Shaking off all the spooks that October gave us (Thanks, Halloween and Ops issues for giving us jump scares), we’ve come around to pushing out our monthly favourites from the RevOps community!
1. The Importance of the Right CRM in Relation to Revenue Operations
Every aspect of your revenue operations process contributes to the success of your business. All your people, processes, technology, and data play a role in whether your prospects, leads, and customers buy from you. To get everything and everyone into alignment with the same objective, you must properly manage and provide access to the information required for your entire team to make each customer experience the best it can be. A high-quality, easy-to-use customer relations management (CRM) software program is really the only way to do this.
Read here.
2. Automate the Revenue Process in 7 Steps
Sales teams feel constant pressure to speed up time-to-revenue and quickly close deals. They are faced with doing more with less time. To help take some of the pressure off, companies focus on technology investments to help their sales teams increase win rates and accelerate revenue while automating a lot of the tedious, manual processes that prove to be a bottleneck in the sales cycle.
Read here.
3. How Revenue Operations Can Drive Your Retention and Expansion Strategy
In a recent study of more than 300 revenue decision-makers at high-growth SaaS companies, more than half of respondents said their organizations are focused on two key growth areas in the next one to three years: customer retention and expansion into new markets. Two-thirds of respondents said revenue-process optimization is important to achieving each of those initiatives, but less than half are meeting their quarterly forecasts within a 10% margin. That means they may be going to market with substandard revenue processes, which can be a serious drag on these growth initiatives.
Read here.
4. 5 Things to Consider Before Purchasing a Commissions Automation Software
Handling sales commissions is a task on its own. Now, club it with a bad, incompatible software and it’s hello, incompetence from hell! The trick to picking the right sales compensation vendor for your business is to evaluate how closely the vendor’s capabilities align with the key requirements of your sales compensation structures. This guide will help you with the evaluation process once you have shortlisted a few products.
Read here.
5. A Framework for Evaluating Tools In Your GTM Tech Stack
Today, there are hundreds of tools you can incorporate into your go-to-market tech stack to support your teams. For those of us in revenue operations, we might be saying FINALLY, the market cares about us. Because with all of these cool new sales, marketing, and customer success tools, there is a revenue operations practitioner who has identified a new tool that fills a gap in a process.
Read here.
6. The Right Way to Think About Commissions & Annual Planning
The first step to commissions planning, like many other things, starts with the goals you are looking to achieve. There is an overarching revenue number, but that gets broken into specifics based on the role that you are looking at. Like generating qualified leads for an SDR, generating revenue for an AE, and managing NRR and churn for a CSM. Those are the core goals that weigh the most in any commission plan. But then, there are also the secondary goals that help define the QUALITY of that revenue.
Read here.
7. Revenue Leaders Are Missing the Mark on Sales Forecasting
More than 300 U.S. SaaS revenue decision-makers believe their forecasting capabilities are mature. But only 18% said their quarterly forecasts are within 5% of their actual revenue. That number drops to 15% for monthly forecasts. That’s a pretty big discrepancy between what leaders say, and what their books show. In some cases, revenue leaders might be relying on outdated revenue operations, lacking the tools that could drastically improve their forecast accuracy. They might also be under-weighting the degree to which even small deviations from forecast can ripple across the organization, sowing havoc in neighbouring teams.
Read here.
8. Average Sales Commission Rates by Industry
Commissions are a tricky thing in sales. When offered too low, you may not get the desired results from your reps, but can affect your business if offered too high. You’ve to find the right balance. But here’s the thing. What seems like the perfect commission for other businesses may not be the right one for your organization. Your business goals, where you stand as an organization, your product/service, your industry, and many other factors play a major role in determining your commissions. There isn’t an easy or straightforward approach to this.
Read here.
9. Art and Science Blend with Educated Guesswork in a Marketing Budget
RevOps marketers oscillate between excitement and panic when it comes to doing the annual budget. Whether the process is marketing first (with an outrageous request for ridiculous sums of money) or executive first (with paltry sums that make you want to cry in the bathroom), there is usually a process of negotiation to arrive somewhere in the middle.
Read here.
10. Removing Legal Bottlenecks to Accelerate Deal Cycles
Contracts are the lifeblood of modern companies. They define relationships, outline rights and responsibilities, and spell out the details of any sale, including price, timing, payment terms, warranties, and more. In fact, contracts govern most B2B business deals. But the contracting process can be a major source of tension and inefficiencies, especially between sales and legal teams.
Read here.
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