Revenue Operations Professionals Roles, Challenges, and Tech-Stack
Revenue operations professionals [1] and those in sales, marketing, and customer success have a mandate of managing critical processes across teams and tech stacks. Sales operations and marketing operations overlap on various tasks, including managing outbound, lead routing, and digital asset management. Since sales, marketing, and customer operations touch revenue processes, they also overlap with the use of a CRM.
The Purpose of Revenue Operations in Tech Stack
Revenue operations [2] are vital for a company’s technology stack. It helps gather enough data on customers and store it where everyone can access avoiding any inefficiencies caused by mismatches. In turn, everyone gets to work on the same data set that focuses on customer experiences.
Some essential apps and software included in a tech stack by RevOps include:
Customer Relationship Management(CRM): RevOps unites and aligns various organizational functions and operations, including customer data. One important tool for doing so is the CRM. Among the popular CRM software in the market are HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive.
These tools offer you an overall overview of your customers and clients allowing teams to analyze and understand data seamlessly.
Project Management Tools: These tools help RevOps and multiple department teams to collaborate seamlessly by creating a centralized space where they can efficiently work on revenue-related projects. Some of the most popular project management tools include Asana, Basecamp, and Trello.
Challenges Faced by Revenue Operations Professionals
Due to the heavy lifting RevOps professionals have to handle, they face several challenges, including:
● Unlimited software: There are over 7,000 software applications for tech stack. There are even more for other functions, including sales and customer operations. With such a wide choice, choosing the best software becomes a challenge for these professionals.
● Lack of technical/programming skills: Although most RevOps professionals are technical, not all are engineers. Some companies have to use in-house engineering of IT resources to bridge the gap in their tech stack.
● Skills gap: Today, you’ll find numerous new software each with its user interface and difference. Not all professionals are proficient in all these platforms, and they need the ability to use different business applications efficiently.
● Absence of custom integrations: Having various software suites also comes with its challenges, especially when the apps don’t collaborate well with others. RevOps professionals don’t only record marketing lead details or turn them into closed-won within CRM. They also have to ensure there is no loss of fidelity across multiple applications.
● Limited budget support: Although technology continues to grow in popularity among revenue teams’ budgets, it may prove challenging to acquire sign-off for new applications.
How Revenue Operations Professionals Can Handle these Challenges?
It’s vital to remember that not all problems require immediate solutions. Good technology will not fix broken processes or implementations. Therefore, when RevOps notice a roadblock in their tech stack process, they ought to look at the whole framework to determine which stage isn’t functioning properly.
An extended tech stack may end up fragmenting your data and making it difficult for cross-functional teams to communicate and collaborate with each other. RevOps should avoid attempting to solve problems by adding a new tool. Instead, they should look at their journey and identify the cause of the problem instead of the symptoms. Here are other ways they can deal with the challenges.
People: Although these professional teams tend to focus more on technology, doing smart people management is a vital part of solving their modern operations team challenges. Some of the important people strategies include:
● Cultivating solid internal relationships with executive leadership for sponsorship, which helps them meet their budget of securing new technology.
● Building relationships with cross-functional teams, including legal, IT procurement, and data security to help them easily manage their budgets and security issues.
● Getting and training the right personnel by considering specific qualities that set RevOps managers apart. These include analytical thinking, inquisitiveness, and a knack for process improvement.
Technology: Choosing the right software helps a lot. Although numerous software applications come with free trials, astute RevOps professionals know the real cost of implementation, scoping, internal enablement, and post-implementation support. They also know that new classes of software can help them automate manual processes and integrate their tech stack without writing any code. Some of the technology strategies they can use include:
● Choosing between build or buy. Most RevOps professionals know the importance of buying solutions as they offer better results than building them internally. Internal builds are also costly to implement and maintain.
● Going for fit and not features is wise as business software comes with many features. They should consider buying tech stack software that is easy to understand as it will help them solve their problems seamlessly.
Takeaways
Revenue operations professionals are a vital part of organizations and the teams need all the assistance they can get to perform their duties efficiently. Although they face many challenges, the good thing is that there are also specific solutions to these challenges.
