There are two key factors driving the adoption of RevOps within B2B. One is improving CX, another is promoting efficent growth rather than growth at all costs.
At OpsStars yesterday, offering a sneak peek at some research LeanData will be publishing further down the road, CEO Evan Liang said 95 percent of the sales and marketing professionals surveyed agreed that CX needs to get better. He explained it this way. Making a $100K software purchase should not be a worse experience than buying something for $25 on Amazon. “We have to solve this as an industry,” he said.
From the same survey, 78 percent agreed that revenue growth is the “lifeblood” of their businesses. But that doesn’t mean, said Liang, that spending a dollar to get 80 cents of revenue is a good or sustainable idea. Growth should be efficient: hence the concept of the revenue engine, which SiriusDecisions has been developing for some time.
Revenue growth should be driven by a unified (or at least very closely aligned) team comprising marketing (or demand generation), sales, and customer success. A team, in other words, which can own the entirety of the customer journey, from the top of the funnel through to post-sale, and hopefully through a lifetime. Connecting operations across those functions leads to faster hand-offs and greater efficiency. At a minimum, it means you don’t have marketing pursuing one segment while sales is focused on another. That does happen.
But there’s a third “huge trigger” for RevOps, as Liang put it. For the tech industry, that’s the accelerating drive from on premise software to cloud services. Cloud services means subscription — a recurring revenue model. It’s no longer a case of selling a customer a major software package, walking away as they install it, and letting them figure out how to use it.
The relationship with a SaaS customer has to be long-term, nurturing, and supportive, because it’s so easy for a dissatisfied customer to walk away. By inviting customer success operations to the table, RevOps underlines the need to help customers drive maximum value from their subscription. First, that means they won’t cancel, but second, it means the customers can evolve with the product, being open to cross- and up-selling.
Of course, that’s all very well for the tech industry, but what about the rest of B2B?
The subscription economy already has a firm hold in B2C. And just as B2C raised the bar for B2B CX, it’s likely that the subscription model will grow in significance for B2BC too. Some say every business will soon be a subscription business. That may be hyperbole, but there’s little doubt that recurring revenue models will become increasingly common across the B2B space.
So how to respond to these powerful triggers? “There are going to be obstacles” to creating a RevOps program, Liang said, “but they can be overcome if they’re tackled one at a time.”
Start with a specific problem, he advised. For example, the data disconnect. The disconnect between sales tracking the performance of reps across territories, while marketing is focused on budgets, campaigns, and programs. Change the focus there to what marketing is doing to help (or hinder) reps across territories, and you start to bring teams onto the same page. It’s a quick win, and quick wins will get people on board for a more ambitious RevOps strategy.
