What the Funnel is RevOps?
It’s been nearly a decade since our industry said out with the funnel, in with the flywheel. Now “RevOps” is the boardroom buzzword of the day. Some call it a glorified term for SalesOps while others hire CROs (Chief Revenue Officers) and build RevOps teams. All with the hopes of finally achieving revenue bliss. So what the heck is it?
To answer that, we’ve put together a 5-part blog series covering RevOps basics and how agile technology can help future proof financial institutions.
Revenue Operations and The New World
According to Forbes, RevOps is “the means of maximizing revenue potential for a business by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success teams into a unified revenue-generation engine.”
That’s right, y’all. The days of short-term sales tactics and siloed data are over. That’s the Old World. The New World is unified. The New World is collaborative. The New World says customer-centric = revenue-centric.
Enter: HubSpot. A key leader in this global transformation. As a platinum HubSpot partner for HubSpot’s Solutions Partner Program, we’ve learned first-hand how HubSpot can help integrate data and bridge the gap between departments resulting in – drumroll – more revenue!
This matters because in the New World, customers expect positive digital experiences. Every touchpoint shapes their perception of your brand and their buying behavior.
Growing Pains is Not Just a TV Show
Growth is critical, obvi. But scaling a business comes with a few pesky byproducts:
1) More customers to support
2) More tools to manage
3) More touchpoints to maintain
For a start-up, the solution is usually to raise more money and hire more people. But as growth continues, friction ramps up. Often, it’s only when the friction between teams becomes unbearable that an operations specialist is brought in.
HubSpot calls this a “function-out” perspective – each customer-facing team is only focused on the portion of the CX they’re directly responsible for, and each operations professional supports their designated function. Instead, companies should adopt a “customer in” perspective where “all teams work in unison, informed by a holistic view of the customer, to deliver a unified experience.” But how?
Benefits of RevOps
Let’s return to the flywheel. Literally.
The flywheel, invented by James Watts, is an incredibly energy-efficient wheel. The amount of energy it stores depends on how fast it spins, the amount of friction it encounters, and its size. Think of it like the wheels on a train or a car. You can’t feel much when it’s going fast but if you’re going slow, you feel every bump in the road.
As a business model, the flywheel acts the same way. The speed of your flywheel increases when you add force and reduce friction. Force = things that “rev up” business such as marketing and paid media programs. Friction = things that slow down business like poor internal processes, lack of communication between teams, or misalignment between customers and employees.
How does RevOps speed up the flywheel?
- Reduces friction – Creating a centralized hub or a “single source of truth” everyone can access drastically reduces the number of messages asking “where is that thing?”
- Improves team collaboration – Eliminating patchwork point solutions in favor of a single platform creates more transparency and makes it easier to work together.
- Better predictions and forecasts – Unified data generates a more accurate prediction of revenue growth and minimizes growing pains.
- Increases customer retention – Improving processes at every stage of the customer journey creates consistent and enjoyable experiences leading to higher LTV.
“Remember, data isn’t the secret. The context the data provides allows all those smart people you’ve hired to make better decisions as your flywheel turns.” – Alison Elworthy, HubSpot
HubSpot: Agile Solutions for RevOps
I know. You want to know how to do that and what HubSpot’s got to do with it. (Cue Tina Turner.) Remember how I said this is the New World? HubSpot has created a customer-centric platform suite that lives in a place your whole team has access to: THE INTERNET.
What started as a leading CRM and email marketing platform has become a robust ecosystem of solutions for all the pain points of revenue growth.
In future posts we’ll dive deeper into each hub but for now, let me give you a quick tour of the supercharged spot of hubs.
HubSpot Marketing Hub – a comprehensive digital marketing solution that integrates Customer Relationship Management (CRM), email marketing, and campaign automation. It’s fully loaded and scalable. All of your marketing tools and data are at your fingertips so you can provide a personalized experience to each customer.
HubSpot Service Hub – a robust software package containing all the tools your service team needs to provide seamless, fast, delightful customer service. Connect all of your customer service data and channels in one CRM platform.
HubSpot Sales Hub – a component that allows businesses to manage, communicate and track leads. It helps the Sales team interact with clients without spending valuable time and resources inputting data or writing the same email every time.
HubSpot Operations Hub – HubSpot Operations Hub is a suite of tools within HubSpot’s CRM platform that operations teams can use to connect apps, sync and clean customer data, and automate processes. It’s the supercharger we’ve all been waiting for.
Interested but a bit overwhelmed? We’re here to help. From deciding which Hub is for you to migrating data from existing platforms, we can help you get started with or transition to HubSpot. Book a free call with Rory and he’ll give you the HubSpot scoop.
Either way, I can’t wait to show you around the world I get to play in everyday. Especially my two favorite things: automation and analytics.