PART I Revenue Operations, A System for Growth
CHAPTER 1 Take Control of the Revenue Cycle
- Revenue Operations comprises two components.
- First, the management system – our EQ – aligns the people in your revenue teams.
- Second, the operating system – our IQ – combines technology, processes, and data assets to generate more sustainable and scalable growth.
- Almost 60 % would stop doing business with a B2B vendor based solely on a mobile experience that’s difficult to use.
- The managers and operations professionals we surveyed rated visibility of customers, seller effectiveness, account health, and pipeline health as the four top drivers of the performance of “4D” (distributed, diverse, digital, and dynamic) revenue teams.
- Service has become far more elevated and strategic as product adoption and experience have become central to customer relationship building, revenue expansion, and customer lifetime value.
CHAPTER 2 Create Value and Impact from Revenue Operations
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PART II The Management System to Align Your Revenue Teams
CHAPTER 3 Understand Six Pillars of the Management System
- Six specific pillars for managing the people, process, and technology of revenue growth:
- commercial leadership
- commercial architecture
- commercial insights
- commercial asset management
- commercial enablement
- commercial operations.
- Ultimately, only the CEO or chief operating officer can unify sales, marketing, and service into one revenue team because that is the only manager to whom these functions report.
- In the absence of analytics that quantify account potential and propensity to close, most organizations chase too many low-quality clients and opportunities
CHAPTER 4 Lead a Modern Business That Aligns Marketing, Sales, and Service
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CHAPTER 5 Use One of Three Leadership Models: The Tsar, the Federation, and the Chief of Staff
- It has led us to focus on high impact goals like enabling just-in-time learning and specializing our enablement investments to make them more role based and goal oriented.
- “One of the things Joe did was bring in new talent in terms of adding key people to the operations and product marketing teams who had sales backgrounds as well as marketing experience.
- We need to constantly evaluate questions like
- Do our front-line sellers know the most important customers and calling points in every account?
- Are they in regular and meaningful contact with them?
- Is our customer success team engaging in a way that’s not only fixing a problem but being proactive and helping customers get the most out of our solutions?
- Do we have technology in place that provides us visibility to when our customers are or are not using our tools – and will our customer success team rally quickly to engage with that customer?
- Will we find the right balance between videoconferencing and face-to-face engagement as we come out of the pandemic?
PART III An Operating System for Conecting Technology, Data, Processes, and Teams
CHAPTER 6 Assemble the Nine Building Blocks of Revenue Operations
- Here is a list of the nine elements (see Figure 6.2):
- What’s important is not the number of tools, but your ability to connect the dots across the sales and marketing technology ecosystem.
CHAPTER 7 Connect Your Data, Technology, and Channel Assets to Acquire More Customers
- Maximizing the return on growth assets like salespeople, data, and content, which are severely and persistently underutilized, can unlock significant firm value.
- Building Block #1: Revenue Enablement – CRM, Content, and Learning Technologies That Support Selling
- Sales leaders need to insist on making the simplified seller experience a primary goal of their sales enablement strategies.
- Building Block #2: Channel Optimization – Selling Channels That Maximize Effective and Efficient Interactions
- It’s disappointing that “owned media” is rarely a budget consolidation category, because not utilizing it this way prevents these programs from fully reporting results as part of marketing spend, or forces their exclusion from most fully loaded ROI models.
- The vast majority of inbound digital marketing interactions (95%) are anonymous – which means you cannot tell whether a visitor is a prospect, customer, Russian spy, or even a robot.
- Ultimately if you want to have salespeople use marketing signals from your websites and third-party signals of intent – you need that data in your CRM
- Evolve performance measurement from marketing-sourced pipeline to customer engagement metrics
CHAPTER 8 Blend Data into Insights That Inform Selling Actions, Conversations, and Decisions in Real Time
- Visibility into opportunity potential, account health, seller performance, and pipeline activity are regarded as the four most important insights managers need to better manage their selling system.
CHAPTER 9 Extract More Revenue and Margins from Your Teams and Resources
- Sellers don’t need more data. They need actionable insights that inform account priorities, resource allocation decisions, and the level of effort to apply to specific target customers.
- “Conversation AI is our lifeline right now,” according to Stephanie Sullivan, director of Growth Operations at ChowNow. “Sales managers have to listen to calls as part of the job – it’s nonnegotiable, because it’s by far the best way to train.”
- There is a big opportunity to optimize the deployment of sales resources by developing data-driven models that map the response functions by market, territory, and segment.
- As a rule of thumb, the average B2B organization can take 60 – 70 days to plan and design territories when dealing with, on average, five different organizations (e.g. marketing, product, finance, human resources, and sales) and a limited number of data inputs to defining territory boundaries (e.g. historical baseline data, corporate growth targets, sales forecasts, and staffing budgets).
- Pricing is the most efficient way to improve a firm’s profitability,
- [Enforce] pricing policies across the enterprise to stop millions of dollars of margin leakage.
CHAPTER 10 Tune the Revenue Operating System to Get Maximum Performance
- There are three ways you can use advanced analytics to create business impact:
- Digitize your planning processes to improve agility in deploying your resources. Digitizing the process of planning, managing, and optimizing territory boundaries, seller targets, and quota assignments will make those processes faster, less expensive, and more data driven.
- Use analytics to make better predictions, forecasts, and investment decisions.
- Adopt advanced modeling techniques to evaluate more scenarios and build consensus.
- “These factors are always in conflict.
- Cost vs. customer service.
- Sales capacity vs. coverage.
- Seller balance and fairness vs. revenue maximization.
- Seller satisfaction vs. short-term revenue growth.
- Sales rep location, skill and expertise vs. market need.
This leads to trade-off decisions. There is no right answer. Each organization has its own priorities, methods, or ‘algorithms’ for balancing these trade-offs to arrive at territory definition and quota assignments that create the most value for the enterprise – in terms of short-and long-term growth, profitability, and firm value.”
- There are seven interrelated decision factors that inform the development of growth strategies and plans.
- It’s possible to identify and predict which sellers have the highest probability of hitting their quotas or churning, including the ability to drill down into the detail on the headwinds, tailwinds, traits, and behaviors that explain why they are at risk and what drives their performance.
PART IV How to Get Started and Drive Impact
CHAPTER 11 Deliver Growth with Six Smart Actions
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CHAPTER 12 Tailor Revenue Operations to Work for Your Business, Big or Small
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CHAPTER 13 Make the Business Case for Your Growth System, from Activity to Impact
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CHAPTER 14 Practical Tools to Take Control of Your Revenue Cycle
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