What Is Revenue Operations ?

The business model for generating revenue growth has fundamentally changed in the 21st century. Traditional organizational structures for managing revenue growth are no longer adequate due to changes in technology, customer behavior, and business models.

Several key forces are driving this change:

• Customer experience is now the primary basis of competition. Digitally-enabled customers demand speed, agility, personalization, and omnichannel integration. This requires coordinating commercial processes across the enterprise to deliver a unified customer experience.
• Cloud/SaaS business models have increased the importance of customer lifetime value and equity. Sales, marketing, and customer teams must work together as one revenue team to grow these metrics.
• Critical commercial assets like data, technology, and digital infrastructure now represent the lion's share of growth investments and firm value. But these assets are often poorly measured, managed, and monetized across siloed sales, marketing, and service teams.
• Revenue growth depends on the velocity and visibility of customer information across the organization. Real-time visibility into customer engagement, seller effectiveness, pipeline health, and account health are essential to managing dynamic, digital revenue teams.
• Cross-functional teamwork is imperative for coordinating the 18+ strategic levers that drive revenue, profit, and firm value growth. No single leader or team controls all the levers.

Many B2B firms are moving towards a "Revenue Operations" model to align commercial teams, operations, processes, and systems around customer-centric goals. While terminology varies, the overarching focus is breaking down functional silos and managing the end-to-end customer journey holistically.

Benefits of Adopting Revenue Operations

Research shows that a unified Revenue Operations approach can accelerate growth by over 50% and contribute 5-10 extra points of bottom line profitability. Benefits include:

• Higher returns on investments in technology, data, and digital infrastructure that drive growth. These assets are often fragmented across functions today.
• Reduced revenue leakage and friction across the customer journey when managed as an integrated process.
• Tighter coordination across sales, marketing, and customer success avoids coverage gaps, wasted spend, and lost opportunities.
• Scalable adoption of technologies like 1:1 personalization and account-based marketing.

Revenue Operations has become a board-level priority because growth fuels value creation. It enables business model transitions to recurring revenue. It helps scale growth-stage businesses. It lets large enterprises better monetize underutilized commercial assets.

Implementing a Revenue Operations Model

The Revenue Operations model aligns around six core elements:

1. Unified Commercial Strategy - Integrate sales, marketing, and customer success under a common strategy and growth plan.

2. Cross-Functional Alignment - Break down functional silos that cause friction across the customer journey.

3. Data-Driven Decisions - Share data and insights across the revenue team to drive decisions.

4. Modernized Operations - Consolidate ops teams to provide scalable revenue support across the journey.

5. Adoption of Enabling Technology - Deploy tech stack to connect customer data across touchpoints.

6. Shared Customer & Company Goals - Incentivize around customer experience and lifecycle metrics beyond sales quotas.

Enablers:

• Expanded CXO roles like Chief Revenue Officer to oversee commercial strategy. Over 9000 CRO roles added recently.
• CEO leadership to align culture and operations around the customer versus functions.
• Development resources at the front-end and Customer Success at the back-end to support full lifecycle.

The Revenue Operations model detailed here provides a roadmap for CEOs, boards, and growth leaders to transform commercial operations in the 21st century. With the accelerating pace of change, adopting Revenue Operations has become an existential imperative for most B2B businesses today.