Departmental silos can create big issues for software as a service (SaaS) businesses. And when the disconnect impacts revenue, it can be a roadblock to scaling.
In response, SaaS businesses have begun leveraging and transforming their technology to reduce departmental silos and the poor customer experiences they can generate. The result is called revenue operations, or RevOps.
What is revenue operations?
RevOps is a method of aligning your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive full accountability across the entire customer journey.
It’s easiest to imagine RevOps as a team or director with a bird’s-eye view of how these different departments interact with one another, share and use data, and most importantly, affect the entire customer lifecycle.
Gone are the days when departments handed off leads and customers between one another. Today’s SaaS buyers conduct their own research, make informed purchases, and expect their user experience to match what they learned before buying.
As a result, customer centricity and an all-hands-on-deck approach for the entire lifecycle are critical.
RevOps puts the customer experience—from beginning to end—at the center of goal and decision making. It takes a holistic approach to revenue-generating departmental leadership. As a result, RevOps enable SaaS businesses to scale and achieve long-term growth.
But where did it come from?
The rise of RevOps
A few years ago, RevOps wasn’t on anyone’s radar. Now it’s a fast-growing job title on LinkedIn and a conference theme for OpsStarsTM.
What gives?
SaaS businesses have discovered that aligning the revenue engines of marketing, sales, and customer success made them more profitable. Up to 34% more profitable in fact, according to one study by SiriusDecisions under Forrester.
Disconnect between these departments and their processes has long been a pain point of scaling businesses. In the case of SaaS, using data, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation to bridge the gap is a no-brainer. It helps businesses reach today’s customer expectations and greatly reduces inefficiencies brought on by fragmented data and manual operational tasks.
All of this adds up to 19% faster growth and 15% more profits, according to SiriusDecisions’ research.
Why more SaaS businesses should pay attention
If increased growth, profits, and scalability aren’t reasons enough, there are plenty of other benefits for SaaS businesses to consider. RevOps accomplishes the following.
1. Reduces customer friction.
Each department uses its own platforms, from marketing automation to CRM. This can create friction as the customer transitions from marketing to sales to customer success. Reducing that friction requires seamless data sharing across all departments, or a single customer view (SCV).
With the holistic approach of RevOps, the goal is an aligned customer experience before, during, and after purchase.
More than ever, customers expect that what they see is what they get—particularly thanks to easy access to reviews, demos, case studies, and more.
When so many services today are just a finger-tap away, the expectation is SaaS businesses will deliver a consistent experience throughout the customer journey.
2. Aligns goals across departments.
Often, the members of diverse departments of a SaaS team don’t have an understanding of the revenue generated by their individual efforts, nor do they have goals that can easily be linked to revenue outcomes. It’s hard to feel like part of a business’s success when you can’t see how your efforts fit in to the big picture.
RevOps aims to reduce these barriers and make efforts and results clearer for everyone. Shared goals across departments means more working together, more sharing data, and more efficiency.
Delivering a consistently positive customer experience before and after purchase requires seamless alignment.
Data-driven collaboration through RevOps makes this possible.
3. Synthesizes business metrics.
Many SaaS businesses pay close attention to metrics like customer satisfaction, but fail to align these meaningfully with their revenue metrics. This is because sharing all that data across departments can be tedious.
A RevOps team or director develops a central hub of information that allows for collective and strategic decision making and go-to-market strategizing. As a result, departments can all see not only:
- acquisitions
- churn rate
- customer satisfaction
- customer acquisition cost, and
- customer lifetime value
but also things like:
- net new revenue
- gross profit
- monthly and annual recurring revenue, and
- cash collections.
This more holistic view—which takes into account both customer and financial metrics—is what ultimately makes unification so profitable.
To achieve this, a financial system of record should be a part of the RevOps team’s technology. A financial system of record can act as a single source of truth (SSOT) that unifies the data used by departments to create a complete RevOps stack.
4. Unifies and streamlines department operations.
A benefit of a holistic RevOps stack is it increases transparency and accountability. This reduces miscommunication between departments.
All the little loose ends that need tying up—such as a customer who has reached out for help during checkout—can be sighted easily with a bird’s-eye view. Then, these loose ends can be handled or delegated by RevOps instead of sitting around while everyone wonders who’s responsible for taking care of them.
Reducing operational inefficiencies leads to increased revenue. And as processes are optimized, that revenue becomes more predictable.
Combined with the people and data in your revenue-generating departments, the processes dissolve silos and create the SCV your business needs to secure future growth and satisfied customers receptive to upsells.
Enhance the customer experience with unified data
SaaS businesses give customers great, frictionless experiences by reframing the customer lifecycle as a unified journey that starts well before purchase and extending well after.
When every employee has access to the customer information, the customer doesn’t feel like they’re being shuffled between team members for every interaction. To achieve this, an SSOT for both customer and financial information is needed.
An adaptive billing platform like Stax Bill provides a tight integration between a business’s financial technology components.
As the record of truth for account receivables, the billing engine is vital to customer journey management.
An agile billing system consolidates revenue details for:
- customer service
- contract management
- sales
- quotation systems, and
- entitlement administration.
A robust recurring billing platform also brings a competitive advantage with the ability to be flexible on pricing changes without having to invest in fintech development cycles. Additionally, the insights provided by your billing engine form an integral component of your revenue operations, unlocking the ability for businesses to scale efficiently and stay flexible for whatever the future holds.
