If you grew up in the 80’s or 90’s, there’s a good chance you played Mario Brothers on Nintendo at some point. For many kids, their favorite part of the game was finding a star (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, here you go).
A star made you invincible, and it felt like nothing could go wrong. It meant that any shortcomings in your level of play (e.g. being bad at timing jumps over the countless number of mushrooms) would be taken care of.
In an unsure economy, businesses can often find it difficult to have this same feeling of invincibility. This is especially true when it comes to RevOps, the concept of maximizing revenue potential in a repeatable way.
This is because very few businesses have a house team of RevOps professionals guiding their GTM motions and analyzing their models. Oftentimes, random sales reps or marketing team members will be tasked with revenue operations as a service-type responsibilities, usually with subpar results. The fact that some businesses may use “revenue” in someone’s job title may or may not be indicative of their RevOps knowledge.
Like Mario finding a star, a business can have that same feeling of invincibility when they turn their revenue operations over to a company which specializes in offering RevOps as a service. Instead of hiring a full-time, in-house RevOps team, a business can outsource their revenue operations to experts who will review and revamp their processes through a revenue operations as a service model, ensuring better coordination between sales and customer success teams.
Here are some examples of the areas a Revenue Operations as a Service company may look at while mapping out your marketing strategy and processes:
Let’s take a look at the last one, lead status, and see how it might be tackled by a team of RevOps pros.
Lead status shows the sales pipeline position of a lead within the current marketing or sales cycle and helps to drive what actions should be taken by team members to move them forward. It is beneficial as it helps to confirm that no leads fall through cracks, ensures there is less friction in the handoff between sales and customer success teams, and aligns team members to prioritize and plan next action steps.
Clear and agreed upon lead status definitions for each stage of the customer journey are important because they help to eliminate confusion and premature movement from one stage to the next. When a business uses RevOps as a service, they can be assured that a lead’s movement is handled in a timely and effective manner.
Lead status occurs on the left side of the sales pipeline, where team members work together to track and update each lead's movement through the funnel.
For most companies offering Revenue Operations as a Service, they will require that customer lifecycle stages, sales technical setup, and the marketing to sales handoff process be completed before the lead status options are configured and built.
To maximize how lead status is used in HubSpot, a team of RevOps experts will typically have a set of guidelines which will inform their decision-making. Here a some examples with descriptions:
Bottom line: data integrity and consistency = success.
When it comes to correctly building the process for lead status, a team of RevOps experts will typically work in phases.
Phase 1 will often include agreeing on defined lead status (names, order, definition, ownership), acknowledgment of triggers, and customization of triggers. Acknowledging triggers communicates the why and the what of the defined triggers and customization adds changes as per the requirements.
Phase 2 gets into the actual processes including building lists, building workflows, adding suppression lists inside workflows to avoid duplicates, resetting lead status options for existing ones, turning on workflows to automatically update lead status, and building custom reporting on leads moving through the funnel
Phase 3 wraps up with rolling out the process to the team and constant monitoring to make sure workflows are working.
When lead status options are done right, you can expect that all contacts will have clear ownership (marketing or sales and customer success), that there are clear sales processes to recycle and unqualify leads, there is organization around the pre-deal sales pipeline for the sales team, and all contacts are segmented correctly based on lists and workflows.
It can be difficult for a business to feel confident in their RevOps plan. For a true “Mario just found a star” feeling of RevOps invincibility, consider using RevPartners as your RevOps as service partner.
Here’s a great example of the “RP Difference” in action…
No defined process between HubSpot and Salesforce resulting in messy data and inaccurate reporting for BDR (business development representative) and AE (account executive) teams. Unqualified contacts were causing major confusion.
One of our strategists built an integration between HubSpot and Salesforce using native two way selective sync and an inclusion list to only send contacts to Salesforce that had been qualified by BDR in HubSpot.
Clarity was created for the sales team on lead status in both HubSpot and Salesforce.
Warning: you may begin involuntarily dancing like this upon turning over your RevOps operations to RevPartners.