Revenue operations has garnered much attention as a way to overcome challenges as B2B organisations tend to look to operations teams to harness and optimise resources.
Organisations would benefit from elevating and empowering operations teams, delivering a revenue operations' capability that integrates and unifies plans, processes, data, technology, and talent across the revenue ecosystem.
This not only drives a better customer experience but also brings an orderly approach to predicting and responding to today’s dynamic market environment.
Revenue operations requires new capabilities, roles, processes, and a change-agent mindset from operations leaders — all of which can propagate concerns, threats, myths, and misconceptions about what revenue operations is and what it should be responsible for.
The nine myths in revenue operations include:
- It’s a land grab.
- It’s a cost-reduction exercise.
- It kills agility.
- It’s a miracle cure.
- It’s omniscient.
- Leaders are superheroes.
- It kills specialisation.
- It requires headcount centralisation.
- It’s short-term-focused.
Reality number one: revenue operations structures are tailored
Embedded in several of these myths is a fear that operational headcount centralisation tips the power of control across the revenue ecosystem.
Successful revenue operation organisational structures span everything from a completely decentralised model to a structurally unified centralised operations structure.
The ideal for many organisations may be a hybrid approach through a CoE (center of excellence) for select responsibilities such as data, analytics, and technology, for example.
In this structure, operations functions — marketing operations, sales operations, and customer success operations — all work with the shared CoE for their respective data/technology requirements.
Regardless of the organisational structure, the goal of revenue operations is to reap the benefits of alignment and integration across the revenue ecosystem to maximise customer value and accelerate growth.
Combining all ops functions into one without creating new capabilities, responsibilities, processes, or a change-agent mindset loses the big picture.
Reality number two: revenue operations is a strategic partnership
Revenue operations--coordinating efforts among sales, marketing, and customer operations--forms a strategic partnership that best supports the C-suite.
Operations teams enable growth and exceptional customer experiences by optimising resources.
To deliver on this vision, marketing operations, sales operations, and customer operations need to break down silos and integrate their actions.
This partnership across operations personnel allows unified insights to be fed to executives at a critical time during strategic planning, aligns planning processes across the organisation so that individual functions are working in a cohesive fashion, and project-manages the execution and adaptability of plans in an agile fashion when markets change.
Through this unified revenue operations capability, the C-suite, especially the CEO and finance executive, empower the organisation to maximise its commercial potential and optimise resources, reducing duplication, overlap, and rework.
First published in Forrester.
