Whether you’ve just joined a company as their first Revenue Operations (RevOps) hire or you are an experienced practitioner brought in to drive significant business transformation, your focus should remain steadfast on what truly matters: driving sustainable revenue growth.
So, where should you start?
We advise to first seek to address issues with processes and team alignment before focusing on technology and data structure. Identify key issues first; uncover the ‘hair on fire’ issues, any blockers to change, and seek to understand team communication and operations. Then, define what success looks like; start with the end in mind and establish the necessary reporting/data outputs to ensure any optimisations to processes and systems can deliver on this effectively.
Here are some fundamental questions to help you bring structure and clarity as you familiarise yourself with an organisation in the early stages.
1. Process: Map, Match, and Optimise
- 🗺️ Visualise the Customer Journey: Have you mapped the entire customer journey, from lead from revenue?
- 🕳️ Identify Revenue Leaks: Can you pinpoint friction in the customer journey where opportunities may be lost?
- 🤖 Automate Wisely: Have you identified where automation can streamline processes while recognising when manual steps are still necessary?
- 🎯 Prioritise Improvements: Are you assessing which enhancements to make based on impact, cost, and time to capitalise on easy wins?
2. Rethink Your Focus: From Leads to Revenue
- 🧮 Differentiate Your Leads: Are you treating all Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) the same? Implement a robust lead scoring framework to prioritise high-value prospects.
- 🤖 Embrace Automation: Are you utilising automation tools for smarter lead nurturing and scoring to enhance efficiency?
- 🤝 Streamline Handoffs: Have you identified and eliminated friction points in the Marketing to Sales transition for a smoother process?
- 📊 Monitor Key Metrics: Can you track Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) or Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), and Sales Velocity to inform and refine your strategies? Moving any of the key metrics in the right direction will accelerate revenue growth
- 📈 Focus on Outcomes: Are you continuously optimising based on revenue results rather than say just lead counts? Is attribution tracking in place and do you trust it to make decisions?
3. Tech Stack: Streamline for Success
- 🔍 Assess Your Tools: Have you identified underutilised tools in your tech stack with a view to eliminate redundancies?
- 📝 Guide Decisions with Process Maps: Are you using your customer journey map to inform tech stack decisions?
- 🔗 Integrate Systems: Are you able to connect/integrate all systems for effective revenue tracking? If not, why not?
- 🚀 Simplify Your Stack: Are you choosing tools that simplify operations rather than adding complexity?
4. Insights: Move Beyond Reporting
- 📊 Purpose-Driven Analysis: Are you asking for or producing reports with a clear analytical purpose?
- 🧠 Test Hypotheses: Have you clearly defined what you’re testing and what insights you aim to gain?
- 📈 Make Data-Driven Decisions: Have you considered the implications of the insights you uncover and how they can inform strategic leadership decisions?
5. Enablement: From Strategy to Execution
- 📋 Execution is Key: You have the strategy ✔️, the process ✔️, and the tech stack ✔️—but how effectively are these being executed? 🔍
- 📏 Measure Effectiveness: Can you measure the outcomes of your RevOps initiatives?
The (in)ability to measure impact and effectiveness is a common challenge.
Start by identifying key metrics that matter most to the business and ensuring they can be tracked with accurate underlying data. We recommend a core list of metrics that every SaaS organisation should track.
Then focus on the trending data to uncover insights from these metrics over time. Traditional CRMs fall short in this area, which is why many organisations leverage external visualisation tools or build out manual reports in Excel. At RevQore we’ve developed our own solution to help customers visualise MRR/ARR and Sales Velocity trends effectively.
Leaders invest significantly in their revenue engines, so it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of performance in order to identify areas for improvement.
