years the complexity of marketing, sales and customer success has increased substantially. The addition of digital channels and the shift from customers towards preferring digital first, requires a vastly better integration and collaboration between marketing/sales/customer success siloes. Revenue Operations provides the solutions companies need to have better insight in performance, make better decisions and drive efficiency.
The Value of Revenue Operations for Small Businesses
Whilst Revenue Operations looks like something for big business, the benefits for smaller may actually be similar, if not larger. Small companies may not have the workforce to deal with a complex, omnichannel environment. Teams tend to wear multiple hats, and if a company is growing fast, their schedule will be packed. So what can small businesses expect to achieve?
Data Insights
Getting accurate, real time and relevant insights into a small company's performance can be hard. Often data is decentralised in many different systems, core KPI's are not clearly defined and reports are not standardised. Reports are made in Excel where data from different sources is combined and correlated, which takes a long time and is prone to mistakes. It's the reason why in small companies it is often very hard to know which investments are paying off or where to change the strategy to accelerate growth.
More often than not this is accepted as the unavoidable status-quo, which should not be the case. Smaller businesses have less cash in the bank to spend on growth initiatives and hired hands. They also have less time themselves are they are often more self reliant. It means that accepting a lack of data for good decisions, also means they accept having even less time and spreading their investments thinner. It is for that reason that small businesses stand to benefit even more from good data than any other business, so they know exactly where their resources are going to produce the best return.
Process Efficiency
As second area where small businesses stand to gain a lot is in consciously designing processes. Trading in the omnichannel market requires three departments to collaborate closely, which simply cannot be achieved without thoughtful execution. If teams do not think about how marketing's digital channel connects to sales' approach, and how new customers are turned into advocates by Customer Success, the operation will become disjointed. Leads won't be nurtured effectively and sales may find it hard to grow business. Similarly, Customer Success in turn may be onboarding customers blindly without a good briefing on their priorities. It leads to a mediocre customer experience and fixing issues always takes more effort than doing things right first time.
Small businesses have the benefit of not being overly complicated yet, and usually having smaller teams. It makes for a great environment to design solid processes that will ensure teams unify their approach. Moreover, as the company grows it will be much more resilient to typical growing pains such as a large influx of new employees. Doing processes early on has a huge benefit for efficiency, quality and customer experience.
Automation
The final stop, intentionally after data and processes, is automation. The reason why automation is the third one on this list is because it should come after the previous two items. Companies that know where they struggle (data/analytics) and know how they work (process) will implement a vastly superior automation solution. It usually results in solutions that are cheaper, quicker to be implemented and ones that truly automate things that employees do not need to do.
Beyond taking the steps in the right order, we are huge fans of automation. Whether it is for reporting, support chats, administrative tasks or even using ChatGPT as a productivity tool, the sky is the limit. The goal we always keep in mind is that people should spend most of their time on where they add value, which is usually in tasks that require creativity and may pose a brand new challenge. Anything else, which is repetitive and simple, should be in a system.
A True Story
We have a great example of automating tasks with Hubspot at a SaaS scale-up recently. We did the legwork to determine what the core KPI's and the bottlenecks were. We established that the customer success team was working hard, but simply was not getting the results they wanted. Renewal tasks would take many actions to complete and over time the CS team got behind on their work, magnifying the issue. As soon as we found the underlying cause, we sat down with the team and designed a new, unified customer success process. It heavily simplified work by creating one standardised approach for each customer. We also took care to simplify administrative tasks, such as the way contracts were processed. It was a good start and things became easier once we launched the new processes. Finally, we implemented Hubspot and embedded many administrative and repetitive tasks there. CS team's interactions were logged automatically and when something needs to happen, they receive a task. It's taken the complexity out of their work and focuses their energy on creating a great customer experience.
In the end the amount of revenue managed by a single CS associate more than doubled, whilst retention and growth were also up. Customers gave positive feedback on how tight the CS process felt and how quickly the company is to respond. Of course there are always challenges in every implementation, but the end result was worth it. Doubling revenue per CS and boosting growth far outweighs doubling the size of the team and dealing with issues. It is a great example of how RevOps is crucial for small businesses to succeed and accelerate.
