Is Football a Lesson in RevOps?
A football (American football) team is made up of three units: offense, defense, and special teams. While each of these units performs different functions from the others, they are constantly working to set each other up for success for the greater good of the team.
Examples include the offense sustaining a long drive and in turn giving the defense a chance to rest; the defense forcing a turnover and giving the offense better field position; and special teams scoring points via kickoff returns and field goals to take the pressure off the other two units.
A football team understands that in order to win, the objectives of all three units must constantly be in alignment to produce winning results.
RevOps is really no different.
RevOps is about three units (sales, marketing, service) which perform different functions and work to set each other up for success for the greater good of the company (cross-functional support).
Examples include the marketing team delivering engaged, qualified leads to the sales team and the sales team apprising the service team as to what was promised to the customer pre-sale so that it can be properly delivered post-sale.
A successful company understands that in order to create recurring revenue, the objectives of all three units must constantly be in alignment to produce winning results. No silos allowed!
RevOps as a Service to the Rescue
While most every company agrees that RevOps is important, not all companies agree on the definition or the proper way to structure a RevOps team. To top it off, most companies don’t have “revenue operations experts” in-house to forecast models and understand GTM motions at the depth needed. The solution? RevOps as a service.
When you outsource all your RevOps needs to a team of experts, you save on employee bandwidth and are ensured of an optimized and team-aligned plan moving forward. It’s a strategic partnership which provides businesses with a way of achieving sustainable revenue growth without having to hire an entirely new in-house team.
Areas/Topics Assessed
When you turn over your revenue processes to a team of RevOps experts, here are some examples of areas they may look at while mapping out your strategies:
- Sales stages
- Lead scoring
- Net revenue retention
- Forecasting and goals
- Lead status
- Sales sequences
- Customer lifecycle stages
Let’s take a look at the first one, sales stages, and see how it might be tackled by a team of Revops pros.
Sales Stages
What are They?
RevOps is a science, not an art. It’s all about creating ways to replicate and repeat revenue growth and uncovering the process of how revenue teams can teach, measure, repeat, improve, explain, and apply growth strategies to the full revenue cycle. The keyword there is repeat. When something works, you shouldn’t have to guess how to do it a second time.
Setting up and moving through sales stages is a key part of this process. Sales stages are the steps in a repeatable sales process through the buyer journey. They coincide with the deal object and can be customized per deal pipeline.
They are important because they standardize the sales process and information, improve sales reporting capabilities, and enforce robust revenue forecasting.
These 5 stages of the sales process occur at a very specific point during the buyer’s journey and if not properly optimized can lead to lost opportunities. To take the pressure off of a business that may not have all the tools and RevOps-trained employees to properly execute it, it is wise to outsource this to a company which specializes in RevOps as a service.
Guidelines
To maximize how sales stages are used in HubSpot, a team of RevOps experts will typically have a set of guidelines which will inform their decision-making. Here are some examples with descriptions:
- Book ends: identify beginning and end triggers for each pipeline
- Sales motions: fundamentally different buying processes require separate pipelines
- No prospecting: all prospecting actions should live outside the sales pipeline
- Buyer journey, not sales journey: stages show material progress forward
- Be aware of fake stages: e.g. ‘proposal sent’ is not a stage, it is a sales activity that occurs during a stage
- No holding: “holding” stages should not exist. A deal is either progressed forward or lost
- Entry requirements are not shackles: if a stage doesn't need information to progress, it shouldn't exist
- Sales actions: entry requirements should not be sales actions unless there is a need for an extremely prescriptive sales process
- Automation is king: where possible, automation should progress a deal forward
Roadmap
When it comes to correctly setting up the steps of the sales process, a team of RevOps experts will often work in phases.
Phase 1 will often include:
- Defining stage names
- Defining entry and exit criteria for stages
- Defining probability and required properties for each stage and pipeline
- Completion of sales stages flowchart
Phase 2 gets into the actual processes:
- Building pipelines
- Building custom properties for entry and exit criteria
- Setting up deal properties and required properties
- Building workflows
- Building funnel reporting and dashboard
Phase 3 wraps up with:
- Rolling out processes to sales team
- Consistent monitoring to ensure process is being followed
What Will Success Look Like?
When sales stages are set up correctly, you can expect your sales pipeline to be established per sales motion with names, probabilities and required properties defined and for there to also be a repeatable process for how a deal advances through the sales process.
Also, there will be confirmation of entry criteria and exit criteria that serve as required properties per stage so each deal has the same relevant information at each stage interval and the presence of workflows and automation to advance deals through the pipeline automatically.
Reporting Examples
At RevPartners, We Specialize in RevOps as a Service
Every business does RevOps, whether they realize it or not. That means they’re either doing it well or they're doing it poorly. For the ones without an in-house team of trained RevOps experts, it’s probably the latter.
So…
Turning over the revenue operations of your business to experts makes a lot of sense. Don’t settle for an agency when what you need is a technical Systems Integrator, like RevPartners.
Can we help with sales stages? Of course. But we do a lot more: We start moving fast and do a lot of work upfront. At the start, we map your entire sales process, complete a tech stack audit, start automating processes to drive efficiencies, define your Ideal Customer Profile, create personas, and write messaging. Also, we start building custom reporting for full-funnel analysis.
When you’re ready to kick your business into high gear, give the keys to us and hang on for the checkered flag!
