Why Turning Sales Ops > Revenue Ops is your Secret Weapon for Driving Growth

The nature of selling is changing. The sales cycle is more process oriented, automated, and well-tracked than it has ever been before. As a result, the Sales Ops role has become critical for managing this complexity and the role of the Sales Manager has shifted to focus more and more on coaching. Smart Sales Ops leaders are realizing how much activity from the customer journey they just aren’t getting visibility into.

The Sales ops team is traditionally the source of truth for everything that is actually happening in a deal lifecycle, but what about before the deal? What about after? How do you know if there is more revenue on the table or if a company is about to churn? If you aren’t looking at critical contextual factors, you honestly have no idea. Hence, the rise of Revenue Ops — the strategic function that connects and tracks marketing, sales, and customer success activities to get a full picture of where your revenue is hiding.

So, how do you evolve?

1. Develop a process for capturing every single interaction in the same system.

Your first goal is to centralize data collection. From Marketer, to SDR to AE to CSM to RM, every function that is traditionally siloed business needs to be tracking in the same system. Why?Because to your customer, every outreach feels like it is coming from the same entity — even if it is coming from a different person! That is why it is important for your Rev Ops team to connect every person, process, and dollar your business brings in as revenue together in one system of record.

2. Clean up your data by figuring out how to make it impossible for someone to input the wrong thing.

Your second goal is to expand data collection. This is where automation comes into play: your tools should be working for you, not against you. From now on, your team needs to capture every email, meeting, call, and any other piece of data that tells the story of your customer experience. Only once everything is captured, can your team piece together your customer journey in a meaningful way and break it back apart to dive deep when there are gaps.

3. Build a repeatable process with clear benchmarks for deal progression.

The goal here is to be able to identify key indicators for positive deal progression (i.e. are they opening your emails, answering your calls, bringing more people to meetings, etc). This process must also be reflected in your systems so you can track every prospect at every stage of your sales cycle. The best place to start here is by analyzing the data for deals that did v. did not close. To get beyond the Sales Ops POV, be sure to get additional context by asking your Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success folks where good leads are coming from and what the profile for your most loyal customers look like.

4. Give Sales their marching orders.

Your final goal is to figure out and evangelize exactly what your next 5 AEs hires need to do on a daily basis to be successful. Ensure movement is happening throughout your entire funnel by setting activity targets and providing meaningful sales enablement support via tools, training, and collateral. This is where Revenue Ops starts to split into analysis v. enablement. While there should be accountability on a high level to the entire customer journey, there will be a need for certain folks to specialize so as not to lose critical business context. Some common specializations include: systems, data science, sales enablement, sales training, and people analytics.

Ready to become a Revenue Ops Rockstar? Check out how Truly can help you with steps 1–4 by becoming the only voice tool you need to capture, track, and coach your team from SDR to RM.