10 Revenue Operations Best Practices to Maximize Growth

On the surface, it might seem like sales are the biggest driver of revenue growth. But just like one person on your team isn’t solely responsible for your business's success, neither is one department. Companies combining marketing, sales, and customer relations under one framework through Revenue Operations (RevOps) can align goals and practices to maximize revenue growth. 

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In fact, when implemented successfully, RevOps can lead to robust revenue streams that are far more predictable—and scalable.

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So, who should use a RevOps framework? 

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To be clear, any company with inaccurate or outdated data, unmet customer expectations, a need for greater transparency, or misaligned revenue targets would benefit.

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To leverage this at your company, follow these revenue operations best practices.

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1. Establish a RevOps Leader

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RevOps is, at its core, a unifying practice. It’s about finding the common threads that marketing, sales, customer experience, and other teams share and weaving them into a cohesive whole. The only way for the outcome to be greater than the sum of its parts is to put a leader in place to establish and communicate a singular vision.

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It’s absolutely critical that a company’s RevOps leader is not (and does not become) just another executive admin in a crowded field. They need actionable authority and experience in cross-team strategy execution.

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2. Create Cohesive Business Goals

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The first objective for leadership is to ensure the RevOps strategies and goals transcend departments. When designing for cross-departmental cohesion in revenue process and business strategy, consider:

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• Avoiding cosmetic, surface-level, or unrealistic targets
• Using meetings wisely and sparingly to avoid oversaturation
• Enabling and empowering cross-functional collaboration

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Effective RevOps goals are big enough for everyone to take seriously without pinning teams to unreasonable expectations. Similarly, meetings about them should happen often enough to foster fruitful discussions. And, at every turn, teams should be encouraged to work together and solve problems creatively.

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3. Manage Data for Effective Decision-Making

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The best business decisions are driven by rigorous analysis of good data. This implies that data needs to be clean and accurate to begin with. If your team doesn’t regularly scan shared databases for outdated information, then this is where the work begins. 

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From there, data can also be enriched. Data enrichment is augmenting client profiles and other critical datasets with third-party information and accurate projections.

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Through effective data management, decisions can be made with clarity and more seamlessly align with the business’s unified revenue goals. This is especially important for revenue teams, who depend on accurate data to achieve their targets.

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4. Implement the Right Technology

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Too often, businesses implement technology for technology’s sake, leading tech stacks to balloon out of control. A strong RevOps program isn’t necessarily one with the most tools and solutions; it’s one with the right combination of software.

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This leads to muddied decisions between bundled software suites and more bespoke solutions. Companies need to weigh the benefits of ecosystem friendliness against the implementation (and ongoing) costs to implement the right tech solutions. Additionally, leadership must contend with opportunity costs, system creep, and other related issues for teams integrating new systems.

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5. Build Cross-Functional Teams

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As noted above, cross-functional collaboration should be encouraged across all organizational teams, including sales and marketing teams. Businesses can design for cross-functionality by:

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• Establishing communication channels and embracing transparency
• Defining clear roles and responsibilities aligned with RevOps goals
• Providing software tools and platforms to support collaboration

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Put simply, the best way to keep teams aligned in their focus is to allow them to work together to share actionable insights.

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6. Map the Customer Journey

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Customer journeys, or detailed descriptions of the experience customers have, are among the best ways to understand what customers want—and what they don’t.

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To map this, detail exactly what resources your customer encountered and compare the results against other success stories. The elements shared between them are ones to emulate and emphasize across the board. 

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Understanding the customer journey can also help businesses identify areas where they may be overspending or wasting resources, leading to a more effective customer acquisition cost.

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7. Review Existing Strategies and Processes

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Consistent, critical reviews are necessary for RevOps and business operations, especially when optimizing the RevOps team structure. Firms need to assess whether goals are being met regularly and, if not, whether strategies are being executed correctly. This involves looking at individual processes and analyzing the sales cycle length, sales operations, and sales productivity, along with key performance indicators and metrics.

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By following this chain of events—processes to strategies, strategies to results, results to goals—teams can quickly identify where the weakness exists and how to adapt.

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The upshot of a robust assessment program is increased capacity for adjustments, both on-the-fly and long term. Businesses that understand where they are with respect to their goals are better equipped to make changes and improvements proactively (rather than staying in a reactive posture).

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8. Use Revenue Forecasting and Predictive Analytics

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RevOps teams need to be forward-thinking. To do that means engaging in revenue forecasting and predictive analysis, which are closely related:

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• Revenue forecasting: This is a focused methodology for projecting how much revenue your organization can expect, from what sources, and with differing levels of certainty for factors like retention, growth, and attrition.
• Predictive analytics: This is a more holistic practice that produces models and matrices that take revenue as one element alongside costs, client scenarios, third-party and environmental interactions, and more.

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These projections utilize historical data analysis to predict what the future could be like—but it’s up to a RevOps team’s execution to make the best outcomes a reality.

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9. Automate Processes for Efficiency

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According to one report, RevOps teams, including marketing operations, customer success operations, and sales operations teams, must prioritize operational efficiency in 2024 to weather projected budget trends, operational challenges, and other volatilities.

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As AI tools grow in sophistication and strategies, like product-led growth, reduce the need for bloated sales processes, RevOps is uniquely positioned to provide value. Marketing, sales, and customer relations teams can do more with less—especially when aided by AI and marketing automation platforms.

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10. Explore New Sales and Marketing Channels

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RevOps’ alignment of sales and customer engagement needs to be open to any and all sources of leads and customers. It should actively encourage sales and other team members to test the waters in channels they’re not already engaging. For example, a cold outreach campaign on LinkedIn could be the spark needed to engage a new customer base that wasn’t on marketing’s radar.

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What this amounts to, in practice, is sales enablement—empowering your salespeople to prospect, engage, and convert with training and support throughout the process. Companies can increase customer lifetime value and overall revenue by fostering collaboration between the sales team, customer success team, and revenue operations team.

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Optimize Your RevOps With Operatus

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Compartmentalizing sales, marketing, and customer support has led many companies to experience revenue loss and stagnation. These RevOps best practices eliminate these gaps between departments and ensure every team’s focus is the same: maximum growth.

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Here at Operatus, that’s our mission. We’re a team of RevOps specialists dedicated to accelerating growth by aligning companies under a single, unified banner—predictable revenue and healthy growth. 

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To that effect, we offer a suite of RevOps as a service solutions, including granular project management and broader data migration, and other consulting packages.

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Get in touch today to learn how we can help you!