Top Lessons From The Hubspot and RevPartners RevOps Summer School

The words “summer school” sound like a punishment. Instead of eating ice cream or jumping into a lake with friends, summer school comes off like penance for falling asleep in math class.

A summer program that delivers exponential compounding revenue ain’t too shabby, though. 12X revenue is worth missing out on a canoe ride.

In July of 2022, Hubspot and RevPartners.io collaborated on a free three-day training program called RevOps Summer School. Over the six hourlong sessions, the host led participants through a robust revenue operations framework that concluded with configuring 30+ fundamental Hubspot workflows for revenue operations.

If you’re serious about honing your revenue operations chops, it’s a great investment of time. BTW, did we mention it’s free?

However, six dense hours is a lot for anyone, especially if you’re just getting started with RevOps. To give you a taste of this school experience, we’ve pulled out a few big concepts for you to chew on.

Model ≠ Motion

Long before hopping into a CRM, a RevOps professional needs to understand the business model and the go-to-market motion. Those are two different things:

• Business Model: How customers buy your product/service

• Go-To-Market Motion: How a business gets customers to buy your product/service

Understanding that the business model and the GTM motion are two distinctly different things helps clarify what matters and define what a “win” would look like. In Day 1, the Summer School neatly captures the business model spectrum and teases out a few implications for those various models:

To tease those graphs into a narrative, a complex database software that’s geared to enterprise businesses has to acknowledge that

• buyers are assuming a lot of risk

• it will take a long time for a deal to close

• the sales team should be winning 1:3 deals

• the seller should invest a lot of resources into closing new business (since it’s prohibitive for an enterprise business to walk away a month in implementation)

On the other hand, a SaaS tool that users only pay for what they use (think AWS pay-as-you-go) -

• puts the risk on the seller (high cost of marketing with no guarantee of a sale)

• a customer could churn with one bad experience

• win rates are a lot lower

• has a very short sales cycle

• and the business is strongly incentivized to retain and upsell their customers

Once a business has figured out their business model (and the upsides/downsides associated with that model), the go-to-market motion is a lot clearer:

MRR Is a Helluva Drug

In 2022, the business landscape has shifted so far from a single sale to monthly recurring revenue services that it’s an anathema to consider not charging a service fee of some kind. Even car companies are getting into the ongoing subscription racket.

From a RevOps perspective, there’s power in service-based revenue: it compounds.

Let’s explain this through a thought experiment:

Your Marketing team generates 5 leads a month,
your Sales team closes 1 out of 5 deals a month,
and your Success team retains a customer for one month.
That’s one customer a month.

• If RevOps can help Marketing increase lead generation by 100% and generate 10 leads a month, down the funnel that will lead to two customers for one month. This is linear growth.

• If RevOps can capitalize on this marketing improvement and help Sales increase their win rate to 2:5, then that’s four customers for one month. Now we’re seeing exponential growth.

• If RevOps can enhance the staying power within Customer Success to extend service contracts to three months, then each customer generates threefold service revenue. Four customers a month worth three times the value: 12X revenue. This is the power of compound growth.

If your business could 12X revenue thanks to a few days of summer school, perhaps you could take the profit and buy your own ice cream shop.

Your Dashboards Require More Pylons

Hubspot is a fantastic tool for businesses to gain insight on their marketing, sales, and success activities. They even make it dead simple to set up dashboards that are easy to use and double click down into.

However, getting access to a kitchen full of thoughtfully designed utensils and cooking surfaces doesn’t mean your pancake batter of a business can start cooking without doing some configuration.

By understanding the business model, the go-to-market motions, and the revenue drivers for your business, you’re ready to tag and organize your business processes and then graft them into Hubspot. One key step here is tagging those discrete steps along the customer lifecycle:

In the Summer School, one particular business was diagrammed and tagged, the Bowtie model. Underlying this model was a lot of prework: business model, sales/marketing/success GTM motion, data model, math model, and more.

However, look at the variety of data points!

• VM- number of leads/deals/accounts at each stage

• CR- conversion rate through a stage

• Δt - time it takes to move from one stage to the next

Those data points are what should fuel dashboard design because they are clear markers of how a business reacts to changes, improvements, and adjustments. This is the kind of data that allows a RevOps professional to work like a scientist, rather than an artist.

Once you have those lifecycle events to start listening to the data, setting up Hubspot (or any dashboard tool) will allow you to make much more intelligent decisions, such as:

• Developing marketing collateral to speed up your (previously invisible) pipeline slowdown between Interested to Engaged in order to improve total revenue by 5%

• Scheduling an upsell conversation 30 days for a new customer rather than 60 days to improve total lifetime revenue by 7%

• Providing coaching to sales reps that close deals fast but churn at a higher rate because their average time to close is measurably faster than reps that take time to help customers choose the best product for their needs.

That’s the science of RevOps in action.

Now What?

If those highlights tickled your bones, be sure to take advantage of the free Summer School: this free offering is a crazy-good value for the time invested!

If your gut reaction was, “Wow, super cool, but I don’t have the time to make this happen,” that’s understandable! It takes a lot of work to even simply answer the question, “What’s my business model?”

At Learn to Scale, we help organizations get started with RevOps by identifying quick wins and long-term strategies that fit your unique business while teaching you concepts that you can use for years to come.

What could you do if you had a clear roadmap to 12X your revenue or more?