Revenue Operations Defined, Explained, And In Virtual Reality

In the past ten years, the term “revenue operations” has spiked:

Additionally, roles and titles have started to reflect this larger interest in RevOps:

If you Google “What Is Revenue Operations” you’ll get a lot of answers like “align teams,” “leverage data,” and “design centralized processes,” but that doesn’t help someone understand if they need to hire a RevOps expert or not. Of course we want to leverage data to design a synergistic central system, but do we really need to hire a $100K/year professional to do that?

What’s elusive is a definition that helps answer the question, “So what would you say you do around here, Mr/Mrs. RevOps Professional?”

RevOps with HubSpot Summer School provides a better definition:

RevOps is the science of sustainable revenue growth that enables revenue teams to teach, measure, repeat, improve, explain, and apply growth strategies to the full revenue cycle.

What’s good about this definition is that it describes processes that Revenue Operations professionals apply, versus just the outcomes they (hope to!) achieve.

But still, this improved definition is opaque and corporate-speak: Who is on and who is off the revenue team? What kinds of growth strategies are we already not aware of? Is the full revenue cycle different than the customer lifecycle? 🤷‍♀️

We created a short video to explain Revenue Operations more practically:

As RevOps professionals, we teach, measure, repeat, improve, explain and apply growth strategies to:

Set up a core reporting dashboard that aligns go-to-market teams

Not only does an organization need a basic reporting dashboard built off a single source of truth, but often leaders need help crafting KPIs that matter, especially when it steps beyond their silo of Sales, Marketing, or Customer Success.

Design sales/marketing/success rep career paths and incentive structure

Who writes rep job descriptions, leveling criteria, and incentive plans? Often this is delegated to HR, but HR isn’t forecasting or accountable to sales and churn targets. A RevOps professional can collaborate with HR to bring a holistic view of the business to the experts in retaining talent, producing career paths and incentives that drive excellence.

Develop and iterate MQL/ SQL definitions

Classifying a prospect as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a crucial handoff point between Marketing and Sales. With most organizations, it’s an uneasy peace. RevOps can arbitrate and iterate criteria to identify when a lead is sufficiently qualified, not only for that initial sale but also considering the lifetime value of the customer.

But perhaps those descriptions are still confusing. How about you step into our virtual reality space to really get your arms around this definition:

If you want a little help identifying if Revenue Operations would be a fit for your organization, hop on over to our Sales and Systems Assessment to get right-sized for RevOps.