Benefits of a Revenue Operations Platform

A new management system is needed within companies, one that becomes a “single source of truth” and does a better job of generating greater returns. By integrating sales, marketing, and customer success and support, revenue operations platforms can become this critical revenue source.

“The underlying problem is simple. Managers are trying to use organizational systems developed in the 20th century to manage a far more advanced and digital commercial model in the 21st Century.” Management models should evolve and the future is Revenue Operations (RevOps), as explained by a Forbes article.

A revenue operations platform aligns all revenue-driving teams across the organization, integrating business systems and their data, such as CRMs and marketing automation platforms, sales enablement platforms, and customer success platforms.

With the integration of all these software, organizations can make more accurate revenue forecasts and consistently improve marketing and sales processes.

Related: How Marketing Ops and Revenue Ops Can Better Support Remote Teams

In the pursuit of this new management system, how can a business thrive? More importantly, is your business hindered by a disconnected tech stack, or do you have a solid ground for a revenue operations platform?

Revenue Operations Platform Tech Stack

Organizing your technology in a way that best supports the customer journey can also lead to a potential increase in top-line revenue. 

The RevOps platform becomes the core of Revenue Operations. This software pulls revenue data from all of these various platforms and uses artificial intelligence technology to create revenue forecast models decision makers can use to plan and strategize.

A revenue operations platform unifies both the technology and processes across teams involved with the revenue engine to enable the free flow of data, efficient goal-sharing, and open channels for sharing information.

Not all organizations have tech stacks that are suited to facilitate the top-line. What are the essential software and apps in a RevOps stack?

• Marketing automation. These platforms assist the marketing and sales departments to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities to both increase revenue and maximize efficiency.
• Sales engagement. Known as SEPs, these tools help with the interaction between sellers and their prospects and customers through multiple channel administration, keeping sellers organized and streamline their workflow using automation and integration.
• Data enrichment. Also called sales intelligence or data appending, these tools are designed to enhance, refine, or otherwise improve raw data. For salespeople, it mainly serves to bring internal and external data together to build a richer profile of their potential and existing customers.
• Revenue operations platform. Platforms such as these allow for the integration of these functions into a powerful Business Intelligence (BI) tool. This could be among the most desirable features of rev ops platforms. By combining sales forecasting, marketing analytics, and predictive sales analytics software, businesses can access actionable insights through the collection, analysis, presentation, and integration of data.

The centralized entity that will oversee, maintain and integrate the data associated with your customer experience will ultimately be the revenue operations platform. 

Considerations for a Revenue Operations Platform

Although RevOps does not automatically mean that your technology stack needs to change, it does mean that your approach to tooling needs to change.

In most cases, the marketing, sales, financial, and operations departments selected the tools they used because they provided capabilities that met their needs. The main takeaway is that your tools should operate so that all of your teams are working from the same data set.

To qualify for the revenue operations category, a product must:

1. Provide revenue forecasting capabilities.
2. Organize customer interaction data across multiple business systems using AI features.
3. Allow sales reps to analyze their account engagement.
4. Align sales and marketing efforts.
5. Measure revenue KPIs and provide performance metrics.
6. Align sales and marketing

A revenue operations platform enables the creation of end-to-end processes and workflows that focus on revenue generation. These platforms introduce a set of KPIs, unified processes, and automation that every team can use. Here are several essential factors to consider when choosing a revenue operations platform:

1. Software functionality. Best software with robust features can be a wise choice. Some tools might have features that aren’t fully developed, making them less ideal.
2. Ease of use. Intuitive and easy-to-use software allows teams to better implement the RevOps strategy and also reduce the learning curve for people using the software. 
3. Current and future fit. The tool should fit current and future use cases. This consideration becomes more important as businesses grow along with the amount of data that is handled. 
4. Flexibility. The platform should get regular software updates that continually expand and improve its functionality (like Saas services) This gives teams more options in terms of interoperability with other applications. 

What Makes a Revenue Operations Platform Better

According to an article from the Harvard Business Review: “…by placing RevOps at the center of your organization, you can better unify your operations teams: eliminating friction, discovering efficiencies, and freeing up bandwidth so operations can innovate and help all teams share a unified mission to improve CX and grow business.”

Organizations need a unified revenue operations strategy, able to leverage prospect and customer data from prospect throughout the customer lifecycle. By understanding how their efforts impact revenue, they can work more collaboratively to reach objectives. Data must be in one place versus spread across systems and departments. The data has to be trustworthy and shared so everyone is working from the same source of truth.

This is why selecting the right revenue operations platform can mean the difference between growing your company’s pains or unlocking your teams’ full potential to serve your customers and boost your revenue growth.

What would be the real difference between a revenue operations platform and not having one?

Spreadsheet Upgrade

Despite their many advantages, spreadsheets are difficult to operationalize because they are disconnected from the rest of the company’s data. This can lead to costly problems for companies in terms of lost time, data accuracy, and innovation. 

Moreover, spreadsheets don’t have underlying components like machine learning and artificial intelligence and are often questioned due to human involvement and data integrity.

Revenue operations platforms aim to fix this, alleviating a majority of the current spreadsheet pain points and transforming them into a powerhouse tool. 

Related: Faster Time to Revenue Means Ditching the Spreadsheet

Better than BI Tools

Traditional BI tools are great at showing where you’ve been but they lack:

1. Data diagnostics. Machine learning to find problems with data including missing data, anomalies, or bad data.
2. Automated Analytics. Setup and configuration automation. They require additional resources to set up and maintain. 
3. Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics. The first gives an indication of what may happen, the second shows the way to make it happen.

Platforms for revenue operations include all-in-one the functionalities listed above.

Automated Dashboards

Dashboards help teams gain performance insights to build stronger pipelines, gauge their team performance, improve forecast accuracy, and generate more revenue. They also allow for better revenue forecasting, tracking, and deals overview.

Revenue operations platforms do this by automatically collecting data from your platforms to give one whole truth, not half-truths based on data from one siloed system.

Single Source of Truth

With so many different data analyses floating around organizations, it’s hard to know which ones to trust. Data security and accuracy can be ensured by having a single source of truth. But the reality is, you can’t achieve this with siloed software.

By connecting data, revenue operations platforms enable companies to gain better insights, improve lead management, and improve campaign effectiveness.

With the above benefits in place, all revenue teams are in lockstep to operationalize growth at scale in a transparent, accountable manner from the boardroom to the front line.

Want to add a revenue operations platform to your tech stack ecosystem?  Request a demo from RevOptics and help your teams function efficiently and enable hyper revenue growth for your company.