The challenges that a RevOps person and team faces in an organisation often depends on when building a Revenue Operations framework becomes a strategic focus in that business’s growth journey.
From our experience with scaling B2B SaaS businesses, this focus typically arises when their go-to-market strategy lacks the revenue operations structure and commercial tech stack necessary for scale. A well-designed tech stack is crucial to accelerating an organisation’s commercial strategy because it enables efficient processes, reduces friction, and provides a unified view of the customer journey.
This typically presents us with some common challenges that we put into four categories:
- Automation & Scalability
- Data Quality
- Process Alignment
- Reporting & Decision-making
We believe addressing these challenges requires a holistic RevOps approach whilst also leveraging expertise in building tech-enabled processes across the entire customer lifecycle.
We have listed below some of the most common issues we walk into when working with our customers. This is not an exhaustive list but is a good place to start an evaluation.
1. Automation & Scalability
- CRM – Automations & Validations: Current workflows are not set up for best practices or operating effectively.
- Integrations with CRM: Other systems are not integrated well with the CRM and are not sharing data consistently.
- Offline Sources: Non-CRM systems and sources are used to operate core commercial processes.
2. Data Quality
- Data Clean-Up: The quality of the dataset in the CRM and the underlying architecture used to store and manage the data requires clean-up.
- Attribution: Origination, Tracking & Attribution – there is a lack of ability to tie revenue back to its origination, and activities prior to revenue creation.
3. Process Alignment
- Customer Lifecycle: The commercial team is misaligned across the customer lifecycle.
- Pipeline Building: Poor sales process and pipeline tracking.
- CPQ & Billing: The quote to revenue or cash process requires optimisation.
4. Reporting & Decision-making
- Analytics: Key business metrics not clearly defined or measurable.
- Revenue Intelligence: The ability to use the CRM for data-driven decisions is limited.
- Forecasting: Lack of consistency and accuracy of the current forecasting methodology.
Once RevOps have uncovered the major challenges, key priorities and blockers to change in their organisations, the real work begins!
The next step is to deliver the solution to overcome those challenges and decide on the order in which to do that. There is generally never just one way of solving the problem(s), so it is crucial to start with the end in mind and have a clear vision of the desired end state for that organisation. This will be key to informing which solution and which ‘order of things’ will be most appropriate.
If you’re facing similar challenges and are unsure of next steps, we invite you to share those challenges with us and the RevOps community. Perhaps, you are also dealing with other issues not mentioned here, we are always keen to hear what is consuming the time of fellow RevOps professionals!
