February 8, 2022

It’s Not “The Future”: How Revenue Operations Makes the Difference NOW

It’s Not “The Future”: How Revenue Operations Makes the Difference NOW

People.ai

People.ai
It’s Not “The Future”: How Revenue Operations Makes the Difference NOW

When it comes to revenue operations, even the staunchest naysayers quibble about whens, not ifs. Sure, they’ll grant you that revenue operations (or RevOps) technology stands to revolutionize the worlds of sales, marketing, and operations, yada yada yada. The problem, they say, is that it’s just not there yet.

Well, according to Demand Gen Report’s most recent report on RevOps, it is. 

Not only are 75% of the highest-growth companies in the world expected to deploy a RevOps model by 2025, but—even more crucially—businesses are seeing big, undeniable benefits from adopting RevOps modeling right now.

Today, we want to dig into these benefits to help you better understand how RevOps can make a difference in your company. First, however, we have to tackle the first question:

Why Now?

Why has RevOps become more feasible and beneficial for companies so suddenly? Plus, if it helps so much, why weren’t companies doing it before?

The Old RevOps Problem: Data Cleanliness

The big idea behind RevOps is that it unites all business development arms under a single, organized process. Everyone has one source of truth and cooperates using the same action plan. 

Phrased this way, it’s obvious what RevOps needs to work: clean, reliable data. In the words of Demand Gen Report: 

“The foundation of every RevOps program must be a strong database that provides every team access to robust, high-quality data on everything from lead scoring and routing to ABM and attribution.”

If something’s been keeping RevOps from taking off, therefore, it’s the database. When companies can’t effectively ensure their data is clean, even the most brilliant RevOps process only goes so far. So how do you make sure the data’s clean?

The Missing Link: Automation

Why is the data disorganized in the first place? Manual entry. Without automation, every team member, much less every team, has their own way of manually inputting data and organizing it. While their processes may work individually, they make comparing data or, you know, actually working together much more difficult. 

With automated data entry, however, teams have the ability to completely standardize their data, which finally allows RevOps to work the way it’s supposed to. The master builder has the right stuff, and the house can stand up to any breeze.

Okay: Automation Has “Fixed” RevOps: So What?

Now for the fun part: we get to talk about all the wild, revolutionary stuff RevOps makes possible right now. Stuff like:

Building a Better Pipeline—and Then Continually Making It Better

When it comes to sales ops, silos are the enemy. Even if your teams are full of all-stars, if they aren’t coordinating their efforts, then your customers get a disjointed, inconsistent experience.

RevOps unifies teams and departments under a single, consistent process designed with the client in mind. Everybody contributes toward a shared goal using shared data and a shared methodology. Together, they create a pipeline where all branches work in tandem to deliver the best pitch possible. 

The best part? Pipeline optimization doesn’t end there—or, really, anywhere. Instead, RevOps data allows your band of marketing, sales, and operations geniuses to continuously uncover what’s working and what isn’t. From there, they can continuously improve their processes, hone their strengths, and deliver even better results.

Focusing on the Buyer, Not the Sale

One of the main sources of information Demand Gen Report tapped for their report was Christine Nurnberger, CMO of Bottomline Technologies and enthusiastic adopter of RevOps. When Nurnberger made the switch to RevOps, she noticed something surprising: it was changing the way her organization’s entire messaging worked. She explains:

“As marketers, we tend to create product-centric messages, because selling has solely been a sales process for so long—but now it’s a buying process. When you flip that notion and think about messaging from the buyer’s perspective, it changes key internal operations such as how you engage with prospects and customers.”

RevOps, combined with ABM, makes this new buyer focus possible. Instead of focusing on product-based messaging to push to all personas, RevOps data and ABM technology allow you to focus on how each individual buyer would benefit from your solutions. Thus you become more outcome-focused.

Companies adopting this strategy are already seeing a huge difference. Zoom recently replaced their manually-updated spreadsheet with People.ai’s RevOps automation platform. This allowed them to connect behavior to outcomes, surface key buyer metrics based on data, and build custom benchmarks. As a result, their rep bookings increased by 21-49% across segments.

Defining a Whole New Process

People.ai’s automated RevOps technology didn’t just improve Zoom’s sales, either; it transformed the way they approached those sales in the first place. Sales leader Mark Pickart made People.ai an essential part of his everyday work routine:

“When I sit down at my machine to start the day, I look at People.ai. It’s part of our scorecard. How did we do? Who had a busy day, and why? It helps me to know who to check in with and where to focus my conversation. As I spot check deals, especially the largest opportunities that I don’t know well, it shows me what’s happening and if I’m missing something.”

Ultimately, this is the key benefit of RevOps. When you have better, more accessible, more shareable, and more actionable data, all of your teams can approach what they do best in a much more informed and directed way. Let’s see the skeptics argue with that.

Want to know more about how automation and RevOps can point you in the right direction? We’d love to talk about it. If you want to see how automation technology can facilitate your RevOps strategy right now, reach out for a free People.ai demo today.

Learn all of the ways People.ai can  drive revenue growth for your business