A Rev Ops Run Down with Dr. Debbie Qaqish

Overview

In this presentation, Debbie explains what Rev Ops are, why they are so important now, and how the market is responding.

Speaker

Debbie Qaqish is Principal and Chief Strategy Officer at the Pedowitz group, a management consulting group that helps sales, marketing and IT executives drive more revenue. Debbie is a public speaker and published author. 

Quotes

“It is not just about sales it is about collaborating or integrating sales, marketing and customer success operations into a single organization or a single entity it’s an end-to-end business process for driving predictable revenue through that functional alignment of all the customer facing elements of the organization.” 

“We did find that those companies who rated themselves far above on revenue goals had best in class CX and we also found that companies that are fully aligned 41% have best in class customer experience. So, it tells you that number one if you’re going to have successful customer experience, you have to have the alignment and having that alignment helps you drive the revenue” 

Key Points

1. Rev Ops just is about collaborating or integrating sales, marketing, and customer success operations into a single organization
2. How critical the alignment of customer facing functions are
3. The difference Rev Ops enabled organizations have in the market

Transcript

Hello, everybody. I’m Dr. Debbie Qaqish. And welcome to this very quick presentation, the rise of the Rev Ops organization.

Now what I think is so funny is I chose to talk about Rev Ops because I think it’s such an incredibly hot topic right now. And I just published a book, but the book was about marketing operations. And they originally wanted me to talk about marketing ops, but I said, no, no, we need to talk about Rev Ops because it is hotter than hot.

So, a quick agenda. Here’s what we’ll be covering. I’ll answer the question: what is Rev Ops? I’ll answer the question: why now? I’ll answer the question. How is the market responding? And then I’ll provide some next steps.

Now, we are so excited at the Pedowitz group because we just published a very unique report about revenue operations. The report is answered by marketing people, salespeople and also the customer success organization, taking a look at Rev Ops as an entirety so this wealth of information and I’ll be sharing a lot of those details with you during these quick presentations.

But let’s answer the question: what is Rev Ops? The first thing you’ll see on this page is this graphic that I have on the right so you can see that Rev Ops is comprised of sales operations, marketing operations, and customer success operations. It is not just about sales it is about collaborating or integrating sales, marketing and customer success operations into a single organization or a single entity is an end to end business process for driving predictable revenue through again that functional alignment of all the customer facing elements of the organization. So, when we work with organizations that have a successful revenue operations team or are looking to build one, here is what we typically see. The need for Rev Ops is driven 100% by the need to have one view of the customer that is shared and facilitated across all the customer facing functions of the organization. It definitely improves the efficiency across the revenue process. And it helps drive predictable revenue growth which is what every CXO wants to see.

So why now? Why are we talking about Rev Ops now? And it’s interesting because many of you listening to this probably will not be able to execute an ultimate Rev Ops organization because reorganizing taking marketing ops, sales ops and Customer Success ops, and pulling those out under a single leader is probably going to be too heavy of a lift for many organizations. However, what’s driving this is this need to have revenue now being viewed as a team sport? We live in a world where tech profusion of digital transformation is rampant and changing more and more every day. We see the customer is in control. And if you can’t have the right kind of conversation with the customer in a digital world, you will lose. We also see more of a focus on taking an account or holistic approach, especially in the world of b2b selling.

And again, at a board level and executive level, and the shareholder value level. They want predictable revenue growth. So, when we put all of that together, we’re now looking at revenue as a team sport and what drives that is a functional Rev ops organization. So now I’d like to share with you some of the key findings from our report and again, you can visit Pedowitz group.com. This report is right on our homepage. And again, it was answered by marketing, sales and also Customer Success professionals. So, this is really the first statistic that is very interesting to me.

Only 29% of the people in the survey had fully aligned around sales, marketing customer experience teams, yet a whopping 69% said, Yeah, we’re working toward that alignment because we understand just how important it is. These respondents indicated that misalignment was a huge cost factor and drain on their business. They indicated 55% indicated because they’re not aligned, they’re missing revenue opportunities because they’re not aligned. 59% said they’re wasting time and 59% said it is resulting in poor customer experience.

So that alignment between the customer facing functions is absolutely critical. Another area that was really interesting that we found from the survey respondents was the idea of maximizing revenue opportunities. And any CXO worth their salt. This is going to become very, very important. So, 61% of our respondents said that they do have insight into data, especially from finance that helps them make better decisions. However, that number goes up exponentially for all of the rev ops enabled enterprises that responded to the survey. 78% of fully aligned teams said they have insight 75% of teams that are overachieving on their revenue goals said they had alignment and a 76% who rated themselves as best in class for customer experience, said they had the data and the insight.

So again, that collaboration, having that data and having that insight really makes an impact on revenue opportunities. Another area that we explored with the respondents was customer experience and we all know how critical that is yet only 18% of companies rated their customer experience as excellent or best in class. However, we did find that those companies who rated themselves far above on revenue goals had best in class CX and we also found that companies that are fully aligned 41% have best in class customer experience.

So, it tells you that number one if you’re going to have successful customer experience, you have to have the alignment and having that alignment helps you drive the revenue. Data and technology. This is one of those statistics that just absolutely floored me when I saw it in the report. Only 10% of respondents that we talked to said that they rated optimization of technology as excellent. Only 10%, we are drowning in technology and marketing sales and also in the Customer Success organizations. Yet only 10% said they have optimized anything about their Mahr tech stack, however, and this is a stunning number. For Rev Ops enabled enterprises that figure jumps to 33%. Think about the impact on your organization. Think about the impact on your business. If you could take optimization of technology from 10% to 33%. How much of an impact that would have on your organization?

So again, part of that value of a Rev Ops organization is maximizing, optimizing what you have already invested in and finally, employee experience. Now let’s equate this to talent and if you’re listening to this very short presentation, you’re probably in marketing sales or customer success. And we all know there is an absolute war on talent right now. And there is a huge gap between how much the market needs and how much is actually available out there. So, it was very interesting. That people who were not Rev Ops enabled had a different set of challenges than the Rev Ops organizations did. For the non-Rev Ops oriented organizations, they said their number one constraints were budget at 38%. Poor employee experience at 33% and lack of understanding of new skills required was 32%. On the other hand, for all of the rev ops enabled enterprises, their number one challenge was the flexibility of having remote office employees. So that is quite the dichotomy there between those rev ops enabled organizations and those that are not rev ops organizations, and we all know that this is the year of employee experience. We know that having happy, healthy, vibrant employees is going to help us make or break our businesses.

So that was very quick through some of the highlights from the report. Again, you can visit Pedowitz group.com and download your own copy. But here’s what I would advise for next steps number one, review the need for Rev Ops in your organization. Do you really need a rev ops structure in your organization? And again, if the answer is yes, then you want to consider three different approaches.

Number one, you can improve the collaboration that’s already taking place between marketing sales and the customer success organizations. I will tell you that I am not a fan of this approach. Because this has been tried for years and years and we don’t seem to be making any progress and improving that collaboration and making a substantial impact on the business. My first recommendation to organizations is to take a look at building a center of excellence, a Rev Ops Center of Excellence. This is a dedicated effort does not require you to reorganize where these operations teams actually live, but allows you to put into place a team of high functioning experts under a common business objective, so that you can drive to getting that one view of the customer so that you can drive to getting that data and insights and so that you can drive maximizing and optimizing the value of the investments that you have in technology.

And of course, the third way is to just completely reorganize your business. I see this more in smaller, more agile companies. They actually have the ability because they’re small and they don’t have a lot of, you know, legacy, ways of thinking and serving the customer. It’s just easier for them. And so they’ll actually create a dedicated Rev Ops organization. So those are the three steps.

I hope the last 10 minutes have been insightful and informative for you. We’d love to have you download our report called Rev Ops difference where we interviewed marketing sales and customer success leaders to talk about the world of Rev Ops.

So again, thank you for spending the time with me, and we’ll see you next time.

Thanks, everybody.