RevOps as a Service? What’s That?
Companies have been doing revenue operations (“RevOps”) for forever, whether they called it that or not. What is new, however, is the idea of RevOps as a service.
Let’s say you open up your refrigerator one day and it’s not cold. That’s a problem, and likely one you're not equipped to fix on your own. Most people do not possess the technical know-how (and extra time) to figure out why their fridge isn’t doing its job. So what do you do?
You call an expert! You outsource the task to someone who has more experience, more skill, and more resources to get the job done. If you try to take care of this problem on your own, you’ll most likely end up wasting valuable time and money.
Now, instead of a broken refrigerator, imagine it’s a company’s broken revenue engine. Instead of a refrigerator repair company to the rescue, it’s a company full of RevOps experts. That’s RevOps as a service!
To be more precise, it is the idea of turning over analytics, tech stack alignments, and lead and demand generation processes to a company that specializes in optimizing the customer-focused activities of a business.
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:
-
Forecasting and goals
-
Sales sequences
Let’s take a look at the first one, lead scoring, and see how it might be tackled by a team of RevOps pros.
Lead Scoring
What is it?
Dating has changed a lot over the years. Nowadays, you can essentially know everything about someone before meeting them face-to-face. You can view a person’s social media accounts to see what they look like, what kind of friends they have, what their preferred activities are, and what they do for a living. You can even search their job title and make a reasonable guess as to how much they make a year.
Many people use this type of information to decide whether or not it'd be worth trying to pursue a relationship. After all, you wouldn't want to waste time on someone that you know would clearly not be a good fit.
Well, businesses do this too. It’s called lead scoring and it’s a model of assigning value to leads to identify the most valuable to your current sales funnel. A business will be most successful when it only “dates” the leads that it is most compatible with.
The problem is that when it comes to correctly scoring and identifying those leads, many businesses lack the know-how and advanced testing practices which are vital to accurately determine who may or may not be a good lead to pursue. This is where the idea of RevOps as a service shines.
When you turn lead scoring over to the experts, you’re set up to pursue the leads that will be the most beneficial to your business. i
Why Is It Important?
For businesses to be successful, there are several things they must have:
-
Money, and plenty of it
-
Good employees by the bushel full
-
Luck in astronomical quantities
-
Time
What separates the first three from the last (time), is that they can be replenished when they run out. You can always make more money, find more good employees, and stumble into some more good luck. What you can’t do, though, is create more time.
One of the best ways to save time is to not waste it. Wasted time is gone for good, and that’s what makes it the most valuable resource a business can have. One of the best ways to avoid wasting time is to zero in on the opportunities that give your business its best chance for success while avoiding situations where losing is inevitable.
When you stop pursuing leads that, by various measurements, aren’t a good fit for your product or service, you stop wasting time.
Lead scoring assists in prioritizing outreach, optimizing sales resources, and delineating marketing to sales handoff. In short, lead scoring helps keep you focused on the things that make your business work.
Lead Scoring Threshold
Lead scoring is not a stand-alone marketing technique, as sales team input is vital throughout the customer journey. The hand-off between sales and marketing occurs at the lead score threshold, the point at which the prospect is deemed sales-ready. At this point they become a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and sales takes over.
Making the determination that a prospect is sales-ready comes down to point attribution. Prospects can gain or lose points based on whether or not they’ve opened an email, what their job title is, and if they’ve attended a webinar, just to name a few.
Not all companies are good at point attribution. The system they've developed may have blind spots/biases or their tracking system may not be efficient. Using RevOps as a service can help optimize this process. When you turn over revenue processes like lead scoring to professionals, you save on employee bandwidth and receive a well-developed scoring system.
Instead of asking “how does lead scoring work?”, you’ll be saying, “I can see how lead scoring works for us.”
Guidelines
To maximize lead scoring systems in HubSpot, the team of RevOps experts will typically have a set of guidelines which will inform their decision-making. Here are some examples with descriptions:
-
Positive & Negative: Leads should be able to take a step backward as well as forward
-
Lifecycle Stage is key: You shouldn’t be here unless you’ve got robust Lifecycle Stages
-
Right-sized bucket: Qualifying leads doesn’t work if everybody qualifies; only the top 20-30% should
-
Attributes before trigger: Let the attributes guide the trigger score, not the other way around
-
Decrease stale leads: After boosting the score for recent behaviors, make sure to decrease after a set time
Roadmap
When it comes to correctly setting up lead scoring, a team of RevOps experts will often work in phases.
Phase 1 will often include:
- Buyer personas: created or drawn from diagnostic
-
Fit score: define demo and firmographic positives and negatives
-
Behavior score: define engagement positives and negatives
Fit Score Examples
-
Personal: job title, email domain, persona
-
Company: location, size, industry, revenue
Behavior Score Examples
-
Website: form submissions, web sessions, pageviews, specific page, CTA clicks
-
Email: subscription status, opens and/or clicks
-
Ads: interactions
Phase 2 gets into the actual processes:
-
Build properties: fit score, behavior score, lead score
-
Add attributes: map positive and negative attributes to property
-
Lead score trigger: define, create list, automation
Phase 3 wraps up with:
-
Optimize contact sources: for outstanding data
-
Audit: review MQLs as a team to determine if adjustments are needed
-
Update properties: make necessary adjustments
What Will Success Look Like?
When lead scoring is done right, you can expect that the top qualified 20-30% of your leads will surface themselves to your team, leads in your HubSpot platform will automatically qualify themselves on fit and behavior (distilled into a single property), lead to MQL lifecycle stage qualification will be automated and conversion reports will be generated, and a key step of the marketing to sales handoff will be automated and codified.
When You Think RevOps as a Service, Think RevPartners
Time is a finite resource. Therefore, businesses need to focus their efforts where it’s going to statistically be more profitable. That’s where the lead scoring process comes in. More specifically, that’s where lead scoring designed by a team of RevOps experts comes in.
Here’s a great example of the “RevPartners Difference” in action…
Recent Problem Encountered by Partner
Many SQLs were failing to turn into deals. Sales team needed a qualification process to identify high intent prospects and prioritize quality over quantity. Essentially, poor quality leads were hurting conversion rates.
Our Solution
One of our strategists created a scoring system with custom properties and a Company Fit Score. They then created a process using the scores to determine whether to open a deal, send back to Business Development Reps, or request a follow up call first.
The sales team now has reporting for the middle of the funnel and all stages of the SQL process. The quality of deals increased, along with win rates.
What’s the Bottom Line?
At RevPartners, we build growth engines while others give you scooters. Come experience the RP difference for yourself!
