Creating Sustainable Revenue Growth
For businesses to be successful, they need to grow. That growth, however, can't just be a one time thing. While it’s possible for a person to hit the lottery once, manage their money well, and then never have to work again, a business will not be set forever with one good year.
Though the idea of creating sustainable revenue growth is old, the trendy nickname for it, “RevOps”, is pretty new.
Although there may be debates regarding the definition, very few (ok no one really) argue about the need for it. All businesses want to increase their revenue and do it year after year.
Are Businesses Good at RevOps?
The problem for most modern businesses is that while they have people who are great in sales or excel in marketing know-how, those same employees often lack a deep understanding of GTM motions and/or don’t have the ability to look at models and forecast correctly. In other words, most businesses do not have an in-house team of trained RevOps professionals.
This is where the concept of RevOps as a service comes into play. When a business contracts out their revenue operations strategies to a company with an expertise in RevOps, the company’s RevOps team will design and handle the entire revenue process. This is beneficial for a few reasons:
- Saves money: much less expensive than hiring a full time in-house team of RevOps pros
- Saves bandwidth: alleviates tasks from current employees who can reinvest that time in other company projects
- Peace of mind: Ensures that your RevOps operations are being handled by professionals
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, including aligning sales and marketing efforts with your ideal customer profile.
- Marketing to Sales Handoff
- Data integration
- Sales stages
- Lead scoring
- Net revenue retention
- Forecasting and goals
- Customer lifecycle stages
Let’s take a look at the first one on that list, marketing to sales handoff, and see how it might be tackled by a team of RevOps pros.
Marketing to Sales Handoff
But First…Football
Tom Brady is the best NFL quarterback of all time; Jim Brown is the best NFL running back of all time. Had they been on the same team (they played decades apart), it would seem to be an unbeatable pairing. But suppose for a minute that every time Brady attempted to hand off the ball to Brown, there was a miscommunication resulting in either a fumble or a busted play. In that example, the fact that both those players were immensely talented would be offset by the fact that they could never get on the same page.
In the same way, a business might have salespeople who, to borrow a line from the movie Tommy Boy, could “sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves”, and a marketing team full of all-stars, but if the hand off process of leads between them always gets fumbled, none of their talent is realized. The benefits of sales and marketing alignment and a smooth handoff cannot be overstated.
What is it? Why is it Important?
The marketing to sales handoff sets defined parameters for primary ownership of contact communication as a lead moves between marketing and sales.
With this level of alignment in place, businesses see 36% higher retention rates and 27% faster profit growth. Coupled with those growth percentages are also the assurances that no leads slip through the cracks, there is a process to report on follow-up results, and there are shared responsibilities for both sales and marketing teams.
There is a very tight window on the data model where this handoff occurs:
Roadmap
When it comes to correctly building the process for marketing to sales handoffs, a team of RevOps experts will often work in phases.
Phase 1 will often include:
- Defining handoff stages (New, Nurture, No-reply, Disqualified)
- Determining KPIs to track
Phase 2 gets into the actual processes:
- Building lists to coincide to handoff points
- Building Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and handoff dashboard
- Building workflows
- Determining SLA
Phase 3 wraps up with:
- Establishing and running recurring meetings to view dashboard
- Tweaking triggers based on data and feedback
(sidenote: although not always required, it is often better if the RevOps as a service company has already completed lead status, customer lifecycle stages, and lead scoring prior to these phases)
A Sample “Smarketing” Meeting Agenda
Purpose of Meeting: To agree on the transfer of primary ownership of a prospect from marketing to sales.
Review recent contacts who have been added to HubSpot ownership transfer lists
- Confirmation: an appropriate and timely follow up has happened, when applicable
Review recent MQLs on dashboard
- Confirmation: sales team has reached out and have appropriate properties filled out
- Review: all contacts in lead status
- Sampling: run a few through lead score triggers to confirm correct contacts are hitting MQL trigger
Review contacts moved to Disqualified and review reasons
- Decide: Do tweaks to lead score or list triggers need to be updated?
Review MQL -> SQL/Opportunity conversion rates
What Will Success Look Like?
When your RevOps as service team has put all marketing to sales handoff processes in place, the first thing you can expect to see is a recurring marketing and sales teams alignment meeting to review new data and streamline sales processes. Success will also manifest in an agreed upon SLA between sales and marketing ownership and lead follow up, disqualified reason feedback loop, and an MQL audit report that tracks progress through each stage of the customer journey.
When the game is on the line, fumbling a handoff is the last thing you want. RevPartners specializes in RevOps as a service and is a sure way to get your team firing together on all cylinders.
