Use Revenue Operations to Develop a Customer-Led Approach to B2B Sales

Leore Spira
5 min readApr 25, 2022

Prioritizing the customer has traditionally been the domain of business-to-consumer (B2C). However, Business-to-business (B2B) is becoming increasingly comparable to B2C in this way. Indeed, customers are critical to every business’ revenue cycle, so more than 80% of organizations that emphasize customer experience report constant revenue growth.

Customer-led growth (CLG) determines the entire worth of a business based on input from the user. With the objective of adding value to customers throughout their connection with your goods. This necessitates the development of the following strategies, which need relevant KPIs for both customer-facing and technical teams.

Nonetheless, customer requirements vary substantially. Frequently, consumers struggle to express their business needs succinctly. The ability to ask important qualifying questions, comprehend consumers’ value points, and build a solution that fits their demands is as much an art as it is a science. The approach is often influenced by both experience and data, which is enhanced by Revenue Operations.

Moving forward, we will explore how Revenue Operations might enhance the B2B sales process and the performance of any business!

Revenue Operations — The Secret Ingredient to Customer B2B Success

Customer needs differ significantly from one to another. Often, customers struggle to articulate their business requirements clearly. The ability to ask meaningful qualifying questions, understand customers’ value points, and design a solution at a price point that meets their needs is as much art as it is science.

Furthermore, the process is just as often informed by experience as it is by data. Art and science meet in the RevOps process by distilling these requirements to create a repeatable sales process where art and science meet the revenue operations process.

By serving as the glue between sales, marketing, and customer success teams, a RevOps strategy guarantees that revenue and customer loyalty do not stagnate. B2B enterprises preach the importance of customer happiness both pre-sale and post-sale, as practically every business believes that improved customer experiences add to the pile of client achievements.

After a client signs a contract, the customer journey continues to change, which is why RevOps allows B2B teams to contact the customer at each point of their trip. With a free-flowing data foundation in place, B2B businesses can now quickly resolve issues with the broken buyer’s journey. Not only does RevOps prioritize the customer experience at all levels of a B2B organization, but it also engages all teams in revenue generation with the common aim of maximizing the B2B revenue cycle.

Each business should choose what is best for its customers and pursue that course. What, therefore, is the common denominator in this case? Optimizing your unique route to increase consumer engagement requires a multidisciplinary team devoted entirely to that aim and driven by the client. This is referred to as RevOps.

Comprehending The Role of Revenue Operations

Revenue Operations was formed out of the growth of marketing, sales, customer success technologies, and the need for cross-functional alignment. RevOps is responsible for unifying the three revenue-focused departments under a single guiding concept and for managing operations throughout the firm on an end-to-end basis. It fills in the gaps as a hybrid function to become the organization’s primary information center.

On the marketing dimension, RevOps strategy enables businesses to be more nimble in finding the most successful channels and campaigns for filling the top of the sales funnel and weeding out ineffective ones.

On the sales dimension, it may help define which data tools are required to route marketing leads to the proper sales representatives, clean up leads obtained via data marketing, and tell sales enablement teams the best ways to assist those reps. Additionally, it provides operations managers with detailed forecasts and retrospective statistics on what works and what does not when it comes to generating sales and motivating sales agents.

Current Trends B2B Customer-Led Trends & Impact of Revenue Operations

Moving forward, let’s explore the main trends in B2B interactions and how Revenue Operations have a significant impact.

Increased Online Sales of High-Priced Products

Buyers value digitalization for several reasons, but three are highlighted in the report: cost savings, security, and convenience. To adapt to this shift, businesses have increased their attention on customer experience by establishing a RevOps job tasked with optimizing and coordinating sales, marketing, and customer success operations inside a digital-first acquisition funnel.

Increasing Complexity of Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Technology Stacks

Technologies have been developed to assist the majority of an organization’s operations. Marketing teams, for example, use technology to develop and enhance everything from infrastructure and data collecting to execution and measurement. These technologies are linked to the exchange of data, which simplifies marketing’s task.

While this setup in a single silo is fine for departmental data reviews, it becomes problematic when marketing, sales, and customer success departments use disparate technologies with disparate data sources and monitoring approaches. These distinctions often result in conspicuous gaps and contradictory metrics throughout the client experience.

Ultimately, the RevOps function is tackling the pervasive complexity and misalignment in this area. RevOps now owns the systems and processes that span the customer experience and the data generated to serve as a single source of truth for decision-making across go-to-market teams. And RevOps is not only for big firms; we are now witnessing the establishment of this role in teams ranging from SMEs to enterprises.

Asymmetry in the Relationship Between Sales & Marketing

For decades, friction between sales and marketing teams has been a constant; it is generally seen as an intrinsic business component. Overall, the discrepancies between marketers and salespeople are due to fundamental variations in objectives, incentive structure, and risk tolerance.

Differences in priorities cause a divide between Sales and Marketing, with marketing teams focusing on boosting lead volume via a strategic lens. In contrast, sales teams take a transactional approach to contacting customers and completing transactions.

Conclusion

The rapid rise in digital B2B buying, aided by COVID-19, has pushed the adoption of RevOps, as more businesses seek to optimize their go-to-market strategies around the customer experience. RevOps serves as the connecting tissue between revenue and go-to-market teams, relying on efficient collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer success operations.

--

--

Leore Spira

A leader, process optimizer, a RevOps geek. I am driven by the power of data, and look for new and innovative ways to optimize processes to drive success.