“We want durable, sustainable revenue.” - Rosalyn Santa Elena
RevOps has grown significantly. In fact, 48% of companies now have a RevOps function, up 15% from last year. But with more representation in the revenue process comes more responsibilities. RevOps leaders are tasked with fixing poor processes, misalignment, and data quality as their top challenges for the coming year. How can revenue orchestration help teams overcome these hurdles?
“There's so many different tools out there but there's a lot of overlap. One tool will do nine-tenths of what you want, and then you have to purchase another tool to do a third of what you want.” - Tana McDermott
RevOps leaders are still facing the same challenges year after year, even though new tools, like AI, have been introduced into our workflows. We still struggle with poor processes, misalignment across teams, and data quality that isn’t good enough.
RevOps is used to being asked to do more with less, and that hasn’t changed. At Brightly, Ashley Moralez has a small team that needs to scale to support a growing business. With rapid growth comes rapid change. One of her challenges is needing to push back on some of that change to ensure that there’s a true business need and real ROI attached. “We don’t want to solve a need that might just scratch the itch today,” she says.
Tana McDermott highlights that RevOps has increased expectations year after year, but not always increased headcount. One of her challenges is figuring out how to produce 20% more revenue with the same amount of people, efficiently. Often, we look to our tech stack for this lift, but with so many tools that solve only part of the problem, there’s a lot of overlap.
While the operational challenges are often the same, the lens that companies are using to view operations is different. Today’s businesses want predictable revenue. This requires having confidence in forecasts, alignment across teams, and the ability to make actionable decisions quickly.
Jump to the clip for Ashley’s advice on slowing down and understanding business needs before making changes.
“I think change management is probably the number one thing that everyone forgets about when you’re going through process changes or evaluations.” - Ashley Moralez
We make changes with the best intentions to create a better experience for our sellers and buyers. But that doesn’t mean that change management will be easy or that the changes will be adopted.
When evaluating a new technology, or even an optimization in Salesforce, start with your business need to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. Is this a 3-year fix? A 5-year fix? Or a long-term fix? You’re investing not just money into the technology but the time to build out the system, create processes, and train your team. It’s a hard pill to swallow when all your work is re-done two years later.
The technology landscape changes fast. Tana points out that when growing a sales development team, you’re hiring people from different companies who use tools you might not have, like an auto-dialer. Your sellers are going to feel deflated when they make 80 calls a day and only talk to two people. We have to focus on efficiency but don’t forget that you also need to make your people happy.
Jump to the clip for answers to the question: As you’re evaluating technology to solve your problems, should you look for a tool with 100% coverage?
“Data is only valuable when it's accurate, easy for the team to put it in the system and keep up to date, and requires less admin work.” - Ashley Moralez
Quality, comprehensive, and accessible data is a foundational pillar for successful RevOps initiatives. When everyone views data from the same source of truth, it ensures that they see the business in the same way. If your marketing team is looking at a different set of revenue data than your CEO, that’s a big cause of misalignment.
Over the last few years, Ashley has worked on streamlining the sources of data points at Brightly. Today they centralize data with the business intelligence team which supports revenue operations. Together, they set KPIs and collaborate to ensure that what sales puts into Salesforce is measurable and aligns with desired outcomes.
Jump to the clip to hear why quality, comprehensive, and accessible data is a core foundation of durable revenue growth.
“I think about RevOps as the revenue conductor, the maestro in the front. By having strong revenue orchestration, we can start to move toward strategic alignment across the business.” - Rosalyn Santa Elena
One of the major Salesloft initiatives at Brightly is improving product rollout. When bringing a new product to the market, you want to communicate effectively to different personas. Since Brightly works in different vertices, each with its own personas, Ashley uses Salesloft to streamline processes around product enablement and go-to-market strategies.
Salesloft helps ensure that the outreach cadences are built to be the right fit for these personas. From an operational standpoint, sellers don’t need to worry about recreating the wheel for every product release and really enjoy the streamlined approach.
At Workiva, Tana highlights how Salesloft improves the customer experience. There are so many people who touch the customer account, from marketing to sales to customer success, but the customer doesn’t need to talk to everyone. Salesloft lets teams send call recordings to key stakeholders involved in the opportunity to share knowledge throughout the sales cycle.
Jump to the clip to hear about how Ashley encountered the “wild west” stage of Salesloft implementation at Brightly when she joined.
“It just comes back to consistency and the global sales team using one tool.” - Tana McDermott
Tana brings back the challenge of overlap in technology functionality. While Salesloft is fueling the fire, what else can be added on top of it? As she mentioned before, AI capabilities and auto-dialers can increase efficiency and productivity while making the sales team happier. You should also see what else you can get out of technology that you already own and decide to get rid of some tools.
As sales and growth slow down in a difficult market, your team might start to suffer from change management fatigue. Ashley says that this is a good time to focus on optimizing and leveraging what you already have in your technology. Right now, Brightly is looking at their library of cadences in Salesloft, removing what doesn’t work, and collaborating with marketing and customer success to be even more efficient.
Jump to the clip to learn why Tana says that building cross-functional alignment is like building a house.
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