Business leaders know the truth summed up so concisely by Peter Drucker, “The purpose of business is to create a customer.” Astute business leaders know why Drucker felt so; because customers bring in revenue, and revenue is the lifeblood of business.
To optimize revenues, most organizations have specialists manning the different segments of the customer journey. In contemporary organization structures, I see that Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service have grown into super-specialized functions, each with its own set of sharply defined objectives. Marketing is hyper-focused on prospecting, customer lead management funnels, and MQL - Marketing Qualified Leads. Sales is razor-focused on SQL - Sales Qualified Leads, customer acquisition, and sales strategies. Customer Service is preoccupied with upselling, retention, and CLVM - Customer Lifecycle Value Management. The resulting complexity makes many business heads wish wistfully: Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a super-awesome business professional who would get everyone, the marketing, sales, and customer service teams, to work in unison towards growing customers and revenues.
There have been many experiments in recent history to fulfill this latent wish of business leaders. I have known many CEOs who have energetically gone about marshaling the different departments to march in unison. Some of them have groomed talent to perform this activity as a deputy, designated as COO at times. Others have identified a favorite function and made it the chief orchestrator of all the functions. For example, some companies are dominated by Sales and the other functions, such as Marketing, support the sales efforts.
In the digital age that we live in, customers expect omnichannel experiences; thus, most companies have got digital specialists onboard, some of whom are internal employees and the others are digital service consultants, such as yours truly. Astute leaders see the digital paradigm as a window of opportunity for businesses to fundamentally reinvent themselves because digital pervades all aspects of the industry today. I have seen many smart companies grab this opportunity and leverage the potential of digital technologies to not only build efficient customer experiences but also to synergize their internal teams. Such businesses have begun to see promising revenue results driven by lead indicators such as growth in customer acquisition, customer retention, average revenue per customer, and the MQLs.
Digital Transformation, which has seen widespread adoption with many companies designating a Chief Digital Officer to spearhead the initiative, has provided the impetus to many new concepts. Revenue Operations (RevOps), an unabashed term that makes no qualms about the preoccupation with Revenue and Operations, is one approach that is making waves. It tries to formalize the role of an integrator, Chief of RevOps, to manage the increasingly siloed Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service, teams. RevOps, aims to get all the customer-facing digital stacks to row in unison, including those that may belong to Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and other departments, such as NPD.
RevOps, as per research, has helped companies achieve encouraging results:
- 71% higher stock performance.
- Up to 20% higher sales productivity with 30% lower GTM expenses
- 100% to 200% increases in digital marketing ROI with tighter GTM alignment
As a result, many companies that have not yet adopted RevOps plan to do so in the future. In fact, the pace of growth of RevOps job titles is outpacing that of Sales job titles, as per LinkedIn.
To me, the Chief of RevOps, seems to settle the age-old dilemma of all business leaders: Who is that one person who can give me the definite answer to, “How are we doing on the revenue front and what’s our plan to hit the target?” Inevitably, business leaders get a different answer from every department that they pose this question to; not anymore, I hope!
In my mind, the concept of RevOps is another attempt to reorganize the business model around the basic goals of the business: Delighted Customers (read revenue) and Competitive Advantage (read Operations). And, the astute business leaders (I am talking about you; I am sure you knew that :) know the most efficient pathway to those twin goals. My take on the RevOps phenomenon, an integrated-actionable digital map of the customer journey has helped organizations to grow revenues for as long as I can remember, no matter what name you call it by ;)
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