How to Align Sales, Marketing & SEO Through Revenue Operations

The end goal of any business is to make revenue faster and more efficiently than its competitors. One of the most important assets you can use to achieve that goal is the data your company gathers. It can provide valuable insights into your processes, customers, and practices, and increase overall revenue.

Revenue Operations deals with making data more visible across your organization and aligning all teams that produce revenue to maximize it.

From the data collected through your marketing operations (including website visitors and social followers) to sales stats (how many of your prospects are actually within your ICP? How quickly can you get from prospect to CW?), Revenue Operations is about building and end-to-end operation to increase your sales quotas and revenue.

This article will explain Revenue Operations and how to use the strategy alongside sales, marketing, and SEO to grow revenue.

What is Revenue Operations?

Revenue Operations is an approach to business strategy and planning that tries to align sales, marketing, and customer care into a bigger structure aimed at increasing revenue. The main idea behind it is that since teams that work on different areas of a business are united by a single goal — making the business profitable — they should cooperate more efficiently to achieve that goal.

RevOps strategists achieve this goal by ensuring better data centralization and sharing, building communication between sales ops, marketing, and customer success teams, and automating workflows wherever possible.

Importance of Revenue Operations for Revenue Growth

Implementing Revenue Operations is a long process that usually requires organizations to rethink major parts of their strategy. So, you might have to adapt workflows, implement new tools, and improve communication.

With all the effort that goes into implementing a RevOps strategy, it’s important to understand why it’s relevant.

The major benefits of Revenue Operations include the fact that sharing goals and insights creates better business processes and more revenue as a result. It’s really as simple as that.

Companies with a siloed team structure often might have separate tools, databases, and work processes. This results in an uneven strategy that might be held back by a disconnect between your marketing and sales efforts.

Once you align your demand generation (educating and engaging your target audience) and demand capture (qualifying prospects in the high-intent phase) processes, it’s easier to focus your sales reps’ time and efforts on the accounts that will bring you guaranteed revenue.

So, to start with, you might focus on SEO to generate leads, by signposting your ICP to your solution. After that comes additional marketing efforts including brand building on social media, blogs, or ads. Then, your sales team kicks in with demand capture efforts — qualifying leads based on intent and choosing the right time to engage with them.

In an ideal world, your demand generation and demand capture efforts aren’t independent of each other. Consequently, Revenue Operations is a framework that facilitates the sharing of data and revenue goals between marketing and sales teams. This results in better team effectiveness and an increase in revenue.

Ultimately, both marketing and sales teams have insights that can benefit each other’s operations, and Revenue Operations tries to optimize the sharing of those insights.

‎Source: BCG

The results speak for themselves. A BCG report has found that B2B companies that implement Revenue Operations spend 30% less on go-to-market operations and increase their digital marketing ROI by up to 200% thanks to this practice.

‎Source: Adobe

Processes for Implementing an Effective RevOps Strategy

Before implementing RevOps at your company, you need to analyze these three key areas that a Revenue Operations team will deal with.

Technical workflow components

The first thing you have to review is the tech stack that your company uses. Consider all the tools used in different departments and how the information that these tools provide can influence the work of other departments.

For instance, if your SEO team uses SE Ranking’s traffic checker, you can uncover useful data to direct your SEO strategy. Understanding what keywords draw in more traffic that turns into qualified leads can help the sales team focus on optimizing specific pages for conversion and improve sales prospecting.

SEO software can also provide a lot of information about competitor websites to the sales team. Specifically, it can show new competitors via SERP tracking because their sites will start competing with yours for core keywords.

The sales team, CRM tools, and specifically lead scoring systems can provide insight into what type of SEO actions influence revenue the most and help the marketing team turn their attention to areas that can produce a more tangible effect on the bottom line.

You want to find the useful parts of your teams’ tools. Remember, one great tool is better than many fiddly, underwhelming tools.

Data coverage

The next thing you should analyze is how data is gathered and distributed across your company. Even a smaller company may have hundreds of data points recorded and stored away daily. The issue is that you may not be using your data efficiently as sometimes it gets stuck in a single department, and other teams don’t have access to it.

Apart from understanding what tools are used to record and store data, you need to find:

• What data is recorded
• Where it is stored
• How long is it stored
• Which people are responsible at each stage of gathering and storing data
• Who has access to which data
• How that data is used
• Who is using the data, and for which purpose

For example, if you’re tracking buyer intent as part of your marketing strategy. (more here on why you should be), who has access to the intent data? If you’re gatekeeping it within your marketing team and just using it to inform your social ads or blog page strategy, you’re missing out. Once you’ve got an MQL, your sales reps need that intent data as well so they can choose the right time to reach out to the prospect (high-intent and ready to buy).

Answering these questions will give you a full picture of how data is used at your organization and will serve as a basis for transforming this system into one where both the marketing and sales teams can access meaningful insights from the data the other team records.

Customer feedback collection and analysis

Customer feedback is one of the most important types of data you can process at your organization. Sales and marketing employees can use this data to understand their customers better and increase revenue.

You’ll need to track what types of customer feedback are gathered, how it is done, how it is used to gain insight, and who is responsible for planning, executing, and analyzing customer feedback campaigns.

Your company should also more broadly track what people say about your product or solution. A recent study estimated that 95% of your web traffic could be coming from ‘dark social’ sources; that is, private messaging channels like WhatsApp, SMS, DMs, and word-of-mouth. This activity might be considered ‘direct’ traffic, but there’s no way to tell in what context your site is being shared.

So, practice social listening. Find out what’s actually being said about you on spaces like Reddit, YouTube, and influencer pages. No, you can’t read people’s private messages, but you can glean lots of relevant data through other dark social sources.

How to Align Sales, SEO, and Marketing Through a RevOps Framework

With all of that information on how your SEO, marketing, and sales interact, you can start building a strategic alignment between them. Here are the steps you need to take to do that.

Structured communication and cooperation

The first step is to build consistent communication and cooperation opportunities. The exact way you implement this depends on your organization’s structure and resources.

For instance, you could create a new position for a VP of Revenue Operations or the Director of Revenue Operations and have the heads of the SEO and sales teams report to them. That’s the common path, as so many companies look for a RevOps leader, and the job was the fastest-growing one in 2023.

Since the RevOps model gravitates toward marketing and sales enablement, rather than planning operations, your entire revenue team might consist of just a Chief Revenue Officer and a data analyst.

Alternatively, you could have sales operations and marketing operations leadership collaborate without a dedicated growth leader, but that could be harder to manage.

Whatever way you choose to promote communication between these departments, the main idea is to make sure they have the right tools for cooperation and a consistent plan for using them.

Mutual business goals persuasion

The next step is aligning the goals of marketing and salespeople at your company. The key factor here is that both teams should optimize their actions towards a single goal — revenue growth — instead of chasing only the KPIs specific to their line of work.

When your teams don’t think about their roles as separate but instead understand they’re pursuing a single goal, they’ll be more willing to cooperate and share data and responsibilities.

Better data sharing

Data is one of the pillars of the Revenue Operations model, and it should be your priority to find more effective ways of sharing it. You’ll need to rework both technical and operational data structures at your organization.

The first thing you should do is centralize data storage. The key issue that Revenue Operations tries to improve is that data tends to become isolated within different departments. Creating centralized storage for all of the company data prevents that and opens more opportunities for data analytics and finding actionable insights.

Source: Improvado

Another step is to create easy ways for teams to access this centralized data storage. This could be made in the form of Excel documents or Looker Studio files that can show the core sales and marketing metrics without having to work with complex databases.

While individual access to data is important, your Revenue Operations team might also need a data scientist who could do high-level data mining to discover insights.

Ideally, a successful RevOps strategy should mean every element of your tech stack is fully integrated with others. Whether or not you’re using automated software, the tools you use should share the right data with each other (and your team) and run with minimal interference from you.

Here’s an example of an integrated RevOps tech stack using Warmly, our autonomous revenue orchestration platform.

Fixing existing marketing funnels

Creating collaboration between different teams and sharing data lets you find what your sales funnel currently looks like and find ways to improve it. After that, you can experiment with new ways to use that data to engage more MQLs and SQLs.

In particular, your inbound marketing tools will offer plenty of useful information on the success of your content strategy and where to invest more time.

Additionally, visitor identification software can significantly optimize your marketing funnel, particularly if you’re focusing on Account Based Marketing (ABM). Without knowing who the accounts are that are visiting your blog pages, pricing page, or just your homepage, it’s difficult to tailor your marketing content to fit their needs and concerns.

Crafting and mapping more effective customer/buyer journeys

Another aspect of using data to understand your customers better is to enhance the ability to map customer journeys. Since marketing, SEO in particular, and sales have detailed information on both ends of the customer journey, combining them creates a more detailed picture of it.

Customer-centric approach

One of the main paths to increasing revenue at any for-profit organization is keeping the customers happy. The more satisfied your customers are at any stage of the customer journey, the more likely they are to convert, refer your business to friends and family and ultimately generate revenue.

Revenue Operations help with that due to an improved understanding of customer needs through data syndication.

A successful, integrated sales and marketing approach can also involve your customers. Social selling is increasingly becoming an important channel for B2B SaaS companies because it helps build that implicit trust and connection that dark social thrives on.

RevOps framework

To ensure the efficiency of Revenue Operations, you need to formalize the framework. This means planning out the workflows that you will be using, and either instituting RevOps roles at your company or finding ways to outsource them.

Work out what approach would suit your company best and document the Revenue Operations metrics you want to track to see whether the approach is successful.

Training and skills development

Introducing Revenue Operations to any company involves new tools and new processes. Apart from instituting new roles, you’ll have to train your employees on adjusting to the tools and workflows that RevOps entails.

Pay attention specifically to working with data and workflow automation systems, as these are the cornerstones of Revenue Operations success.

Regular review

Once you have a documented Revenue Operations strategy and a set of KPIs to use to measure its success, record those, and do at least a quarterly review of how the new systems work and whether they have a decent ROI.

Also, consider gathering feedback from your team to find inefficiencies in the new workflows.

Improving tracking and forecasting processes

Finally, you’ll have to improve how you track data and use it for forecasting. To that end, consider automating the data workflows at your company and involve both the marketing and sales teams to review more factors that can influence revenue forecasts.

Challenges in RevOps Implementation

Since introducing Revenue Operations is a big undertaking, it’s likely to run into problems at most companies. The most common challenges are:

• Unwillingness to change. Many managers and employees might believe that the effort it takes to create, test, and refine new workflows isn’t worth the marginal improvement. You will have to show how effective Revenue Operations can be and how that can benefit the teams involved.
• Data integration issues. As the software SEO and sales teams use might not have native connectors, bringing that data to a single place can be challenging. You will have to work with the IT department to create a custom solution.
• Market volatility influences forecasting. Even with good data quality practices, revenue forecasting isn’t flawless as market volatility can change the predicted course of events. You will have to learn to consider external factors and adapt to changes fast.

Measuring the Success of Revenue Operations

As with any sound business investment, you have to measure the effectiveness of Revenue Operations to prove its necessity. Here are the metrics you want to track:

• Revenue growth
• Average revenue per user
• Cost per acquisition
• Customer lifetime value
• Win rate
• Revenue cycle length
• Customer churn
• Customer satisfaction rate

You can also try to track the ROI of RevOps, but that might prove to be tricky. The reason why is that it’s hard to tie specific increases in revenue specifically to Revenue Operations.

The most optimal way to do that is to calculate the cost of tools, the salaries of Revenue Operations personnel, and the work hours of marketing and sales teams allocated to RevOps and juxtapose it with the revenue increase that exceeds the projected value.

If you’re set on investing in Revenue Operations, give it three to six months to start seeing ROI — that’s how long it may take to test and improve it.

You might also want to adapt your social listening strategy to start tracking your brand’s overall share of voice within your market. If you’re using influencer campaigns, you should be able to tell if these are working as more people talk about your brand on spaces like LinkedIn and YouTube.

Revenue Forecasting

Since Revenue Operations deals with large amounts of marketing and sales data, it’s useful for a crucial business process heavily dependent on quality data — revenue forecasting. It doesn’t just give you an outline of your team’s effectiveness. Predictable business growth can help with budget allocation and risk management.

While you can and should do time-series and qualitative forecasting as a part of the Revenue Operations framework, it lends itself more to regressive analysis. This way of analyzing data helps you make connections between outcomes and variables, letting you know what actions can lead to an increase in revenue.

Implementing a RevOps Strategy with Warmly

Introducing Revenue Operations to your organization can be a long process that requires major changes in workflows, data collection practices, and communication between sales and marketing teams.

However, the multiple benefits it can bring all lead to the most important business goal: increasing revenue.

Warmly helps bring together all of that sales and marketing data into one place, giving you the best chance of implementing a strategic RevOps process at your organization. Starting with just a script tag, Warmly can deanonymize visitors to your website and help you build a revenue-focused sales and marketing strategy.

‎Qualify visitors more quickly with Bombora buyer intent data, then use AI Chat to engage with those high-intent accounts, moving them along the sales funnel with as much interaction from your sales reps as you wish.

And thanks to integrations with Salesflow and Outreach or Salesloft, you can align all of your demand generation efforts with effective email and LinkedIn prospecting, bridging the gap between sales and marketing.

If you’re still undecided whether your organization needs to implement Revenue Operations, start by doing a quick audit of your current tech stack and sales/marketing integration.

Are you seeing delays in getting MQLs to CW deals? Or an increase in unqualified leads making it onto your sales reps’ calendars? Then a RevOps platform like Warmly could be the solution you need to optimize your marketing strategy and qualify warm leads more quickly.

Interested in seeing exactly how Warmly integrates into your existing tech stack? Book a demo.

Cover image by Freepik.