RevTalks, Episode 8: The RevOps playbook for revenue efficiency

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Introduction

Linda Su: It's clear we need to think about the buyer journey more holistically and build trust with buyers by capitalizing on those perfectly timed moments throughout their journey. At the same time, alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success is extremely important. So how do you do that?

How do you adapt your internal processes to center around delivering customer value across their entire life cycle? One function that helps you do that is revenue operations. And I couldn't think of a better person to guide us through this than Eddie Reynolds, founder and CEO of strategic RevOps consulting firm, Union Square Consulting.

Welcome and Introduction

Eddie Reynolds: Welcome, everyone. I'm Eddie Reynolds, the founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting. Today, I want to talk about how revenue operations can help build a more efficient revenue engine to deliver more customer value and do it more profitably.

What I wanted to talk to you about today, coming off this discussion about the buyer journey, is how the experience is as important as the product, and how that experience is getting worse every year, and how we can make it better. Thank you. I want to share with you a playbook for how revenue operations can build a more efficient revenue engine to deliver more customer value and do it more profitably.

Customer Expectations vs. Reality

So, I want to start by just asking, what is it that we want as customers? When we think about the experience we have with the vendors we work with, when we come to an event like this and engage with other marketing content, we want to be educated on ways to do our jobs better and achieve our organization’s goals. When we engage with salespeople as we're 70 percent of the way through that process, we want them to understand our business, who we are, what we do, how they can help us, and engage us as we evaluate that product or service to reach a decision on whether or not it can help our company.

Then, when we finally sign that contract and start working with customer success, we want them to help drive the success of the platform, product, or service we've invested in. But what are we getting today? Most of the time, when we engage with our vendors, we go to see marketing content and it's gated. We're worried that as soon as we share our email address, we're going to get a hundred emails from marketing and dozens of calls from SDRs. We go through the sales assembly line, where we're handed off from the SDR to the AE, to the SE, to the CSM, constantly repeating ourselves, re-explaining who we are, what our company does, and what we're trying to achieve with the platform, with these broken handoffs.

Challenges in Delivering Customer Value Efficiently

So how do we deliver more value to our customers when we have less budget? We don't have unlimited resources. How do we deliver a better customer experience and spend less money? I think this is the challenge most companies face today. And this is the challenge most revenue operations organizations are trying their best to solve.

Transition from Growth-at-All-Costs to Revenue Efficiency

Let's first look at where we've been. We're coming off the growth-at-all-costs phase of the industry, where the focus was on finding ways to grow in any and every way possible. It was expensive, unprofitable, and unsustainable. Yet, while we were spending all this money, our customer experience got worse. We built sales, marketing, and CS practices that were siloed, not repeatable, and not predictable for the business or our customers in terms of the experience they could expect. Now, we're entering a new era, an era of revenue efficiency, where we start with customer value and find ways to deliver it profitably by building repeatable, predictable, scalable processes that unite and align sales, marketing, and customer success.

The Role of RevOps

So who does this? Obviously, it's RevOps. We're looking at who has the time and expertise to take on this challenge. Leadership and frontline sales, marketing, and CS are busy trying to attract, retain, and grow customers. RevOps is the team that has the time to sit down and fix these processes one step at a time. It's why RevOps has been the number one most in-demand, high-growth job on LinkedIn. Yet, RevOps often cannot solve these problems. Why? From what we've seen talking to so many RevOps professionals and the work that we do ourselves, RevOps is often treated as systems admin. We react to fire drills all day, every day, with a flood of ad hoc requests coming in. There's never any time to do strategic work, to actually think about the customer value we want to deliver and build an engine to deliver that.

Strategic RevOps Approach

Strategic RevOps is a different approach. It starts with strategic planning, focusing on the customer journey, finding ways to deliver more value profitably by prioritizing the most important work, and being proactive in building the infrastructure to deliver a better customer experience. This is how we build efficient revenue engines and deliver that experience. But how do we break this enormous concept down? I want to share some very tangible examples.

Revenue Efficiency Pyramid

We start by thinking about the main four pillars of revenue. We want to align sales, marketing, and customer success, but for the purpose of this presentation, I want to break it down. Obviously, we want to convert more inbound leads, convert more outbound prospects, convert more of our qualified sales pipeline into actual revenue, and then retain and grow our customers.

If we think about the step-by-step process in each one of these pillars, we can break it down and find things that are not working well, find things that we can optimize to deliver more customer value step-by-step and do it more profitably, more repeatability, and more scalably.

Prioritization with the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid

It's not like we haven't thought about this before, right? We're all at this event trying to learn more ways to do this. There are tens of thousands of software products on the market that claim they can help us do this. We already have a list a mile long of things we want to improve in our revenue engine. So where do we start and how do we prioritize what we do in revenue operations and as a revenue team overall?

To help visualize this, my team has come up with the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid to show an order of operations for how we prioritize these things. Over the years, we've met revenue teams that don't have the fundamentals in place. One of the challenges of coming to an event like this is seeing amazing things, getting excited about concepts, and wanting to implement them immediately. But, as we've discussed, AI doesn't work if you don't have a strong foundation of reliable and accurate data.

Laying the Foundation

The fundamentals come down to laying the critical foundation for the team to execute the basics of the go-to-market motion. I'm going to go into more details and examples of that. If we think about our sales process, for example, do we have the strategy, process, and technology in place for our sales reps to execute effectively? Once we have that foundation, how do we drive team adoption and get them to take the necessary actions for our go-to-market process?

Optimizing and Scaling

Once the team is executing the process and we have reliable data, we can start to optimize the process, look at what's working and what's not, analyze it, and find more efficient ways to execute. Many organizations try to implement advanced tools without having these foundations in place. Then, we go into the top of the pyramid: automation, AI, and advanced revenue operations practices. These are the exciting things we see at events like this and want to implement, but without the foundation, we can't take full advantage of these tools or new processes.

Tangible Examples

To drive this home, I want to share two specific examples. Let's start with the sales process. For me, the sales process is always the first place to look in a revenue organization. I don't want to spend time, resources, and money filling the top of the funnel if we're losing deals in the middle of the sales cycle. Look at the base fundamentals: Are we selling to the right people? Do we have a clear understanding of our ICP and buyer personas? Do we have a sales process mapped out and built into our CRM?

We worked with Techstars about a year ago. The CRO at Techstars brought us in on day one, and he had previously been a sales leader at HubSpot. He came in thinking they needed to build more pipeline. We started by asking about their sales and prospecting processes. They had a firm grip on their ICP and buyer personas but were casting too wide a net. We did a capacity plan to determine how many accounts a rep could cover, then assigned specific territories with a tight focus on the best accounts and contacts.

By segmenting these lists, the reps could focus on one type of account and persona at a time. This alone significantly increased their pipeline generation in the first six months without climbing further up the pyramid. Once the foundation was in place, we built reports and dashboards for daily review, created specific cadences, and reviewed metrics for data-driven coaching.

Revenue Operations Roadmap

So, how do we turn this into an action plan? We use a Revenue Operations Roadmap. This helps prioritize operational improvements aligned with company objectives and the top goals of the revenue team. We align with executive and revenue leaders to set clear initiatives, helping us prioritize resources and tackle important tasks.

 What I want to emphasize is having a single document summarizing everything the revenue team is working on for the year, aligned with company and revenue objectives. This includes not just the KPIs we're looking to hit but also the projects we need to work on to achieve those KPIs. It's broken down into phases, focusing on one priority project at a time.