Revenue Operations Pros Are Work Horses
“to whom much is given much is tested”
Ah, the life of an operator.
I’ve run a team including Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, CS Ops & even a Product Support Ops function… that was an incredible experience. We had a great deal of operational leverage and with that many sets of eyes on the “revenue team” we were able to come up with very creative and resource efficient solutions.
I’ve also been the only Ops headcount.
What a different world that is.
Everything falls on you. You are the ER Doctor, nurse and ambulance driver. Success involves building a roadmap for the revenue engine and building a triage system for intaking requests and communicating statuses.
Here are 15+ common tasks that operators have to tackle on a consistent basis.
Strategy & Planning
Developing sales strategies: Collaborating with sales leadership to define goals, target markets, and overall approach.
Territory planning and optimization: Defining and assigning sales territories to ensure efficient coverage and maximize sales potential.
Quota setting and management: Establishing realistic and motivating sales quotas for individual reps and teams.
Sales process optimization: Analyzing and improving the sales process to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
Compensation plan design: Developing and managing compensation plans that incentivize desired sales behaviors.
Enablement & Support
Onboarding and training: Equipping new sales reps with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
Sales tools implementation and management: Selecting, deploying, and managing sales technologies like CRM and automation tools.
Creating sales playbooks and resources: Developing and maintaining resources like sales scripts, presentations, and FAQs.
Providing ongoing sales support: Addressing sales reps' questions, troubleshooting issues, and providing guidance.
Analysis & Reporting
Sales forecasting: Predicting future sales performance based on historical data and market trends.
Pipeline analysis: Monitoring the health of the sales pipeline and identifying potential roadblocks.
Performance analysis: Tracking key sales metrics and identifying areas for improvement.
Reporting and dashboard creation: Generating reports and dashboards to communicate sales performance to stakeholders.
Data & Operations
Data management and hygiene: Ensuring data accuracy and completeness in the CRM and other sales systems.
Lead management and routing: Qualifying leads and routing them to the appropriate sales reps.
Sales automation implementation: Using automation tools to streamline sales tasks and improve efficiency.
Collaboration & Communication
Cross-functional collaboration: Working with other departments like marketing and customer success to align goals and improve processes.
Sales communication: Keeping sales reps informed about company updates, product changes, and sales initiatives.
This list is not exhaustive at all and it is oriented toward Sales Ops.
Once you layer in marketing work and CS work… the list swells even further.
Instead of being overwhelmed by all the work, stack the tasks and put them into buckets.
Strategy & Planning
Revenue Operations takes a holistic view of revenue generation, aligning all customer-facing functions (marketing, sales, customer success) with overall business objectives.
This involves developing a comprehensive revenue strategy that encompasses the entire customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention and expansion. Go-to-market strategy considers how each function contributes to revenue goals. Territory planning may extend beyond sales, including marketing segmentation and customer success account assignments. Quota setting and compensation design consider the contributions of all revenue-generating teams. Revenue Operations optimizes processes across the entire revenue cycle, identifying and removing friction points that hinder revenue growth.
Practical tips to implement:
Document your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Clearly define the characteristics of your ideal customer, including firmographics, needs, pain points, and buying behavior. This will help focus go-to-market strategies and ensure alignment across all revenue teams.
Conduct a sales process audit: Map out your current sales process and identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies. Use data and feedback from sales reps to pinpoint areas for improvement and streamline the process for increased conversion rates.
Implement a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing: Clearly define lead response times, lead qualification criteria, and handoff processes between marketing and sales to ensure a smooth and efficient lead flow.
Enablement & Support
Revenue Operations empowers all revenue-generating teams with the resources and support they need.
This includes onboarding and training programs for marketing, sales, and customer success, ensuring everyone has the knowledge and skills to excel in their roles. Technology plays a crucial role, and RevOps manages a stack of tools that support the entire revenue cycle, including marketing automation, CRM, customer success platforms, and analytics tools. RevOps creates and maintains playbooks, knowledge bases, and other resources that empower all teams with best practices and standardized processes. Ongoing support, addressing questions, and troubleshooting issues ensures all revenue-generating teams have what they need to succeed.
Practical tips to implement:
Create a knowledge base for sales content: Centralize all sales collateral, presentations, case studies, and training materials in an easily accessible online repository. This ensures sales reps have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips.
Develop a sales onboarding checklist: Standardize the onboarding process for new sales hires with a comprehensive checklist that covers all essential training, tools setup, and knowledge transfer, ensuring they ramp up quickly and effectively.
Implement a sales coaching program: Pair experienced sales reps with new hires or those needing improvement. Regular coaching sessions can help improve sales skills, address performance gaps, and boost overall sales effectiveness.
Analysis & Reporting
RevOps provides data-driven insights across the entire revenue funnel.
This includes analyzing marketing campaign performance, sales pipeline health, and customer success metrics like churn and lifetime value. RevOps generates comprehensive revenue forecasts, predicting future performance based on historical data and market trends. By analyzing data from all customer-facing functions, RevOps identifies trends, opportunities, and areas for improvement across the entire revenue cycle. They create reports and dashboards to visualize key metrics, track progress towards goals, and communicate insights to stakeholders, facilitating data-driven decision-making across the organization.
Practical tips to implement:
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) across the revenue funnel: Monitor metrics like website traffic, lead conversion rates, sales cycle length, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLTV) to gain insights into revenue performance and identify areas for optimization.
Conduct win/loss analysis: Regularly review closed-won and closed-lost opportunities to understand the factors contributing to success or failure. This analysis can reveal valuable insights for improving sales strategies, messaging, and competitive positioning.
Use data visualization tools: Present key revenue metrics in clear and concise dashboards that are easily accessible to stakeholders. Visualizing data can help identify trends, track progress, and communicate insights effectively.
Data & Operations
Maintaining data integrity across all revenue-related systems is paramount. RevOps ensures data accuracy and consistency across marketing automation platforms, CRM systems, and customer success platforms.
They implement processes for data cleansing, enrichment, and integration, ensuring a single source of truth for customer data. RevOps optimizes lead management and routing processes, ensuring leads are qualified and distributed efficiently to the appropriate sales reps. Automation is leveraged across the revenue cycle, streamlining tasks like lead nurturing, customer onboarding, and renewal management. By optimizing these operational processes, RevOps increases efficiency and allows all teams to focus on revenue-generating activities.
Practical tips to implement:
Implement a data governance framework: Establish clear policies and procedures for data entry, data quality, and data maintenance to ensure data accuracy and consistency across all revenue systems.
Integrate your tech stack: Connect your CRM, marketing automation platform, and other revenue tools to enable seamless data flow and avoid data silos. Integration allows for a more complete view of the customer journey and facilitates better decision-making.
Automate lead scoring: Use lead scoring models to prioritize leads based on their engagement level and fit with your ICP. This helps sales reps focus on the most promising leads and improves sales efficiency.
Collaboration & Communication
RevOps is the central hub for collaboration and communication across all revenue-generating functions.
They foster a culture of alignment and shared goals, breaking down silos between marketing, sales, and customer success. RevOps facilitates communication and information sharing between teams, ensuring everyone is aligned on priorities and working towards common objectives. They may establish cross-functional teams to tackle key initiatives and drive revenue growth. By fostering collaboration and communication, RevOps ensures a unified approach to revenue generation and a seamless customer experience.
Practical tips to implement:
Establish a regular cadence for cross-functional meetings: Bring together representatives from sales, marketing, and customer success to discuss progress, challenges, and opportunities for collaboration. Regular communication fosters alignment and ensures everyone is working towards shared goals.
Create a shared revenue dashboard: Provide all revenue teams with access to a dashboard that displays key metrics and progress towards goals. This promotes transparency and encourages collaboration towards common objectives.
Develop a communication plan for key initiatives: When launching new products, campaigns, or sales initiatives, ensure clear and consistent communication across all revenue teams. This keeps everyone informed and aligned on messaging and objectives.
Remember that RevOps is a holistic approach to driving revenue growth by aligning all customer-facing functions, including marketing, sales, and customer success. This means that we as professionals must work to optimize the entire revenue cycle, from attracting and converting leads to retaining and expanding customer relationships.
Super short summary:
Strategy & Planning
Developing a comprehensive revenue strategy, defining ideal customer profiles, optimizing processes, and setting goals and quotas.
Enablement & Support
Equipping revenue teams with the training, tools, and resources they need to succeed, including onboarding programs, technology management, and ongoing support.
Analysis & Reporting
Analyzing data across the revenue funnel to track performance, identify trends, and generate forecasts, providing insights for data-driven decision-making.
Data & Operations
Ensuring data integrity and consistency across all revenue systems, optimizing lead management and routing processes, and leveraging automation to improve efficiency.
Collaboration & Communication
Fostering cross-functional alignment and communication between marketing, sales, and customer success teams to ensure a unified approach to revenue generation.
By optimizing processes, enabling teams, and analyzing data, RevOps helps businesses achieve sustainable revenue growth and improve customer lifetime value.
If you are the only person working on this stuff — as I said, start by building a system to track projects and capture new tasks as they bubble up. This will help you stay organized + demonstrate to your teammates how heavy your workstream really is. People have empathy but they can’t feel for you if you don’t communicate what’s happening clearly — Ops is about communications first and foremost!
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