Why You Should Work with a RevOps Agency

Once you have decided to introduce RevOps into your business you’re faced with another critical choice: how do you go about doing that?

The first step is building out your business’ revenue operations capabilities:

• Hiring the right team, usually starting with a Chief Revenue Officer and including a technology team and data team.
• Getting your technology stack right, whether that be getting new tools or better connecting existing ones.
• Getting buy-in from leadership and team members. Aligning people is a huge part of successful RevOps adoption so getting all stakeholders on board is key.
  

Depending on what sort of business you are working in, it’s possible you could do this all yourself and build an internal revenue operations team. However, building a brand new team is often difficult to get right, time consume and most importantly, expensive.

You could also add RevOps responsibilities to your existing employees. However, this will split everyone’s attention from the “real” jobs, negating the benefits you were hoping to achieve with RevOps in the first place.

The other option is to hire a revenue operations agency to be your partner in bringing revenue operations into your business.

Benefits of Using a Revenue Operations Agency

Opting to hire a RevOps agency offers you several benefits and advantages over building an in-house team.

Laser Focus on Revenue Operations

A major advantage of hiring a revenue operations agency is that you get an purpose-built entire team whose sole commitment is running your revenue operations. This external team doesn’t suffer from distractions caused when in-house team members are forced to wear multiple hats.

Hiring a RevOps agency will get you the most efficient way of setting up revenue operations for your business while freeing up your own marketing, sales and customer success teams to focus on their core responsibilities. 

And as you’ve likely picked up on, RevOps is all about efficiencies.

Knowledge and Experience with Tech

Seeing as simplifying and streamlining your technology stack is an important task when adopting revenue operations, hiring an agency makes the most sense when making this transition. 

As mentioned above, a RevOps agency is focused solely on revenue operations, which results in a deep knowledge and understanding of the marketing technology landscape (see the graphic of the current MarTech landscape below). This knowledge, understanding and experience will be brought to bear for your business so that you can be confident that your RevOps platform will be built with the tools and solutions that meet your specific business needs.

By hiring an agency, you can skip all of the research, evaluation and comparing necessary to selecting technologies and rely on the expertise of your agency.

Objectivity

Hiring a revenue operations agency gives you an objective, third-party perspective on what’s working, what isn’t working and what are the best ways forward to overcome your revenue challenges. 

The best agencies will often work on a RevOps consulting-as-a-service model in order to provide ongoing feedback and consistently challenge your thinking to help ensure your approach is backed by the data so you can make the best decisions for your business. 

And since your agency is hyper-focused on revenue operations and accountable solely for revenue growth, you can count on any recommendations they make to be similarly focused on creating revenue and reaching their clients’ (meaning you) goals. 

Having an objective voice when making business decisions is critical. Despite the best of intentions, in-house teams can easily become emotionally invested in certain strategies, partnerships or tactics. 

Being an external voice, an agency is more likely to be able to provide objective assessments, feedback and recommendations that may be difficult for an internal team to communicate.

When Its Time to Hire a  Revenue Operations

How do you know your need for revenue operations has become urgent? What are the signs that your business isn’t operating as efficiently as it could, which leaves customers and revenue on the table?

To answer these questions you need to take the time to assess the effectiveness of your customer journey; how your marketing, sales and customer success teams are impacting that journey; and how well all three segments are working together.

When you are auditing your business, encountering any of these situations is a glaring sign that it’s time for you to find your RevOps agency.

You Have Too Many Different Tools

Tools and technologies to support marketing, sales and customer success operations are ubiquitous these days. In fact, the 2020 marketing technology landscape from chiefmartec.com includes a whopping 8,000 technology solutions:

This landscape comprises tools for marketing, advertising, content creation and promotion, social media, sales, data management, customer support and several other use cases. This number represents a 13.6% increase from 2019 when you account for consolidation and attrition and a total increase of nearly 25%. 

With so many tools available, it’s easy to see how technology stacks quickly get out of control as businesses add tools to fill needs not currently being met.

As you have likely guessed (or experienced yourself), this situation can severely limit the ability of a business to invest in growth. Plus, paying for all this technology and not using it is just a plain old waste of money.

Adopting the revenue operations framework puts the work of adopting, integrating and maintaining the MarTech stack in the hands of one person (or team), helping you to jettison under-utilized, unused and overlapping tools. This connected technology stack allows your business to save money while at the same time enjoy the efficiencies created by having all teams working from a single source of data.

Siloed Teams are Sapping Efficiency

On an operational level, does your marketing team know what your sales team needs to do their jobs more effectively? Does your sales team know what happens to the new customers they sign after closing the deal? Do your customer success officers know which campaigns have been most effective in growing existing account values?

For many businesses, the answers to these questions are all too often “no” or, at best, “maybe.”

Often these siloes are created, or at least reinforced, by the disorganized and disconnected technology stack mentioned above.

Introducing the RevOps framework to your business centers your marketing, sales and customer success people around the shared goal of creating more revenue for the business. By making all three teams accountable for growth, they are more likely to communicate and work together to reach their goal.

Additionally, working with RevOps streamlines your tech stack, connecting all three teams with a single platform and shared data.

When your teams all start in the same place and are moving toward the same goal, they work together more efficiently and effectively.

You Have Unreliable and/or Fragmented Data

Just like people and technology can become siloed within a business, marketing data can also be fragmented and disjointed within your business. Even if you do have a single master database, keeping teams in the traditional framework often results in individuals pulling their own reports and building their own dashboards. For many companies, it’s common for team members to copy and paste data from their tools into unshared spreadsheets.

In the end, your business winds up with not only different sources of data for each team, but often you’ll have multiple data sources within teams. So, in effect, your search, content and PPC teams could each be working off separate tracking sheets even though they are all within the marketing team.

This siloed data not only reduces efficiency for your teams, but it also makes any analysis and insights unreliable because no one is looking at the whole picture.

It’s like asking your marketing, sales and customer success teams to do a jigsaw puzzle with only a third of the picture each. They might make some progress on their own, but no one will be able to actually complete their goals.

When you align your tools and people with the revenue operations framework, you wind up with consolidated and complete data. You can also rest assured that this data is clean and reliable because it comes from a single source of truth. 

Aligned data improves your customer journey, reducing the number of leads and prospects who drop off or fall through the cracks while simultaneously helping your customer success people maximize lifetime customer value.

Revenue is Stagnant or Unreliable

Maybe you haven’t seen signs of the issues discussed above. But, despite your continuing best efforts, your revenue growth has flattened or has become unreliable and unpredictable - sometimes it’s up and sometimes it’s down. Nothing to do seems to work and you don’t know why.

This situation is an alarm bell that it’s time to implement revenue operations in your business.

And that goes double if you’re tracking negative revenue growth over time.

The simple fact is that your business needs to be increasing revenue to keep up with inevitable cost increases and to reinvest in the business. There’s a reason the saying “If you aren’t growing, you’re dying,” is so popular in the business world.

Unfortunately, many businesses suffer from the problems listed above, severely limiting their ability to generate new revenue and grow the value of existing customers. Disconnected tools, poorly aligned teams and unreliable data means a business isn’t signing as many customers as it could and is consistently leaving revenue on the table.

The good news is that by working with RevOps and incorporating it into your normal business operations, you can solve these revenue-limiting issues to turn your marketing, sales and customer success teams into a well-oiled growth machine.

Ready to Find Your RevOps Partner?

Is your business showing any of the warning signs listed above? Or maybe you are simply struggling to realize the full benefits of your marketing, sales and customer success strategies. Either way, now is likely the perfect time for your business to adopt revenue operations.

Contact us to learn how our approach to RevOps can help you overcome your revenue challenges without having to hire any new people or add additional tasks to your current team members.