The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Operations (Rev Ops)

The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Operations (Rev Ops)

Today’s enterprises face increasingly challenging business conditions and market disruption, leading many to explore new ways to survive and thrive—from improving processes and adopting new technologies to pursuing comprehensive business transformation. Companies are discovering that an innovative revenue operations (or rev ops) process is vital to transforming how they do business and consistently achieving optimal business outcomes.  

In this resource guide, we will highlight the trends that make revenue operations a top priority for forward-thinking enterprise companies. We will also define revenue operations and the critical components of the innovative technology solutions that are helping to transform businesses today. Finally, we will outline how to combine comprehensive automation and new innovations to deliver powerful advantages for your business. 

What is revenue operations? 

Revenue operations includes all vital business processes from the time a buyer shows interest in making a purchase until the company realizes revenue from that purchase. In short, revenue operations encompasses a company’s sales, contracting, ordering, billing, and renewal responsibilities, with a focus throughout on connecting and optimizing the customer experience.   

Revenue operations is essential to effectively grow customer relationships and build omnichannel selling strategies, and their functions impact many departments. When managed correctly, revenue operations can be pivotal in raising sales productivity and selling effectiveness.   

Revenue operations vs sales operations 

While the terms revenue operations and sales operations are often used interchangeably, they’re actually quite different. Sales operations is a traditional business approach that’s focused on maximizing top-line revenue through new customer acquisition. 

Revenue operations, on the other hand, takes a broader, bottom-line view of revenue that spans the entire customer lifecycle. This includes not only the initial sale, but also customer retention, renewals, and expansion through cross-sell and upsell opportunities. As a result, revenue operations requires close alignment across a variety of teams like sales, marketing, legal, fulfillment, customer success, support, and more.  

What is the goal of revenue operations? 

Regardless of the headwinds they face, executive teams must deliver on corporate goals and produce outcomes that meet or exceed shareholder expectations. They are accountable for the results that their business achieves each and every fiscal period.  

Among CEOs, CFOs, and other members of the C-suite, the top priorities include:   

• Revenue: Generate sales that allow the organization to consistently grow and gain market share   
• Profitability: Secure returns from the sales team for investors and for reinvesting in the business  
• Customer experience: Improve ease of doing business to increase market share, customer satisfaction, and repeat business  
• People: Gain greater productivity from staff by encouraging collaboration and aligning behavior with corporate objectives   

The revenue operations process is critical to making progress with these outcomes at an operational level. It is instrumental in helping enterprises secure optimal results in sales and buying cycles. 

What are the components of revenue operations? 

Revenue operations processes connect a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) suite with its enterprise resource planning (ERP). But rev ops is more than just a series of applications connecting customer experience and fulfillment.  

Instead, the individual components of revenue operations are the technical building blocks for a seamless process that improves a company’s bottom-line revenue generation. These components include: 

• Proposals 
• Quoting 
• Contracting 
• Negotiations 
• Execution 
• Order management 
• Fulfillment 
• Billing 
• Renewals and expansion 

Benefits of revenue operations 

With proper execution, revenue operations can deliver substantial competitive advantages. These include more effective collaboration, improved transparency across teams, a more cohesive customer experience, higher revenues, and more predictable growth.   

Why? Because the revenue operations process consolidates the essential activities related to facilitating transactions and closing sales, from the moment a prospect demonstrates purchase intent to the realization of revenue from that purchase. This process allows you to improve various functions along the customer journey, such as navigating catalogs; streamlining quotes, contracts, and order management; and integrating subscription, billing, and renewals functions—leading to more successful direct sales channels, partner channels, and digital commerce initiatives.   

Simply put, an effective and efficient revenue operations process empowers enterprises to achieve critical corporate goals, and provides the link between top-line growth, profitability, and customer experience. Companies that leverage the collective intelligence of their organizations improve their business outcomes. For example, revenue operations can help companies make more appealing offers, remove friction from the buying process, mitigate price erosion, and boost growth and profitability.   

Challenges of revenue operations 

While revenue operations functions are well established, they can be difficult to master as an integrated process. Large, global organizations with distributed workforces often struggle with the innovation and agility needed to achieve competitive advantage and optimal business outcomes.   

One reason for this is that many companies treat the underlying responsibilities within revenue operations as separate, unrelated concerns of different departments. As a result, processes within the revenue lifecycle may be riddled with manual steps and spread across departments that rely on disparate tools. 

For example, sales operations and legal teams tend to have very different interests: the former focuses on helping sales close deals, while the latter wants to mitigate risk to the business. As a result, contract review processes are often poorly coordinated, leading to delays in sales cycles, and even deal slippage.  

Key metrics for revenue operations 

The revenue operations process is critical to delivering positive business outcomes at an operational level and ensuring predictable revenue. It is instrumental in helping enterprise companies secure optimal results in sales and buying cycles. It can impact any number of key business measures, including: 

• Increased sales efficiency 
• Improved sales effectiveness 
• Larger deal sizes 
• Higher win rates 
• Improved margins 
• More opportunities 
• Lower customer acquisition costs 
• Increased speed-to-market 
• Improved forecast accuracy 
• Reduced customer churn 
• Higher customer lifetime value 

In challenging business environments, complacency is not an option   

Enterprises are confronting a new normal as markets become more challenging and less predictable. Business as usual is no longer realistic, as competition and commoditization upend one industry after another. Competitive landscapes are changing, and product offerings are becoming more homogenous due to:   

• Shifts to online seats (digital commerce sites displacing brick and mortar businesses)  
• Lower barriers to entry (accelerating routes to business for competitors)  
• Expanding pools of suppliers of goods and services, both domestic and foreign   

An integrated global economy permits new innovations in the form of disruptive products and business models to appear from unexpected quarters. As a result, product differentiation, intellectual property advantages, and margins become vulnerable to newly emerged alternatives.  

Partner with Conga for revenue operations transformation   

Conga is a trusted business advisor, offering the most complete solution in the market for commercial operations transformation. As the industry leader in transforming revenue operations, Conga is driving the vital business processes between a buyer’s interest and the realization of revenue.   

Conga’s offerings are fueled by the Conga Revenue Lifecycle Solution, which maximizes the entire revenue operations process by streamlining and improving business processes, aligning and driving revenue winning behaviors, and recommending relevant, intelligent actions.  

Read our full resource guide to get the whole picture and to learn the six capabilities a revenue operations solution should support for digital commerce.