Revenue Operations and Sales Operations are often used interchangeably – but they shouldn’t be. In this post, we look at the key differences, benefits, and functions of each, and suggest some ways to choose the best approach for your business.
The role of Revenue Operations is to drive efficiency across the entire revenue workforce to achieve predictable revenue growth – moving beyond the narrow and limiting sales-only focus of the past. RevOps looks beyond Sales to teams like Marketing and Customer Experience and aligns them with a united goal. And the data backs up the effectiveness of this approach – research from SiriusDecisions shows that B2B companies that align their revenue structure grow 15 percent faster and are 34 percent more profitable than those that don’t employ revenue operations.
It may come as no surprise, therefore, that forward-thinking companies are turning to a RevOps approach – so much so that LinkedIn data reveals that Revenue Operations titles rose by 300% in the last two years.
What’s the reason for this rise in Revenue Operations? The way consumers behave has changed fundamentally. This means that every department — Sales, Marketing, Customer Experience, and Account Management — must be on one accord throughout the entire funnel if a company wants to compete and succeed.
Among other things, RevOps delivers in four key areas of responsibility:
Operations Management
Revenue operations work across micro and macro levels in the organization to create strategic business objectives. This ensures that every outcome aligns with the organization’s needs and every part of the organization works in tandem.
Some responsibilities include:
Enablement
Sales enablement focuses on empowering a Sales team to sell efficiently. Unlike Sales Operations, RevOps extends enablement practices to other departments, like Marketing and Customer Experience. Each enablement practice has a significant impact on the whole organization and some responsibilities include:
Insights
The insights team usually includes a business analyst and database developer. Their responsibility is to mine available metrics to fuel the organization to make data-driven decisions that have the biggest impact on revenue.
A few other responsibilities include:
Tools
The implementation and maintenance of software across all revenue-generating teams is a key function of Revenue Operations. An example of roles within this area includes software developers and systems administrators.
Some of their tasks include:
By comparison, Sales Operations is typically employed to mitigate friction in the sales process only. Its aim is to help streamline operations and drive Reps to success. Typically, Sales Operations oversee the sales pipeline and analyze key metrics to get better insights into overall sales performance.
At a high level, anything that helps the sales team achieve growth falls under the responsibilities of Sales Operations. Here’s a breakdown of the key functions within a Sales Operations team:
Strategy
Sales Operations usually form part of a larger reporting unit that can provide insights into essential areas. These may include:
Operations
Sales Ops also perform administrative tasks that help sales reps work more efficiently. Some of these tasks include:
Process and Performance
To help improve sales performance, Sales Operations may help to simplify processes and accelerate the sales cycle. This is where the number-crunching abilities of Sales Ops analysts have the most significant impact.
Deciding on a particular strategy can be tricky. But in 2022, smart leaders are looking to Revenue Performance Operations as the best strategy to grow their businesses. A holistic view of revenue roadblocks, united goals across the organization, and aligned, efficient teams just makes sense – rather than the old way of treating each department as separate entities with different goals.
This is especially true If you’re a SaaS/subscription company. Keeping customers satisfied throughout their full lifecycle is a necessity – not a nice-to-have.
Interested in learning more about Revenue Operations? We wrote a whole series breaking down everything you need to know. Check out part I here.
