The first month of 2022 is well and truly behind us, and while it is a new year, not a lot has really changed. The pandemic is still here, there are somehow even more Marvel movies coming up, and we’re still doing this monthly round-up.
Every month, we scour the community for some of the best, most actionable insights that you can take away. Without further ado, here’s this month’s list of blogs by RevOps pros that have taught us the most!
1. How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile In 7 Steps
One of the most important activities that businesses of all sizes, industries, and locations need to do is to come up with a successful sales strategy. While there are a lot of steps that are involved in this process, the very first one would be to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
An Ideal Customer Profile is like a template of the companies that are likely to get the most out of your product, which also means that it would be a template of the most lucrative kinds of customers for your company. Participating in today’s competitive market without an ICP is like going into a maze blindfolded. You might still have some luck, but wouldn’t you rather make it a lot easier for yourself?
Luckily, creating an ICP doesn’t have to be a complicated, or time consuming process. With just the right amount of research and analysis, you’ll be able to create an ICP for your business, and derive the benefits of the same. You can read more about how to do this here.
2. 3 Ways to Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
In the beginning, there was a big bang. Then, stars were born. The earth formed soon after, and trade and commerce flourished. Since then, the marketing team and the sales team have always been at loggerheads, and improving the alignment between the sales and the marketing teams has always been a business problem. Not anymore.
The team at Workato have come up with ingenious ways to solve this problem. This includes steps like bringing the SDRs under the marketing team, tossing out MQLs, and creating marketing campaigns that are more reliant on cross-functional cooperation. While this might seem pretty new and far-fetched, Workato has seen some great results due to these changes.
To find out exactly how this was implemented, check out this conversation with Bhaskar Roy, the CMO of Workato.
3. Balancing Act: How RevOps Leaders Juggle Budgeting and Politics
The budget is one of the most important things that your company will have to create in the financial year. While it might not be a given that a perfectly balanced budget will assure results, a poorly planned budget can most definitely end up costing your business a lot.
But creating a budget is a balancing act. Every team in your company will want the budget to be favourable to them: The marketing team wants more money for campaigns, sales team might require more reps and training, and the product team might want more investment in R&D. Problem is, you don’t have unlimited resources, and you’ll have to manage this politics efficiently to get the best possible results.
Your ideal budget should serve the overall strategic goal of your business, while keeping everyone happy and motivated enough and can put your plan into action. While this certainly is a juggling act, with a little bit of effort, it can be done.
Read all about it here!
4. How Revenue Operations Teams Can Optimise Sales Processes
While Revenue Operations might be a new business function, it certainly is seen as the future of how businesses operate. It’s been predicted that by 2025, most high growth companies will have a RevOps team as part of their company.
Customers don’t experience your sales, marketing, and customer success efforts in separate silos, which is how these teams tend to function. Having a RevOps team can align your process to the customer experience, and this makes having a RevOps team essential. However, implementation of this might be difficult and there can be many roadblocks that you encounter.
If you’re looking to make the case for a RevOps team at your organisation, you should take a look at how they can optimise your sales process, by revamping your sales strategy, setting more accurate sales goals, and optimising the sales tech stack. Read more about this here!
5. Build Solid Legs on your 3-Legged Stool Before Hiring for Growth
All companies want to grow. Across all industries and sizes, this is one common target that you’ll find. And in order to achieve that growth, it might be tempting to hire more people into your organisation so that you can bang out more products, sales, and therefore, revenue to your company.
However, since people are more than just a maths equation, this doesn’t always work. Before hiring for growth, you need to make sure that your existing team has appropriate targets and is well trained to achieve them, your processes are clean and efficient, and your tech is optimised to solve your business problems. People, Processes, and Tech- These are the three legs of your proverbial stool.
While making these adjustments, you’ll notice that you can drive more growth without necessarily having to hire. You’ll also see that hiring new employees works best when these issues are already sorted out, because they’ll be joining optimised, high performing teams with efficient processes and optimised tech.
You can read more about this here!
6. The RevOps Revolution: A Manifesto for Creating a Cycle of Value
This article opens up with an interesting definition of what a business purpose is: To create value. Create value to who? The customers, the employees, and the community within which the business operates.
This creation of value will lead to more customers, and eventually, sustained growth for your organisation.
The business purpose of creating value is one purpose for three aligned, yet different, audiences. RevOps is the only business function that can align all your organisational resources for the benefit of these three audiences. By creating organisational alignment between all stakeholders, RevOps can accelerate the cycle of value generation.
This article then goes in depth and discusses 8 fundamental truths of RevOps alignment in order to create this cycle of value generation: Building a foundation, Growing from the foundation, and expansion of your business.
Reading through this article can be eye-opening, and can give you perspective on how your RevOps team can function at it’s efficient best. Read more about this here!
7. Effective SaaS Commission Plans Ft. Stephen Covey's Circle of Control
Creating an effective commission plan to motivate your reps can be hard work. These commission plans have to be tailor made to each specific role, but even more specifically, the commissions will have to be based on metrics that make sense for the role.
Confusing? We’ve got you. Think of Stephen Covey’s Circle of Control concept from his book: The 7 habits of highly effective people. There are three circles: Circle of Concern, Circle of Influence, and Circle of Control.
Circle of Concern is a circle containing all the things you worry about, but cannot influence in any way. In the Circle of Influence, you can possibly exert some influence on the outcome, and in the Circle of Control, you have things that are completely under your control.
Simply put, you can create such circles for each role that you have, and then design commission plans based on this in such a way that your employees are given commissions only based on things that they can control. This will keep your employees motivated and focused on the targets that they’ll have to achieve.
Read more about effective SaaS commission plans and how you can use Covey’s principles here!
8. The North Star Metric: NRR and the Importance of Renewal Forecasting
Most businesses will agree that retaining older customers is equally, if not more important than acquiring new ones. In fact, it is actually cheaper to retain customers than to get new ones. For this purpose, most companies look at Net Revenue Retention (NRR) as the “North Star” metric, and is the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers.
The target NRR is usually set at 130%. This article unpacks the importance of renewal forecasting, tracking risk, preventing churn, expanding existing customers, and getting 130%+ NRR.
Through reading this article, you’ll know how to forecast renewals with confidence, how to identify early warning signs of churn, how to prevent churn with complete visibility over the customer lifecycle, how to identify engagement gaps and discover opportunities in our customers, and how to prevent churn among high growth and acquisition strategies.
You can read more about this here!
9. 6 Keys to Generating Revenue-Driven, Actionable Insights from Your Data
The most important thing for all business operations, and most importantly, RevOps, is data. Data is key to the RevOps function of providing valuable insights that can be used to make business level decisions.
However, just having data isn’t all there is to it. You’ll need to know how to intelligently analyse this data so that you can generate revenue-driven, actionable insights from them.
This can be achieved in six steps, and you can read more about these steps and how you can effectively analyse data here!
10. Revenue Operations and Finance: The Deal Desk Dream Team
Of late, it’s become increasingly apparent that the deal desk is critical to most businesses. But what is a Deal Desk? Deal Desk is where all relevant stakeholders – Sales, Finance, Product, Legal, Success, and others – can discuss and work through deals, usually non-standard ones. Deal Desk is an important, cross functional effort, and the so called “Dream Team” in the Deal Desk would be both RevOps and Finance.
Why is this so? Because Finance will be able to improve billings and cash flows, align ARR and Revenue Recognition as per ASC 606.
We often hear about how RevOps teams can support sales, marketing, and customer success teams, but with a deal desk, RevOps can become a critical business partner to the finance team as well! Automating functions like discount rate approval, and invoicing can make Finance’s job a lot easier.
Learn more about the deal desk dream team here!
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