What’s the first thing anyone does when they want to lose weight? 

They get on a weighing scale and take note of their present weight, and then set goals linked to how much weight they plan to lose on a monthly basis. Then they choose a workout routine and keep measuring their progress until they reach their desired weight. 

What do you do when you want to set-up a brand new home? You take stock of what you’ve already got and then make a list of everything you’ll need to go out and buy. Some people might stagger their purchases over a few months. 

The point is, when you are working towards any goal, taking stock of your current position, measuring and goal-setting are pretty much standard moves. 

It's the same with your revenue goals. You need to take stock, measure and set targets. 
‍

What is RevOps?

RevOps is a combination of Revenue Operations and Revenue Management. It is an approach to optimizing revenue streams through the integration of sales, marketing, customer service and customer success teams. The goal of RevOps is to maximize revenue growth.

As a process, RevOps involves optimizing and managing revenue streams from a holistic perspective, incorporating the activities and processes of not just your sales team, but also marketing, and customer service teams. RevOps also works to optimize the customer journey and reduce customer churn with the goal of revenue growth.

Why should sales leaders care about revenue operations?

The most significant benefits of RevOps are:

• A better understanding of customer behavior
• Identifying opportunities for growth
• Optimizing revenue streams

How does RevOps achieve any of this? Well, by leveraging data and insights from multiple sources, also known as revenue intelligence. 

RevOps encourages companies to eliminate silos and take a holistic view of revenue. It allows your sales team — and your colleagues in marketing and product teams — to gain a better understanding of their customers. You can even appoint a RevOps team that has a few employees from sales, marketing, product, customer service and customer success teams.

All these departments should be part of the revenue operations team because you are all working towards the common goal of revenue growth. All teams benefit. By implementing revenue operations, it's not just your sales team that will get ideas on how to sell better. Your product team gets an idea of which features customers are likely to be more revenue-generating (or which features will be in greater demand). Your marketing team too benefits from pointed insights on where and how to communicate with customers.

Your sales team gets to focus their efforts on the most promising leads and opportunities. This helps your reps to reduce wasted time and effort, which means you will be able to see an improvement in overall sales productivity. In addition, customer behavior insights give your reps ideas on when a given sales move will work — they’ll have a better idea about when to upsell, cross-sell or bundle products, and when to offer a discount.

Let’s talk about revenue intelligence 

At its core, RevOps is about using data and insights to drive business decisions and optimize revenue streams. This includes leveraging data and analytics to identify trends, uncover opportunities, and inform marketing and sales strategies. It also involves leveraging customer data to improve customer experience and inform product development and pricing. All of this is good for your sales team. An appropriately priced product is easier to sell, right? 

As you might have gathered, the key to success with RevOps is understanding how to leverage data such that you get insights from it that drive revenue growth. Your data comes from information that customers put into feedback forms and the kind they give to your sales teams (all those sales objections are feedback, really). You don't just need to gather the data, however. You need to also analyze it to find out how you can scale up your revenue.

Revenue intelligence is not just the data. It is the data, technology, and processes used to gain insights and make decisions that contribute to revenue growth.

Without revenue intelligence, it can be difficult for teams to make informed decisions on how to scale up revenue. For example, without the right data, the sales teams may be unable to work their pitches around customer problems. Revenue intelligence provides the insights needed to make strategic decisions, manage operations, and drive results. By looking at past data and making connections, you build a degree of predictability that X move will yield Y result. 

Key revenue intelligence metrics for RevOps 

If you intend to roll out RevOps in your company or specifically for your sales team, it is important to have a clear understanding of the key metrics that are used to measure success. These are:

• Revenue per lead: The amount of revenue generated by each lead.
• Conversion rate: The percentage of leads that are converted into sales.
• Customer lifetime value (LTV): The total amount of revenue generated by a customer over their lifetime.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The amount of money spent to acquire a new customer.
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): The percentage of customers who are satisfied with their experience.
• Customer retention rate (CRR): The percentage of customers who remain loyal to the organization over time.

These metrics can help organizations understand the performance of their RevOps efforts and identify areas for improvement.

You've already got RevOps and revenue intelligence underway, to some extent

If you are measuring sales productivity, you already have some revenue intelligence and you are already practicing RevOps.  Some KPIs or sales productivity metrics that directly tie in with RevOps include:

• Lead conversion rate: The percentage of leads that are converted into sales.
• Revenue per sale: The amount of revenue generated per sale.
• Revenue per hour: The amount of revenue generated per hour of sales effort.
• Sales cycle length: The average length of time between a lead being generated and a sale being made.
• Close rate: The percentage of leads that are closed as sales.

By tracking these metrics, organizations can better understand the performance of their sales teams and identify areas for improvement.

Increasing sales efficiency as part of RevOps

Your sales team's efficiency is a crucial factor in the success of RevOps. Sales efficiency is a metric tha measures the amount of time and effort required to generate a sale. It is important to track sales efficiency to ensure that sales teams are focusing their efforts on the most promising leads and opportunities. Isn't that also why you qualify and prioritize leads?

So how can you improve sales efficiency?

• Automate sales operations to reduce admin load and create more time for selling.
• Streamline sales operations to reduce the amount of time and effort required to generate a sale.
• Leverage sales data to identify opportunities for improvement and increase sales efficiency.
• Add new tools to your tech stack to achieve the above, that is, automate processes, streamline tasks, measure in real-time, and increase sales efficiency.

Improving sales forecasting as part of creating revenue intelligence for RevOps

Sales forecasting and revenue forecasting are important components of RevOps. Projections tell you what to expect if you continue on your current trajectory. That's why forecasting is important in RevOps, because it tells you if you're not going to make it to your revenue goals. This advance insight allows you to correct your course, ramp up efforts, or modify your sales strategy. Moreover, if you have revenue intelligence and sales performance data, its easy to build some degree of predictability. 

How a sales team can increase revenue with revenue intelligence and RevOps

Product teams use RevOps to find out which features or solutions to prioritize or add to the product roadmap. Marketing teams might find out that they are likely to target premium customers if they use a specific platform.

How can the sales team use revenue intelligence and RevOps?

Step 1: 

Fish out all your historical data and insights and get it all in one place. 

Step 2: 

Get together your projections and goals. Identify how much you need to scale up revenue. What is the gap between projected sales revenue and targetted sales revenue?

Step 3: 

Add your customer insights to this.

• Here's an example: In your feedback forms (or in sales conversations) customers are saying that they wouldn't mind paying an additional $10 per-user-per-month for your SaaS product subscription if they could just get the team to learn how to use the solution faster and more fully. 

Now you know that you can nearly double your revenue if a $10 discount per user is sustainable. 

• Another insight that might emerge is that companies will be willing to extend subscriptions to the whole team (which represents 5x your current volume) if you priced at just $5 less on a price of $50 per-user-per-month.

Now you know that you can multiply revenue by nearly 5x if a $5 discount per user is sustainable. 

• RevOps-related customer insights might be centered around prospect sentiments. Maybe you go to prospects selling your amazing AI-powered predictive analytics, but feedback forms say that the market is seeking a solution that helps reduce go-to-market lead time. 

"But our AI-powered predictive analytics does exactly that," you scream inwardly. You're right, of course, and RevOps practices have just told you how to word your sales pitch going ahead.

Now you know you’re pitching faster-go-to-market and not AI-powered predictive analytics. 

• Another typical situation to picture: Perhaps your sales team has been selling your easy-to-use accounting software to accountings (du-uh!). However, accountants are quite fine with the complicated software they've been using for years. No, its the execs who need to file and approve expenses, and have on-the-go access to key company figures that would actually see value in your software. Revenue intelligence can uncover the fact that there's a riper, more eager target audience to pursue.

Now you know to get hold of executives rather than accountants. 

Step 4: 

Make modifications based on the insights and the gap between where you are and the goals you have your eye on. This might include:

• Optimizing pricing
• Phrasing your sales pitch differently
• Targeting a different type of user
• Moving in on new target segments

RevOps is easy with your intelligent Wingman

Since RevOps relies so heavily on revenue intelligence, Wingman’s conversation intelligence is a must-have tool in your sales tech stack. 

Insight mining

Intelligent recordings and post-call summaries and annotated transcripts makes insight mining much easier. You also get ready dashboards of key sales metrics like call volume and call success. 

Wingman delivers intelligent insights from sales conversations and also consolidates info from other customer interaction business platforms like CRM and email. This unified view can give you insights into why your customer is doing business with you (or not) and why they’re not doing more business with you. All those competitor mentions and other objections that your sales team faces are important data points for revenue intelligence. 

You can also do your bit to eliminate silos that stand in the way of a holistic approach to revenue growth, by sharing Wingman’s call recordings and insights with other departments.

Automation 

Since RevOps is also about maximizing sales efficiency by automating parts of the sales process, Wingman is just what sales teams need. Conveniences like pre-call customer intel and automated post-call checklists and emails ease workflow and reduce the admin load on sales teams so that they can fit more sales calls into their day. 

Moreover, real-time, contextual in-call prompts help sales reps to simply make better sales arguments on call. 

Support enablement 

Sales managers improve sales efficiency with ease because you can do quicker sales call recording reviews using Wingman’s 2x speed. You also get Slack alerts on at-risk deals so that your sales team never misses out on any opportunities. 

Boost your sales revenue with Wingman! Try a free demo today.