Revenue Operations Roles: Who do you need to build a RevOp team?

Have you started your revenue marketing journey yet? If you nod or answer “planning to”, this piece might be for you. 

Around 58% of B2B organizations already had or are currently building a RevOps team. The trouble is that while RevOps is challenging, creating the right team can be even more complicated. 

Here’s our solution ― understand the process, so it’s easier to find the right people for the RevOps roles.  

Let’s discuss each job description, starting with the basics.

What is RevOps? 

A shortcut for revenue operation, RevOps is the process of aligning siloed departments of sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams in order to optimize revenue generation. By aligning them, businesses can ensure that each team member knows exactly what their role is in the company’s financial performance.

The RevOps team must clearly understand the revenue cycle and how each department contributes throughout the customer lifecycle. It’s the team’s responsibility to make them work together and then devise a general strategy to grow the business.

This new sales trend is commonly found among SaaS and B2B companies.

When do you need RevOps?

According to Salesforce, 41% of executives have a good grasp of RevOps. 

If you’re serious about optimizing the customer experience, you’ll need your internal departments working together towards a common goal―and that’s the core of revenue operations.

Let’s look at these situations where RevOps make sense:

• An ideal company has strong coordination among sales, marketing, and customer success departments. While this sounds easy, it’s not always easy to achieve. RevOps can streamline communication between departments, so it’s easy to identify inefficiencies and implement growth-focused strategies. The question of who really owns the customer journey doesn’t exist anymore.
• Most businesses have a lot of data, but it’s often spread out among different tools and teams. Poor tracking of the flow of revenue leads businesses to miss out on opportunities. In fact, a report found that 1 in 5 companies lose money because of messy data. RevOps is the solution. It activates a single team to keep track of all your revenue data and tools, so you can see what’s happening with your revenue.
• Most companies have no defined process for delighting customers. Without a process in place, it’s easy for different departments to implement their own ideas about how customers should be treated, leading to a frustrating and inconsistent customer experience. RevOps creates processes for every stage of the customer journey so that you can consistently deliver delightful experiences every step of the way.
• For businesses experiencing rapid growth, it’s hard to keep up with all the new sales and marketing initiatives. RevOps team makes sure that you’re able to handle the increased demand. 
• When your company goes through a big change, like a merger or acquisition, you need to make sure the new revenue targets are hit to avoid missed sales (and even layoffs). RevOps help you hit your revenue targets during times of change, from minor product tweaks to full-blown acquisitions.

Before defining the revenue operations roles (as we promised earlier), let’s first clarify the common confusion that RevOps is just a fancy term for sales operations. 

Revenue Operations vs. Sales Operations

When you think of revenue, the first thing that usually pops into your head is a sales agent trying to close deals, so he or she hits his or her sales quota. 

After all, that’s all where the entire revenue comes from.

However, that’s not the full picture. In reality, sales is just one of the revenue-generating departments. There’s a more holistic approach called revenue operations.

So how are they different?

Sales operations refers to the process of managing sales activities. It includes prospecting, closing deals, and tracking performance. It’s about supporting sales reps in doing their tasks efficiently

On the other hand, revenue operations encompass ALL of the activities that contribute to generating revenue. Not only from the sales team but also marketing and cross-sells/upsells via customer support. It’s a more holistic approach. 

Let’s now meet the RevOps team. To be on the same page, we’ll use an established company with established revenue operations as a reference.

What are revenue operations roles? ⁠

Here’s what the RevOps chart usually looks like.

Let’s define them individually now. 

Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)

The Chief Revenue Officer is a member of the senior management team. He’s the C-suite head of RevOps who directly reports to the CEO. His responsibilities include leading the company’s efforts to bring the sales, marketing, and customer success team together to collaboratively generate revenue and grow market share. 

Read more: Chief Revenue Officer vs. Chief Financial Officer – What’s the difference?

RevOps manager

A RevOps manager reports to the CRO and oversees all aspects of revenue operations for a company. This includes translating the CRO’s vision into a plan and implementing them to improve efficiencies across the teams. 

Product manager

A product manager is responsible for the strategy, roadmap, and features of a product. In RevOps, the product manager works with the development team to ensure that the product meets the customers’ needs and is delivered on time. 

The product manager coordinates with the marketing team to ensure that the product is positioned correctly in the market and promoted effectively. A product manager works with the sales team to ensure that the product is sold at the right price. And the product manager also works with the support team to ensure that the product is supported well and any issues are resolved promptly.

Marketing team

Even in a RevOps context, the marketing team’s responsibility remains to promote and communicate the value proposition of a product or service. However, today, there is more collaboration with the sales and success teams to avoid inconsistency with customer data. 

If you have a marketing automation platform like Encharge, you can easily automate the marketing process of your department. You can start quickly visualizing user journeys and sending behavior-based emails to nurture your leads and customers further.

Members of a marketing team must pass only qualified leads to the sales team. Encharge’s lead scoring and segmentation are robust features of the platform that can help. 

Sales team

In RevOps, the sales team works closely with other teams such as marketing, product, and customer success to ensure that the company’s sales pipeline is full of qualified leads. As much as possible, they must contact these leads fast.

A platform like Encharge can accelerate the sales process through its seamless integration to your CRM, such as Hubspot CRM  and appointment scheduling software like Calendly. 

It is also important to note that the sales team needs to connect with the customers to know their buying behavior. This ensures continuity in the selling. 

Customer success team

The Customer Success (CS) team is responsible for ensuring that customers successfully use the product or service. This team provides guidance and support to customers to help them get the most value from the product or service. 

In RevOps, the team works closely with other departments, such as sales and marketing, to ensure the customer’s experience is positive from start to finish. CS is also responsible for renewals and retention. They keep customers satisfied with the product or service and recommend it to others. The team’s ultimate goal is to help customers achieve their desired outcomes.

So we can imagine an operation like this:

Say the marketing team uses ABM to find prospects. 

Marketing activities like email or content marketing warm them up so you pass them to sales as hot leads. If negotiation becomes successful and they close the deal, CS takes over. Dedicated support is on standby whenever the new user struggles or has requests.

Each head of the department reports to the RevOps manager regarding the new customer. Then the RevOps manager consolidates all reports and presents them to the CRO. When it’s time for top management meetings, the CRO can point out how a smooth alignment resulted in more sales. 

So how to get the most out of RevOps?

1. Focus on user onboarding 

User onboarding is one of the most important aspects of any RevOps initiative. It should be a cross-functional collaboration between departments. A not-so-nice fact is that 60% of users will sign up for your product and never visit your website again. 

The solution?

Use targeted onboarding emails to welcome, delight, and educate your new users. Encharge can be used to trigger automated user onboarding workflows.

When done well, user onboarding helps ensure that people are getting the most out of the platform while assisting them to feel confident and engaged as they begin to use it. 

2. Align your processes with technology

Implementing RevOps at your workplace is also about aligning your processes with the latest tools and technologies. This means investing in systems that support collaboration and automation and making it easier for teams to work across departments.

Marketing and sales will love how a single tool like Encharge integrates with your multiple marketing stacks like Zapier, Salesforce, Chargebee, and more.

Read more: 11 Revenue Operations Software Tools to Build a Powerful RevOps Stack in 2022

3. Interpret accurate insights

If you want to get the most out of your RevOps efforts, then you must interpret your data accurately. With accurate insights, you can better understand how well your RevOps campaigns are performing and make targeted changes to enhance your performance. 

4. Edit and optimize relentlessly

When it comes to maximizing the performance of your RevOps efforts, it’s essential that you focus on editing and optimizing relentlessly. This means constantly evaluating your processes and looking for ways to improve every aspect of your operations, from your marketing campaigns to your customer support strategies. Through consistent effort and attention to detail, you can ensure that each stage of your RevOps cycle is as efficient as possible. 

Where to start?

Depending on your company and its size, you may have a range of different roles in charge of bringing in revenue. 

Typically, these roles fall under marketing, sales, product, and customer success. But it’s not uncommon for one person to wear many hats and take on multiple responsibilities, especially for start-ups. 

However, as you grow, it often becomes necessary to specialize these functions and create a more defined team for revenue operations. 

The first easy step starts with using marketing automation. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the options out there, start with Encharge. You can try it for free just by registering your email. 

So what roles does your company need?