Revenue Operations centralizes the operational functions of all revenue focused groups across an org such as Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience. Business Operations take this one step further and encompasses Product and internal operations groups such as Human Resources and Finance.
In this presentation, Joe Gelata reviews both models and how they can help increase alignment and effectiveness of teams across the organization:
- Delivering critical insights and business intelligence from across the business and market.
- Implementing process improvements to gain efficiency.
- Managing and integrating cross-function business technologies and data.
- Enabling employees and partners with knowledge and tools to do their jobs better.
4. Why is it hard to scale?
• Process complexity increases
• Cross-department alignment weakens
• Resources become constrained and resist change
• Data becomes siloed, more complex, and difficult to use
• Onboarding becomes harder and employee output drops
…while efficiency and decision making become more important
5. HISTORY OF REVENUE
CRO/COO
Revenue strategists to
close gap
Alignment only exists at
strategic level
SALES
Win customers
Generate revenue
OTHER TACTICS
CMTO, Marketing IT
Focus on tech, not
alignment
PAST PRESENT FUTURE
SALES/MARKETING OPS
Increase efficiency
Sales/Marketing gap
grows
MARKETING
Focus on top of funnel
Increase volume into
sales
Sales/Marketing gap
emerges
6. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL
• Data & process gaps still exist despite strategy alignment
• Fundamental problem:
• No alignment exists at the executional level
• Result in:
• Poor decision making
• Inefficient employees
• Stall revenue growth
• Let’s fix it!
7. B2B organizations with tightly
aligned marketing and sales
achieved 24% faster revenue growth
and 27% faster profit growth over a
three-year period
~Sirius Decisions
9. Centralizes the operational functions of all
revenue focused groups across an org such as
Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience
Revenue Operations
Take this one step further and encompasses
Product and internal operations groups such as
Human Resources and Finance
Business Operations
Increase alignment and effectiveness of teams across the organization
• Delivering critical insights and business intelligence from across the business and market
• Implementing process improvements to gain efficiency
• Managing and integrating cross-function business technologies and data
• Enabling employees and partners with knowledge and tools to do their jobs better
Goals
REVENUE EVOLUTION
10. What does Business Operations do?
Keep Everything Aligned
Business Operations
Marketing Sales Customer
Strategy
Product Operations
11. 4 PILLARS OF REVENUE OPERATIONS
INSIGHTS TOOLS OPERATIONS ENABLEMENT
12. 4 PILLARS OF REVENUE OPERATIONS
INSIGHTS
INSIGHTS
BI and Analytics for
entire organization
Align to company
strategy
Identify gaps and
opportunities
Data management
Data Management
Ensure proper collection and data consistency
Manage data warehouse, data dictionary
Critical to nail from day 1 – data culture
Risk if not managed properly:
Long and expensive clean-up projects
Slows delivery of insights and decisions
Missed exit opportunities
Projects
Analyze funnel performance
volume, conversion, velocity, value
Dashboards for each team
Company KPI and board deck
Analysis Tools
Sources: CRM, MAP, Product, Website, etc.
Early tools: in-app reporting, Excel
Mature tools: Data warehouse, BI platform, AI
13. 4 PILLARS OF REVENUE OPERATIONS
INSIGHTS – IMPORTANT METRICS
INSIGHTS
BI and Analytics for
entire organization
Align to company
strategy
Identify gaps and
opportunities
Data management
Volume Conversion Velocity Value
MQL 1,000 N/A N/A N/A
SQL 50 5% 20 days $500,000
SQO 40 80% 3 days $400,000
Won 10 25% 95 days $100,000
Lost 30 75% 120 days $300,000
PIPELINE, PIPELINE, PIPELINE!!!
Pipeline creation rate, quarterly coverage, net
inflow/outflow
Company metrics:
ARR growth, Retention, Cash Burn, Magic Number, CAC
Forecast
Weighted pipeline, Forecast categories
14. 4 PILLARS OF REVENUE OPERATIONS
TOOLS
TOOLS
Central management
across all systems
to ensure alignment
of features and
integrations
Technology selection
and implementation
based on ops
requirements
Build process first, then wrap in tools
Run manually before automating
Track tool cost per employee
Tools
$0-1M: CRM (Salesforce), Email (Mailchimp)
$1-10M: MAP (Pardot, Marketo), web (Optimizely),
Prospecting (Vidyard, SalesLoft, Uberflip), ops
(Wrike/Asana, Slack)
$10-20M: Sales (Altify, CPQ), Customer Success
(Gainsight)
15. 4 PILLARS OF REVENUE OPERATIONS
OPERATIONS
OPERATIONS
Develop and
implement solutions
to improve
operations
Project & change
management
Promote
experimentation
across all groups
Provides the businesses skeleton
Focused on process improvement and change
management
Key to aligning processes across teams
$10M inflection point – will need to rebuild
everything to scale
Sample Projects:
Implementing new process/tool
Improve lead scoring
Ensure info is travelling between teams (e.g. Sales
to Customer Success)
Develop solution to solve low prospecting
conversion rates
16. 4 PILLARS OF REVENUE OPERATIONS
ENABLEMENT
ENABLEMENT
Training on new
systems and
processes
On-boarding and on-
going knowledge
distribution
Support day-to-day
admin needs of
groups
Monitor performance
and KPIs
Strengthens the businesses muscle
Works directly with contributors
Projects/Programs
Roll out training for new messaging
Coordinate Deal desk
Manage sales territories
Provide admin support to Customer Success exec
Setup demo environments for sales
Monitor KPI’s and engage Insights for analysis
17. • Monthly/Quarterly meeting for all managers
• Review key company metrics and team
performance
• Drive discussion around solving problems
Ops Meeting
• Weekly/Bi-weekly meeting with department
heads
• Review execution metrics
GTM Meeting
• Weekly/Bi-weekly meeting with individual
teams
• Monitor dashboards, project updates
Marketing, Sales,
Customer Ops
• Weekly/Bi-weekly meeting with all pipeline
contributing teams
• Early identification and resolution of
pipeline challenges
Pipeline Meeting
TEAM INTERFACES
RECURING MEETINGS WITH OPS & ENABLEMENT
23. WHEN TO IMPLEMENT
BLOWLING
ALLEY
Crossed the
Chasm
Optimize processes
in advance of
growth
TORNADO
Hyper-Growth
Optimized processes
allow for maximum
revenue collection
SCALE OPS TEAM
Final
Increase high-
performing resources
to drive growth
INSIGHTS
Day 1
Always collect
and analyze data
to drive growth
decisions
SALES
MVP
Start selling your
product
ENABLEMENT
>10+ Sales/CS Reps
Reduce rep ramp time
and increase
effectiveness
TOOLS & OPS
3+ Sales Reps
Optimize reps before
growing team
24. WHEN TO IMPLEMENT
Always be focused on the 4 pillars - even
if no one is dedicated to them yet
Combine roles to start then split later
Risks of implementing late:
Data quality issues compound
Can't backfill data and loose visibility
Harder to determine what works and what
doesn't
May develop a culture resistant to change
25. WHO TO HIRE
INSIGHTS
• Early hire experienced in
research
• Later hire for analysis skills
• Understanding of business
• Natural curiosity
OPERATIONS
• Experience in chosen
discipline
• Project management skills
• Left & right brained
ENABLEMENT
• Experience in chosen discipline
• Teaching/learning background
• Strong communication skills
TOOLS
• Salesforce admin
• Technical background
• Developer
26. Guiding Principles
1. Data in context: Understand the “how” and “why” of data,
not just the “what”. Tread data as a Data System:
collection, computation, and representation.
2. Action is the new black: Data is useless without insights.
Insights are useless without action.
3. I love BOS: Focus on creating a world-class Business
Operating System that enables the rest of the organization
to create and deliver top-notch products and services.
4. Process over technology: Develop business processes first
then wrap them in technology to enable and automate them.
5. The important wheel gets the grease, not the squeaky one:
Keep calm and focus on core business drivers.
6. It’s all about Scale: Build a BOS that can scale components
up and down as the business changes and evolves.
7. Alignment is King: Cross department alignment is key for
success and Ops is the bridge to join them.
27. OUTCOMES
Processes are effective and efficient
Departments are aligned on strategy and execution
Change becomes part of the culture
Data is clean, accessible, and drives decisions
Employees ramp quickly and stay effective
Ops resources are sharable across multiple teams
28. SAAS RESOURCES
Whitepaper: The RevOps
Framework
FunnelCake interviewed over a hundred B2B Marketing, Sales, and CS leaders to create the definitive
framework for Revenue Operations.
Book: Impossible to Inevitable Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin discusses the journey hyper growth SaaS companies go through as they
create predictable revenue.
Whitepaper: 10 Laws of Cloud
Computing
This is the bible of SaaS and how it operates. Written by ‘The Godfather of SaaS’, Byron Deeter of
Bessemer Venture Partners.
Blog: SaaStr Authored by Jason Lemkin, this is one of the best SaaS resources available. It provides important
benchmarks and best practices we should understand and consider.
Blog: Tomasz Tunguz Authored by Tomasz Tunguz of RedPoint (VC), this is another of the best SaaS resources available. He
does analysis of his portfolio companies and public SaaS data to provide important benchmarks and best
practices we should understand and consider..
Blog: David Skok Another top SaaS resource, this blog by David Skok provides great resources to understand SaaS and build
a company. A particularly good article is his post on SaaS Metrics 2.0.
Podcast: The Official SaaStr
Podcasts
Harry Stebbings interviews the most prominent operators and investors to discover their tips, tactics and
strategies to attain success in the fiercely competitive world of SaaS