Revenue operations (RevOps) is an organizational approach that aligns teams, workflows, and strategies through a unified revenue lens with goals and metrics focused on revenue growth.
In past years of economic uncertainty, the need to prove return on investment (ROI) has led many businesses to adopt RevOps as a cross-organizational strategy.
However, its definition and execution vary across companies, influenced by factors such as infrastructure and the strategies that are in place to drive long-term demand.
In this guide, I present the RevOps strategy we implemented at INFUSE and recommend for 2024, which is aligned with go-to-market (GTM) motions and demand generation best practices to fuel predictable and lasting organizational growth.
GTM And Demand: Frameworks To Enable RevOps
The robust and granular nature of go-to-market (GTM) and demand generation frameworks makes both particularly well-suited for steering RevOps initiatives.
Combining both allows revenue teams to craft iterative strategies that prioritize brand awareness and buyer engagement.
Adopting a blended approach with both frameworks for your RevOps strategy is an effective way to guide product/service activation initiatives, as well as sustain demand for these offerings to meet performance goals.
GTM Frameworks For RevOps
Numerous GTM frameworks exist, with the majority emphasizing specific approaches to facilitate growth.
For example, product-led growth (PLG) is a GTM model centered on driving revenue with a specific (often freemium) product motion.
Meanwhile, an inbound growth model is led by driving traffic and lead generation through an inbound channel mix.
Today, full-funnel approaches to GTM are especially effective, given their focus on supporting buyers at every stage of their journey.
Therefore, rather than focusing on a product or channel mix, the priority is to build seamless experiences for buyers that offer a level of precision that is necessary to establish trust.
Demand Frameworks For RevOps
Demand generation serves as a supportive approach to achieving the objectives of a GTM strategy.
Essentially, it acts as a conduit to sustain brand awareness and cultivate a pipeline of sales opportunities for the organization.
In periods of sluggish economic growth, demand generation is crucial for preventing pipeline deceleration and retaining lead interest.
Lead nurturing is a key element of demand strategies as it develops and maintains brand interest among prospects until they are ready to buy.
Therefore, it helps develop growth and conversion forecasts, as well as drive brand referrals through content marketing and thought leadership.
How To Launch A RevOps Strategy In 5 Easy Steps
Below is a five-step process for driving a RevOps strategy that is fit for the market challenges of 2024:
1. Establish RevOps At Your Organization Across Teams
A core element of RevOps is establishing structures to align your team members and anchor the focus of your organization on the activities necessary for revenue growth.
To achieve this, you will first require a well-defined north star (or unified goal), which can be set by following these steps:
- Clarify your Unique Value Proposition (UVP): Revisit the unique value you offer to clients as a brand in terms of what drives revenue. This will allow you to focus your offerings on what drives organizational growth while also addressing the unique challenges of your target market.
- Identify organizational obstacles: Evaluate what issues in your organizational culture, tech stack, and staff are currently hindering the full alignment of processes required for RevOps. The goal here is to identify the most common bottlenecks that impede your teams’ agility.
- Define your purpose and goal: Define your key revenue goal to help plan the steps required to achieve it. This shared vision will sustain all teams’ activities and future strategies. If, for example, the goal is to increase market share by 30%, all business activities should be guided by that end goal.
Functional Vs. Departmental RevOps:
Molding RevOps teams and processes can either be guided by a functional (staff roles) or departmental perspective. Each approach comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, underscoring the importance of a careful evaluation to determine which one aligns best with the unique needs of your business:
- Functional: This approach establishes tasks for team members to fulfill based on their skill set. For example, a person well-versed in project management would be responsible for developing RevOps systems.
- Departmental: This approach assigns RevOps duties for each department of the organization based on their expertise and availability. It is simpler to implement compared to the functional approach, yet presents more risk of creating data silos (therefore, establishing data flows across departments is a must).
2. Adopt The Recurring Revenue Bowtie Model
Developed by Winning By Design, the Recurring Revenue Bowtie Model envisions the buyer’s journey as a closed loop to focus efforts in equal measure on interactions before and after a sale.
This full-funnel approach helps emphasize the importance of onboarding and expanding business with existing clients through upsells, cross-sells, and renewals.
Screenshot from Winning By Design, December 2023The Bowtie Model is well suited for RevOps since it focuses on both sides of the buyer’s journey: the path toward conversions, as well as the nurturing that is necessary to expand client relationships and encourage post-sale growth.
Given the forecast of slow growth for 2024 (Reuters, 2023), this model is particularly well suited to the challenges ahead—namely, the emphasis on increasing client lifetime value (CLTV) and reducing churn to boost ROI.
3. Align Data And AI For RevOps
At the essence of RevOps lies the concept of actionability, underscoring the critical need to prioritize buyer data that can be leveraged to shape strategies that boost conversions.
Enhancing your buyer data with actionable, real-time data points empowers you to adapt campaigns as needed and acquire insights about your audience, guiding future iterations.
Buyer intent data is perhaps the most useful data for RevOps, as it demonstrates when and how buyers interact with your brand.
It can also shape future touchpoints (via lead nurturing or sales teams) to encourage further engagement.
By aggregating buyer intent data and utilizing AI-enriched platforms such as a client relationship management (CRM) system, it becomes feasible to glean insights from RevOps strategies as a whole.
This empowers your revenue teams to make informed decisions for optimizing ROI, which prioritizes prospects demonstrating buyer intent at the right time.
Since this data is timely, it also allows teams to craft content that garners the highest audience interest due to its relevance.
4. Enable And Engage Defensive Buyers
2024 is anticipated as a year of slow growth, a trend stemming from the past few years of economic uncertainty.
This unusual climate is prompting decision-makers to adopt a defensive stance, as well as exercise heightened scrutiny over the risks associated with their purchasing decisions.
Marketers embracing a RevOps strategy in 2024 must formulate comprehensive buyer journeys that address common objections and build trust right from the outset.
Below are three tactics to enable and engage defensive buyers in 2024:
Create Self-Paced Buyer Journeys
According to Forrester 2024 Predictions, the demand for self-service will be greater than ever, especially as Millennials and Gen Z buyers now make up two-thirds of B2B buyers.
Companies should consider developing buyer journeys that allow prospects to discover pricing, watch a demo, or even download a free trial at their own pace – without the need for a salesperson.
Already commonplace in SaaS, this trend is likely to expand to other B2B industries, placing a significant emphasis on the importance of providing digital buying experiences that enable buyers to investigate and finalize purchases.
After all, 75% of B2B buyers prefer a sales experience without sales representatives.
Leverage ABX And Engage All Buying Group Members
Account based experience (ABX) is an approach that adopts client and user experience (CX and UX) best practices to inform account targeting strategies.
At INFUSE, it is the approach we adopt for account based marketing (ABM) due to its ability to enrich buyer experiences with personalized touchpoints.
ABX also helps inform a holistic view of target accounts, developing an outreach strategy that considers all buying group members and the needs of different departments and professionals for approving a purchase.
Thus, ABX proves to be an ideal approach for crafting a buyer’s journey that seamlessly aligns with the preferences of cautious buyers.
This stems from its emphasis on meticulously tailored lead nurturing touchpoints, ensuring a precise level of personalization that directly addresses individual buyer challenges.
Revisit Your Lead Data And Tech Stack
As noted earlier, building efficient data flows is a critical first step in RevOps. Therefore, it becomes imperative to carry out a thorough audit of your tech stack and lead database to ensure a solid foundation for success.
This audit should focus on detecting inconsistencies and incorrect information on buyers, as well as eliminating any redundant tools and bottlenecks.
Since alignment is key for RevOps to truly function, ensure all data and tools are seamlessly integrated and available for all team members to glean insights and inform their strategies.
5. Nurture With A RevOps And GTM Focus
Enable your lead nurturing for revenue growth by benchmarking it against RevOps key performance indicators (KPIs), such as client lifetime value (CLTV) and client acquisition cost (CAC).
These metrics help inform lead nurturing efforts toward revenue generation, which helps teams plan campaigns that will result in continued buyer engagement and a predictable pipeline of sales opportunities.
Five tips for nurturing with a revenue focus:
- Design touchpoints with revenue KPIs in mind: Guiding lead nurturing efforts through a revenue lens facilitates the development of content and outreach that has been created to maximize returns.
- Develop nurturing tracks for different pain points and buyer personas: By establishing a lead nurturing cadence for each buyer persona (which addresses a unique set of pain points with solutions best suited for that buying group), you will be more successful in encouraging conversions.
- Benchmark quarterly growth against nurturing efforts: Measuring organizational growth (such as net new growth) enables the routine tracking of your lead nurturing performance. Keep in mind, however, that lead nurturing is highly dependent on the average length of your sales cycle. So, for organizations with long sales cycles, performance will be difficult to glean quickly. Even so, consistent and early measurement indicators help glean insights to update future lead nurturing campaigns and ensure continued buyer interest.
- Survey clients of key target audiences: Collect direct feedback from clients within different audiences that you are targeting for a timely overview of their brand perception, as well as market challenges and expectations for 2024. This will help personalize your messaging to better address the concerns of your target buying groups.
- Analyze conversations with prospects: Record and assess conversations with prospects to determine the success of different approaches, as well as the objections and reactions of buyers toward certain topics. This will help determine which topics and messaging points are most successful in driving conversions.
Key Takeaways
Keep these takeaways in mind when planning your RevOps strategy to ensure the best outcomes:
Develop A Rich Buyer Experience
By leveraging the best practices of ABX, the post-sales enablement of the Bowtie Model, and a personalized touch to your lead nurturing, you can build a rich buyer experience that supports revenue growth.
In other words, to drive revenue, you must align team efforts in a manner that capitalizes on developing a relevant buyer’s journey, which will maintain your brand top of mind throughout the buying group’s potentially lengthy and scrutinous decision-making process.
Align Your Datasets, AI, And Tech Stack For RevOps
Make sure to audit your existing data and technology through a revenue-first lens by eliminating redundancies and unnecessary data that will impede the insights required for driving growth.
Consider your revenue metrics when analyzing this wealth of data and how your tools should function to make sure you are tracking revenue attribution from marketing and sales efforts.
Nurture Leads For Long-Term Revenue Growth
Develop comprehensive and relevant lead nurturing cadences that are custom-tailored to each buyer persona to engage buying groups as a whole.
This will enable future sales opportunities for when buyers are in-market for your solutions.
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Featured Image: Viktoria Kurpas/Shutterstock