By Sabina Pons, Operating Partner at Growth Molecules.

LeanData surveyed over 2,000 business to business (B2B) sales and marketing professionals and announced in The 2nd Annual State of Revenue Operations Report that 40% of businesses say there is a misalignment between sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Additionally, 78% of B2B businesses agree that consistent revenue growth is a challenge.

Every business has at least a few layers of different teams working to achieve company goals, and each department is equally important. And, although they each serve different purposes to ensure the success of your business, they may not be working together as optimally as they could be to improve customer success.

The answer? A RevOps initiative.

What is a RevOps Initiative?

A Revenue Operations team, or RevOps, functions as an optimizer. RevOps discovers ways different departments in your business (usually sales, marketing, and customer success) can optimize performance, productivity, and profit by figuring out the best way to share tools and data with one another. 

In 2019, LeanData disclosed that there had been a 55% increase in the number of businesses with a dedicated RevOps initiative. And, in 2021, Gartner reported that a massive 75% of the fastest growing companies will have RevOps teams by 2025! 

The chatter around RevOps and its popularity has continued to grow as all companies want to further improve operational efficiency, customer success, and profit.

The Relationship Between RevOps and Customer Success

Deducing the meaning of Customer Success is a simple exercise, however, defining RevOps and Customer Success in parallel reveals apparent overlaps. The Customer Success Association defines customer success as “a long-term, scientifically engineered, and professionally directed business strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven profitability.”

The objectives of both RevOps and Customer Success intersect at a key point: profitability and efficiency. You maintain and attract clients through superior experiences, and maintaining and attracting customers increases your profitability. A RevOps team or initiative takes this objective a step further by streamlining goals, processes, and communication among a few other departments (namely, sales and marketing) to achieve this goal. 

Your sales, marketing, and customer success departments all have specific roles as clients move through the sales funnel. As a customer is moving through this process, each point of contact should collect different types of information from them. Once a customer interacts with customer service, for instance, that customer service representative should be able to easily access all past information and data about them. RevOps focuses on that: how customer information can be shared as seamlessly as possible between different departments to ensure customer success teams can provide the highest quality of service to your clients.

Creating a RevOps Initiative 

Every business would benefit from having a RevOps team in place. Streamlined communication? Easily shared data? Increased revenue? So how can a RevOps initiative be put in place to optimize your customers’ success?

Many companies offer software and services that can implement a RevOps initiative for you, and some businesses opt for hiring a Revenue Operations Manager, but the first thing to do is to consider where all of your data resides. 

There is likely a massive amount of data siloed between all three departments in question (sales, marketing, and customer success). The next thing to consider is how the software and tools you currently use can be optimized to their fullest potential to streamline communication and data flow.

The process of implementing RevOps will involve a multitude of key players, so make sure the objective (making communication easier and the customer experience better) is clear to anyone involved in this transition.

RevOps Will Revolutionize Customer Success

There is a direct correlation between a customer’s experience and a company’s revenue. When customers are treated well, and they are deriving their intended business outcomes with your product or service, you will retain them as your customer. This results in protected revenue, and hopefully, revenue expansion as well! wait around for you to improve. They’re just going to leave!

Aligning data and information across departments means that when your customer contacts customer service with questions the customer and his or her key attributes are already known. Information about the customer was captured in the pre-sales marketing funnel, and during the sales process, such that relevant data sources are held in a repository governed with best practice SOPs. Your Customer Success Managers (CSMs) will have everything they need to know about your customer at their fingertips, reducing the amount of time it takes your customer to get the information they need and increasing their happiness (and their loyalty) to your company. 

“Alignment” is more than a modern corporate buzzword, just as is the concept of customer success. These two departments, and philosophies, are the keys to your company’s profitability and resilience.

For more information on how to optimize customer success, download this free guide by Growth Molecules: “Customer Loyalty: The Other Product.”