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Back in 2018, Adam Gray, Hugo Whicher and I wrote a book called "Smarketing - How to achieve competitive advantage through blended sales and marketing".
The book tells a story of how a business, (it's based on a case study) was more efficient and effective by aligning sales and marketing.
At the time, there was lots of talk about merging sales and marketing and articles that it should happen, but nobody seemed to want to come up with an answer, so we did.
If I wrote the book today, It would be called "RevOps - How to achieve competitive advantage through blended sales and marketing".
What is RevOps?
RevOps or Revenue Operations is about bringing all of the revenue generations parts of the organisation under one leadership. Marketing, business development, lead generation, SDRs, BDRs, AE, sales people, account managers, renewals, customer success all under one roof. All with the same strategy and all "singing to the same hymn sheet".
Is this Sales taking over marketing or marketing taking over sales?
No, in our book, we share a case study of how the world has changed and rather than throwing rocks at each other over email, a sales department and marketing department learned to co-exist.
First there was a lot of open and honest conversations, then there was a common language and then there were measures.
But RevOps is more than that - it is
In the same organisation the SDRs sitting in a different part of the business and had different objectives and while you could "work with" the leadership to make sure were were "aligned" it would have been more efficient and effective if there had been common objectives. For example, the resource could have been spread differently. The SDRs could sell into the accounts of the sales people below $100,000. This meant that deal that should have been sold for way over that level (there was revenue and margin loss) were sold at $99,995 to meet the criteria.
The organization also had a renewals team, that reported into a different part of the business, they quoted data privacy rules to stop sales people getting at customer data.
RevOps is not a land grab or shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic
I can see people thinking that RevOps would be a great way to build an empire, grab everything and put it to use of the new management.
This would be shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
RevOps is the leadership opportunity to create a new environment, building a new organization for this new digital world.
RevOps gives you sales and marketing alignment
In our book "Smarketing" we use the sales funnel as an example and explain that in the sales funnel, everybody has a role, but the role is different for where we are in that funnel.
For example, marketing maybe at the top because they are good top of funnel (To-Fu), where as sales is about closing so they are at the bottom of the funnel (Bo-Fu). Either way it gives a business a great opportunity to align the team across the whole customer experience from brand to selling, to ABM (account based marketing) to renewals.
What do you need to do?
The ideal catalyst for RevOps is to adopt social selling, it is a platform that allows your business to do something different, to adopt digital strategies to work with the digital buyer. Social selling, because it uses digital, has different, digital, measures. No longer is the business tied to making decision based on the CRM data. The business is able to see other leading indicators to drive the business.