The role of RevOps in a product-led world

Revenue Growth Guide - May '23

Hello, friends!

Let it be known that it took an unexpected level of restraint not to say ‘May the 4th be with you’ as a greeting here.

Anyway, in the spirit of this letter’s PLG theme: Our CEO, Jen, is joining Scale VP’s Matt Amundson on May 11th to talk about Getting PLG Right!

If you want some deeper insights into how to balance your product-led growth, marketing, and other outbound activities, save your spot via the link above.

Okay–onward!

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Not too long ago, “RevOps” was the shiny new term everyone in the industry seemed to be talking about. CRO was the fastest-growing job title on LinkedIn (Head of RevOps still is), and there was a seemingly unending debate about whether RevOps was really something new or just a fancy term for sales operations.

These days, I think we can agree upon the fact that RevOps is indeed different from Sales Ops and that it plays an important role in helping companies drive sustainable revenue growth by identifying the work that will make the biggest impact and aligning teams on a strategy that prioritizes the customer journey.

But now, with more and more high-growth companies thinking about how to implement a product-led motion to help drive that sustainable revenue, where does that leave RevOps?

Today, let’s talk about RevOps’ role in a product-led organization and how to leverage RevOps capabilities to hit your growth goals.

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Streamlining Processes

One of the RevOps team’s key functions is to identify moments of friction throughout the customer journey. Whether it’s your reps struggling to find the right content to move a lead through to the next stage, or overly manual processes slowing the team down, it’s important to shine a light on what needs to be fixed so your revenue-generating teams can work more effectively.

Some examples:

• Automated lead scoring based on collected data

• Standardized customer onboarding

• Pipeline and contract management

• Revenue forecasting

• Reporting

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Providing User Insights

If you’ve ever been to one of our trainings or webinars, you’ve likely seen this image before:

Customer insights are the foundation of a successful product-led motion and your RevOps function should already be providing them. Even if you’re not product-led currently, you should have a full and clear picture of the customer journey from end to end.

Some of the ways RevOps helps provide that picture are:

• Customer journey mapping

• Product usage and cohort analysis

• Durability testing

  • Secret shopping (competitive analysis)

  • Customer feedback (calculating NPS scores)

  • Conversation intelligence (via platforms like Gong)

• Churn analysis

When you have the right data, it’s much easier to understand your users, predict their needs and behaviors, and create more personalized journeys to drive your growth.

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Revenue Architecture

When we (Go Nimbly) talk about RevOps Architecture, we’re talking about more than just building a revenue tech stack. Tools are, of course, a large part of it, but there’s a lot of brain work to be done before you actually start building anything.

Having a holistic view of the business and KPIs that represent the interests of every go-to-market function, RevOps is uniquely positioned to strategize and build robust, long-term solutions that directly align with the needs of the business.

In order to collect clean, consistent data, your systems need to be well integrated. If you want to streamline your processes, you also have to be able to manage change and communicate clearly across teams. Solid RevOps Architecture will help build those bridges so you can get where you need to go.

Some examples of this kind of architecture work:

• Untangling legacy tech debt

• RevTech strategy (building the right tech stack for the business)

• Implementations

• Designing complex solutions

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Balancing Innovation & “Running the Machine”

With all the work operators do on a given day, it’s difficult to balance big, important, innovative work with the tasks required to keep the business running. Still, if you don’t find a way to find and maintain that balance, you’ll end up treading water rather than moving your business toward the growth you want.

The first step here is to differentiate one type of work from the other; just because something is urgent doesn’t mean it’s going to have a net positive impact on the business. Ultimately, reactive work is often urgent (fires that need to be put out), while innovation work takes place over a longer period of time but drives significant change.

RevOps’ role in this is to support the entire revenue team in identifying both “machine work” and innovation work, then planning based on priority. This way, the business continues to run smoothly, as well as build toward the next inflection point.

Some examples:

• Establishing an intake process

• Gap identification and analysis

• Roadmapping

  • Prioritization

  • Getting buy-in

  • Cadenced meetings

• Retrospectives

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One of the great things about RevOps as a function is that it allows for consistent experimentation, which is especially important when you’re implementing a product-led strategy.

For more on that, you’ll definitely want to catch Jen on May 11.

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Next Month…

Who wants to talk about org structure and how to figure out how your team should function? As always, if you have any questions or a topic you’d like to see covered, just send me an email!

Seriously, I love getting mail.

See you in June!