How Marketing, Sales, and Revenue Operations Work Together to Achieve Business Growth

The Future of Revenue Growth

Today’s consumer is more informed and demands a better experience when interacting with brands. As customer experience becomes the primary driver for competition, businesses are turning to systems and processes that drive customer engagement and business growth.

Marketing and sales teams have always been an important part of driving brand awareness, customer engagement, and revenue. However, for a long time now, their activities have been siloed and mostly unknown to the other department. 

This lack of alignment has cost businesses revenue and growth, leading to the rise of revenue operations. Today, businesses that incorporate marketing operations, sales operations, and revenue operations report higher business growth compared to those still taking traditional approaches to sales and marketing. 

Let’s look at what each of these terms represents.

What is Marketing Operations?

Marketing operations are the backbone of any organization.

The term marketing operations describes the marketing functions, people, and technology that allow consistent efficiency and scalability of an organization. It provides marketing teams to deliver value through planning, governance, and support functions of marketing.

Through marketing operations, your organization has optimized processes from planning, budgeting, execution, and data analysis – marketing operations serve as the backbone of your organization. Marketing operations stand on four core pillars – people, processes, technology, and data. 

Professionals involved in the marketing operations team include financial analysts, project managers, data experts, and market researchers. Unlike the traditional marketers, members of the marketing operations teams come from analytical and process-oriented roles. 

Marketing operations includes the following tasks:

Marketing Project Planning

Project planning is a crucial component of marketing operations. Marketing Ops teams must develop new marketing strategies and manage complex projects to achieve clearly defined metrics. During the marketing project planning process, marketing operations teams are involved in developing a market strategy, setting a budget, implementing cross-tactical execution planning, and participating in performance review meetings.

Creative Process Management

Marketing operations teams govern different marketing processes including coming up with new ideas and creating the right processes to allow for fast and efficient implementation of marketing programs. 

Marketing Technology Infrastructure 

Marketing operations teams manage activities related to marketing automation, implementing a content management system, integration with other technologies, and overseeing other technologies used in marketing. They are also involved in identifying and selecting new software and technology to streamline marketing processes

Marketing Data and Analytics

Successful marketing today depends on data-driven marketing strategies to buy highly effective marketing campaigns. Marketing operations teams are responsible for developing a company’s marketing data strategy, checking and reporting analytics to measure the effectiveness of each marketing effort. 

Brand Compliance and Risk

Marketing operations teams review and approve marketing materials to ensure that they are compliant with existing regulations. 

What is Sales Operations?

Without a strong sales operations function, your business will struggle to achieve its full potential.

Sales operations are the processes and activities within a sales organization that enable, support, and drive better, faster, and efficient sales. Sales operations is an indispensable department in an organization due to its impact on the productivity and efficiency of an organization, especially for companies within the B2B space.

Sales operations teams are responsible for several core functions as follows:

• Select key metrics for an organization to adopt in its sales strategy. Some of the metrics include Salesforce quota achievement rate, average win rate, average sales cycle length, average deal size, lead response time, and time spent selling. 
• Training, coaching, and mentoring members of the sales team. Sales ops participate in nurturing talent to help the sales team achieve their goals. They handle activities such as recruitment, onboarding, product training, sales methodology, and market training. 
• Optimizing and implementing workflows, sales activities, lead generation, and conversion efforts in the sales process
• Implementing sales frameworks and methodologies
• Optimizing sales tools and technologies including templates, CRM, automation, data analytics, and client engagement 
• Fine-tuning brand messaging and content by working with marketing teams using data 

What is Revenue Operations?  

Revenue operations (or RevOps) is a term that is popping up more and more in the marketing world - but what does it actually mean? 

Revenue operations are the business function that seeks to maximize a business' revenue potential by aligning marketing, sales, and services across an organization. Through revenue operations, businesses can improve their internal processes, client acquisition, and client satisfaction. 

Revenue operations seek to eliminate the barriers created through traditional businesses, whereby each department works individually, resulting in disjointed revenue efforts, customer experiences, and analytics.

Revenue operations are responsible for the following:

Operations Management

In operations management, revenue ops teams manage business resources to ensure that business needs are met. They handle responsibilities such as business process innovation, project management, change management, sales planning, and cross-functional collaboration. 

Enablement

Revenue operations teams bring enablement efforts into marketing to empower your sales team to sell more efficiently. Some of the responsibilities revenue operations teams handle in sales enablement include onboarding, coaching, and continuous training. 

Data Insights 

RevOps teams use data to drive data-driven decision-making in an organization. Some of their responsibilities related to data include data quality, data management, data access, and operational and strategic insights. 

Tools 

RevOps teams are responsible for the technology and tools that sales and marketing teams use. Their roles include evaluating and procuring new tech, integrating new tools with existing technologies and functions, and system administration. 

Organizations that implement revenue operations see benefits such as:

Predictable business growth

Businesses are now looking at revenue predictions to plan their revenue generation strategy. By incorporating revenue operations into their businesses, they can optimize their sales and marketing process, and use high-quality data and metrics to predict a company’s revenue. 

Better collaboration 

Revenue operations seek to unify different revenue-generating efforts within an organization into one. This reduces the barriers that arise when sales, marketing or customer experience teams compete with each other to demonstrate their impact on a business. Revenue operations are focused on uniting their efforts towards the common goal of improving a company's revenue. 

Higher customer retention 

Sales and marketing teams exist to serve customers, even though they may take different approaches. Revenue operations streamline marketing and sales efforts to allow both teams to pay more attention to customer needs. The result is a between customer experience and higher retention rates.

Greater transparency between cross-functional teams

When marketing and sales teams work in a siloed environment, there lacks visibility into their activities, as well as a lack of alignment. While both teams are engaged in driving business growth, there’s no visibility into what the other team is doing. 

The problem with this approach is that the teams are often fighting each other and in worse cases, blame games arise when a problem occurs. 

Revenue operations ensure that both marketing and sales teams have visibility into what the other team is doing. This creates an environment where accountability, and hence transparency is enhanced. 

• Revenue growth
• Seamless transition to marketing changes 

How Do Marketing Operations, Sales Operations, and Revenue Operations Work Together for Business Growth

Revenue operations act as the bridge between sales operations and marketing operations. 

Marketing operations and sales operations typically handle the same responsibilities across a department, but within their distinct departments. In an organization that wants to scale, this separation quickly becomes a hindrance that results in fragmented customer communication and experiences. 

Most organizations today are already setting up ways for their marketing and sales teams to work together. By incorporating revenue operations into the mix, businesses can become more intentional about providing a more engaging relationship with customers. 

Here’s how these units work together to drive business growth:

Planning

Marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams work together to develop aligned plans. Through such unified planning, both marketing and sales teams have clarity on what the other is doing as well as their priorities.  

They also understand their shared sales, marketing, and revenue goals, and therefore, they can develop a more unified strategy to achieve these goals. 

Data management

Data management is a key component for sales, marketing, and revenue teams. They have to look at the results of their current efforts and the steps that lead to those results for effective planning. 

Without the alignment that comes with incorporating sales, marketing, and revenue operations, teams end up with duplicate data in their siloed databases. 

By aligning sales, marketing, and revenue operations, organizations improve their data management strategy thus creating a unified source of truth for all their sales and marketing needs. 

Since most organizations already use a CRM solution, the next step when aligning is having a unified data management strategy that creates visibility into data and eliminates problems that arise from using poor quality data. 

Measurement 

Sales and marketing track and report on different metrics. By including revenue operations into the mix, these teams can agree on shared metrics to track and report on, which creates a more unified sales and marketing strategy. 

One example of a company that implemented sales operations, marketing operations, and revenue operations to drive business growth is Malwarebytes. Malware bytes moved from siloed sales and marketing operations and adopted a revenue ops model in 2019.

By adopting this new model, the company’s sales and marketing operations worked more closely together and its commercial business skyrocketed. The company was able to adapt to the changes brought on by the pandemic and increase its sales leads and revenues. 

What’s Next

Unify your data for customer-obsessed revenue growth

Consumers today know what they want, and the kind of experience they are looking for. They are quick to look for alternatives if the current option does not deliver the experience or value they expect. This means that marketers and sales teams must have a clear understanding of their customers. 

Data is a major part of these insights, as is the collaboration between sales, marketing, and revenue teams. Their collaboration ensures that all can read from the same data and have a unified strategy to achieve business goals. 

The first step towards this is having clean CRM data, which you can achieve by integrating Kudoz with Salesforce. Learn more about Kudoz here.