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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
Revenue Operation teams (RevOps) focus on boosting operational efficiency and driving revenue growth by bridging gaps between Marketing, Sales, Service, and Customer Success teams.
They pinpoint the most crucial strategies and tools for streamlining operations and fostering accountability.
RevOps teams unite with Finance teams around these 4 core objectives:
🎯 Enhancing conversions and margins
🎯 Reducing revenue leakage
🎯 Leveraging customer data for new opportunities
🎯 Streamlining efficiencies to decrease cost of acquisition (CAC) per channel
Collaboration between RevOps leaders and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) is crucial to ensure data from every function is accessible to all parties. This collaboration not only enhances operational efficiency and provides a seamless customer experience but also enables finance teams to monitor, analyze, forecast, and plan the company's financial future.
Drawing on our collective expertise with numerous RevOps leaders and CFOs, we have developed the ultimate guide for establishing resilient operations, capable of thriving during economic instability.
Let’s dive in!
CFOs are responsible for managing a company's finances, while RevOps oversees the revenue generation process. Collaboration between these two departments is crucial for achieving financial stability and driving growth.
RevOps is all about maximizing a company’s revenue potential through efficiency gains in processes across go-to-market. The CFO is focused on the bookings and revenue recognition, while RevOps is focused on the processes that make those bookings happen.
At the same time, a large focus of RevOps is data and reporting. RevOps analyzes funnel progression and velocity from the time a lead enters the funnel all the way to when they become Closed Won. They look to see whether we progressing leads through the funnel as fast and efficiently as we can. These efficiency gains maximize the time of Sales, Marketing, Service, and Customer Success to then increase their output and accelerate the funnel.
During a fireside chat with Craig Jordan, Founder & CEO of SaaScend, he said:
As the revenue operations role gathers baseline data, they can then measure impact of efficiency gains as they optimize processes and see when the funnel and sales cycles are accelerating.
Monitoring funnel progression provides RevOps with insight to predictability of revenue which is where their collaboration with the CFO can have a huge impact.
The CFO is the master and commander of all things related to the budget. It is their role to take a conservative approach, making sure that the company stays healthy and is not overextending themselves financially.
This is critical especially for startups that are growing at a rapid rate, where teams need investments to continue to scale. It is the CFO’s role to make sure that the amount of investments are not done to a point that would compromise the company’s health.
CFOs are focused on revenue recognition — how much do you have in bookings and then what does that equal when it is actualized? However, to truly understand the state of the business and keep a pulse on company health, the CFO needs to know what is coming ahead. Without this insight, they start to be reactive rather than proactive.
Good CFOs are metric-driven and desire foresight into what is coming down the funnel. They are aligned to forecasts, knowing what will potentially happen and can therefore be better stewards of the company’s finances. Being informed of what is ahead gives them a picture of the current state of the state. Which is why it is no surprise that in a survey done by Gartner of 157 CFO’s, 80% of them ranked “developing a planning, budgeting, and forecasting strategy” as one of their top five priorities.
The RevOps role has the full view of the funnel and specializes in understanding its progression. As they gather data and report on the amount of leads generated, the speed at which they progress to sales, and then the velocity at which they progress through the sales cycle, as well as the rate of conversion between each stage, they have strong insight into the forecast.
RevOps can identify trends as they collaborate with the Go-To-Market teams and say predictions such as: “Based on historical data, we can predict that this set of leads according to their profile, needs, and the path they are taking through the funnel, will have a higher likelihood to close.” Using the historical data, they can also share predictions on how fast certain deals and accounts might progress through sales cycles and become Closed Won.
RevOps has a wealth of knowledge and insight into funnel progression and predictability of revenue that the CFO can use to have a pulse on what is expected to come — so they can be proactive in their stewardship over the business’ finances.
This collaboration is critical now more than ever as more businesses (53%) are being pushed by their boards to repackage their offerings as a subscription or usage-based pricing model to increase their recurring revenue streams (CFO Research, 2019).
Forbes Contributor, Stephen Diorio commented:
This shift from discreet sales transactions to streams of revenues based on subscriptions, milestones, promises and consumption has blurred the lines between the front office and back office all along the revenue cycle. And risks. A byproduct of all this change is it has rendered the traditional financial control systems used by finance teams inadequate to manage the speed, changes, complexity and collaboration associated with recurring revenue streams.
Who better to come alongside the CFO to help manage the speed, changes, complexity and collaboration across GTM of these recurring revenue streams than RevOps?
On the other side, CFOs can guide RevOps with insight into the health of the business and advise them as they invest into different initiatives that will progress efficiency and overall growth.
The two working together creates a force that can be proactive and make well-informed data-driven decisions to increase overall revenue and progress growth.
Common challenges, such as:
❌ Misaligned objectives
❌ Limited visibility
❌ Inefficient processes
These can be overcome through effective collaboration. CFOs can bring their financial expertise to the table, while RevOps can provide insights into customer behavior and market trends.
Together, they can develop strategies that optimize revenue generation and ensure financial stability.
One critical area where CFOs and RevOps can collaborate is optimizing the cost of customer acquisition (CAC).
Funnel visibility is essential for both departments to make data-driven decisions that maximize returns on investment. Using techniques, such as:
✅ Cohort analysis
✅ Customer segmentation
✅ Funnel mapping
CFOs and RevOps can identify the most effective channels for customer acquisition. Leveraging data and analytics, they can make informed decisions about how to allocate resources and optimize their Marketing and Sales efforts.
Gaining greater visibility into your funnel starts with mapping out your lifecycle stages that occur from Prospect to Closed Won. Your lifecycle stages will depend on your business, but the 5 common stages are:
The purpose of identifying and defining your stages is to ultimately understand the rate of conversion between each stage and the velocity, or the rate at which leads are progressing between each stage.
RevOps configures your lifecycle stages into your CRM and marketing automation systems and creates time stamping mechanisms to track the delta of time that lapses between each stage to track funnel velocity and rate of conversion.
This rule criteria is an example of what can be used to mark the time of a lead being moved to the Customer (final) stage.
Funnel mapping and using lifecycle stage tracking is half of what needs to happen to answer the question: “Which channels and campaigns will generate leads and progress them through the funnel at the fastest rate for the cheapest cost?“. The other half comes from disciplined campaign reporting.
To optimize the CAC, you need to have your marketing attribution reporting optimized. There are 6 essential elements that need to be in place to achieve this. But prioritizing the setup will pay off dividends because the data will highlight what is working and what is now — empowering leadership to cease investments on what is not yielding results and double down on what is to maximize their return on investment.
Revenue operations can collaborate with Marketing and ensure that all the mechanisms are set up to capture every campaign touchpoint of the buyer’s journey and foster accuracy as contacts are associated with opportunities to report attribution.
Marketing then needs to make sure they are keeping track of the cost of each campaign and adding the cost to the CRM — so that RevOps and CFO’s can have a more accurate understanding of their CAC.
Marketing measures campaign ROI. RevOps can collaborate with them using this intelligence along with the data they get from lifecycle stage tracking to understand the campaign paths that are progressing leads through the funnel at the fastest rate for the cheapest cost. This helps to inform them what can be done to make the progression as efficient as possible and optimize the company's CAC.
Startups often have limited resources and must be creative to maximize their returns on investment. CFOs and RevOps can collaborate in several areas to reduce startup costs and drive overall financial efficiency. Here are some key areas where collaboration can make a difference:
Companies are putting 53% more toward SaaS licensing compared to five years ago. At the same time, 57% of IT teams say they are under pressure to significantly reduce software spend at their organizations.
By conducting a thorough audit of the current tech stack, you can identify areas of redundancy and potential savings and prioritize technology investments based on their cost, benefits, and ROI. RevOps and CFOs can also develop a standardized process for purchasing and evaluating technology to avoid overspending and ensure that new technology is aligned with the organization's goals.
Collaborate on tech evaluations: By working together to negotiate and manage contracts with vendors and partners, CFOs and RevOps can ensure favorable terms that minimize costs and mitigate risks. By evaluating and selecting the right technology solutions that support their objectives, you ensure that investments are made wisely and deliver the desired ROI. In order to make the evaluations successful, ask more questions:
Unlock discounts by paying upfront: Many SaaS vendors offer large discounts for paying them upfront. When you use a tool like Gynger, you can access these discounts while still paying monthly. Gynger pays your vendor upfront, unlocking significant savings, and you pay them back in the terms that work for you. This is a win-win for all teams — get the tools you need while paying on your terms, at lower costs.
Optimize your procurement process: Using a platform like Vendr, you can easily find, buy, renew, and manage your software subscriptions in one place. Vendr provides a centralized system for managing the entire procurement lifecycle, from vendor evaluation to contract negotiation and renewal. This can help you quickly compare features, pricing, and user reviews of different software solutions, making it easier to identify the best-fit tools that align with your budget and needs.
By working together, RevOps and CFOs can ensure that the organization is using the right technology, in the right way, to meet its business objectives. With global software spend expected to grow to $879B in 2023, focusing on streamlining SaaS procurement and management and negotiating savings will be key to maintaining capital efficiency.
Developing strategies for customer success and retention can help reduce churn rates and increase customer lifetime value, ultimately reducing costs associated with acquiring new customers.
Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. By analyzing current cash flow patterns and implementing proactive management strategies, CFOs and RevOps can ensure the long-term financial health of the company.
By spreading out large upfront expenses over 3-12 months you can smooth cash flow. This enables you to hold onto your cash longer and prioritize it for high ROI investments, like hiring or acquiring customers. It’s also an easy way to arbitrage discounts by offering to prepay your vendors in exchange for a discount.
The cash flow benefits are similar to #1 above, while also enabling you to offset delayed payback periods of customer acquisition costs by delaying some of the costs incurred from onboarding/acquiring them. In short, this is another way you can preserve cash longer.
Send invoices to customers as soon as you’ve rendered services or even before services or products have been purchased (if you use a subscription-based model). Delayed invoices can result in customers forgetting and ignoring the bill, disrupting your cash flow.
Likewise, if customers know they can pay their bills late with little consequence, they generally will. You can implement late fees to avoid disrupting cash flow caused by delinquent payments.
→ Bonus: Offer Discounts for Early Payments
Customers will be willing to pay their bills early if you offer a small discount. This keeps late payments to a minimum while preserving cash flow.
Building a resilient revenue operations framework requires alignment between teams and processes, disciplined and accurate reporting, and building and investing in critical systems that will contribute towards your revenue growth.
There is one metric that aligns your departments and that is revenue. What is the revenue goal that you are working to achieve for this quarter, the next, and the year? What is the YoY growth that the business is striving to accomplish? Making sure that all teams understand this then trickles down into each of their departments for what they will need to do individually and cross-functionally to make the goals a reality.
The CFO and RevOps team can collaborate using the data they have and their expertise to communicate and inform departments of what can be done from an optimization standpoint to help make the revenue goals achievable and hit them faster.
RevOps can bring valuable insights to the CFO, but if reporting is not optimized and data is not reliable to prove effectiveness, then a negative effect that can happen is the CFO starts to view RevOps as a cost center.
“Top B2B tech companies that leaned on RevOps to accelerate their growth experienced significant benefits, including 10% to 20% increases in Sales productivity.” (Sources: Boston Consulting Group)
RevOps needs to be able to have reporting in place that proves this and captures the impact that it has on the business. Which is why capturing baselines is so important. They need to be able to point to where processes, productivity, and output were before optimizations and where they are now as a result, measuring growth quarter over quarter and YoY.
Answering questions, such as:
Being able to have reliable data that answers these types of questions across Marketing, Sales, Service, and Customer Success, proves the value and the impact that RevOps is having on the business.
In turn, having insight to this data and communicating trends, predictions, and recommendations to the CFO fosters stronger collaboration and supports a resilient revenue operations framework.
Systems include the processes that happen among your teams and the technologies used to execute those processes. RevOps is focused on building systems that either contribute towards optimized efficiency or provide data insight to make well-informed strategic decisions. Efficiency and insight both contribute towards scalability and growth, but as discussed, you need to measure the impact along the way to prove this out.
To build systems that contribute towards growth, supporting a resilient revenue operations framework, we recommend the following steps:
👉 Audit your processes
If RevOps has not done so already, we recommend auditing your processes across sales, marketing, service, and customer success. Note the technologies being used. Are they siloed or have they been integrated with your other tools? Are there any manual or repetitive processes taking your team’s time that could be done more efficiently to foster scalability and accelerate funnel progression? Are the managers of each department and leadership able to get the data insights they need to lead their teams to success?
👉 Identify areas of need
From the audit, define areas of need, prioritize the ones that will make the greatest impact on the business and establish your plan of execution.
👉 Plan your resources to invest in
Resources can include people and technologies. Founder & CEO of SaaScend, Craig Jordan, always cautions, “Don’t buy technology for the sake of buying technology.” Tools that will contribute towards efficiency gains, revenue growth, and data insight are worth your investment.
For example, Chili Piper can double your inbound conversion rates, and get more meetings booked on your Sales team’s calendars to accelerate the progression to pipeline. Knowing and defining the goals that the resources will help your team to achieve will help to plan from a priority standpoint of what should be invested in first to make the greatest impact.
👉 Align with leadership
As RevOps identifies areas of need and plans resources for investment, they need to be aligned with leadership, including the CFO, and the managers of each department to fully understand how each department is operating, the goals they are working to achieve, and how those goals align to the overall company objectives.
RevOps then needs to be communicating their plans to the leadership and department managers to foster collaboration and deepen their alignment. Taking the time to position rev ops strategically with the leaders of the business will help to ensure the systems you are building will contribute towards growth and will create a more resilient revenue operations framework.
Effective communication channels are crucial for collaboration between CFOs and RevOps. Adopting technology solutions such as Chili Piper can also drive growth and enable organizations to adapt to changing economic conditions.
Continuous improvement and adaptation are essential for long-term success. CFOs and RevOps should continuously monitor their performance and adjust their strategies to reflect changing market conditions.
Collaboration between CFOs and RevOps is essential for organizations to thrive during economic instability.
By optimizing the cost of acquisition, reducing costs, optimizing cash flow, building a resilient revenue operations framework, and learning from real-life success stories, organizations can adapt and thrive in the face of economic uncertainty.
This guide is an original piece of content created in collaboration with Gynger, SaaScend and Chili Piper. Thank you to Hubspot, Maxio, Driveway and Sweep for their input.
Revenue Operation teams (RevOps) focus on boosting operational efficiency and driving revenue growth by bridging gaps between Marketing, Sales, Service, and Customer Success teams.
They pinpoint the most crucial strategies and tools for streamlining operations and fostering accountability.
RevOps teams unite with Finance teams around these 4 core objectives:
🎯 Enhancing conversions and margins
🎯 Reducing revenue leakage
🎯 Leveraging customer data for new opportunities
🎯 Streamlining efficiencies to decrease cost of acquisition (CAC) per channel
Collaboration between RevOps leaders and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) is crucial to ensure data from every function is accessible to all parties. This collaboration not only enhances operational efficiency and provides a seamless customer experience but also enables finance teams to monitor, analyze, forecast, and plan the company's financial future.
Drawing on our collective expertise with numerous RevOps leaders and CFOs, we have developed the ultimate guide for establishing resilient operations, capable of thriving during economic instability.
Let’s dive in!
CFOs are responsible for managing a company's finances, while RevOps oversees the revenue generation process. Collaboration between these two departments is crucial for achieving financial stability and driving growth.
RevOps is all about maximizing a company’s revenue potential through efficiency gains in processes across go-to-market. The CFO is focused on the bookings and revenue recognition, while RevOps is focused on the processes that make those bookings happen.
At the same time, a large focus of RevOps is data and reporting. RevOps analyzes funnel progression and velocity from the time a lead enters the funnel all the way to when they become Closed Won. They look to see whether we progressing leads through the funnel as fast and efficiently as we can. These efficiency gains maximize the time of Sales, Marketing, Service, and Customer Success to then increase their output and accelerate the funnel.
During a fireside chat with Craig Jordan, Founder & CEO of SaaScend, he said:
As the revenue operations role gathers baseline data, they can then measure impact of efficiency gains as they optimize processes and see when the funnel and sales cycles are accelerating.
Monitoring funnel progression provides RevOps with insight to predictability of revenue which is where their collaboration with the CFO can have a huge impact.
The CFO is the master and commander of all things related to the budget. It is their role to take a conservative approach, making sure that the company stays healthy and is not overextending themselves financially.
This is critical especially for startups that are growing at a rapid rate, where teams need investments to continue to scale. It is the CFO’s role to make sure that the amount of investments are not done to a point that would compromise the company’s health.
CFOs are focused on revenue recognition — how much do you have in bookings and then what does that equal when it is actualized? However, to truly understand the state of the business and keep a pulse on company health, the CFO needs to know what is coming ahead. Without this insight, they start to be reactive rather than proactive.
Good CFOs are metric-driven and desire foresight into what is coming down the funnel. They are aligned to forecasts, knowing what will potentially happen and can therefore be better stewards of the company’s finances. Being informed of what is ahead gives them a picture of the current state of the state. Which is why it is no surprise that in a survey done by Gartner of 157 CFO’s, 80% of them ranked “developing a planning, budgeting, and forecasting strategy” as one of their top five priorities.
The RevOps role has the full view of the funnel and specializes in understanding its progression. As they gather data and report on the amount of leads generated, the speed at which they progress to sales, and then the velocity at which they progress through the sales cycle, as well as the rate of conversion between each stage, they have strong insight into the forecast.
RevOps can identify trends as they collaborate with the Go-To-Market teams and say predictions such as: “Based on historical data, we can predict that this set of leads according to their profile, needs, and the path they are taking through the funnel, will have a higher likelihood to close.” Using the historical data, they can also share predictions on how fast certain deals and accounts might progress through sales cycles and become Closed Won.
RevOps has a wealth of knowledge and insight into funnel progression and predictability of revenue that the CFO can use to have a pulse on what is expected to come — so they can be proactive in their stewardship over the business’ finances.
This collaboration is critical now more than ever as more businesses (53%) are being pushed by their boards to repackage their offerings as a subscription or usage-based pricing model to increase their recurring revenue streams (CFO Research, 2019).
Forbes Contributor, Stephen Diorio commented:
This shift from discreet sales transactions to streams of revenues based on subscriptions, milestones, promises and consumption has blurred the lines between the front office and back office all along the revenue cycle. And risks. A byproduct of all this change is it has rendered the traditional financial control systems used by finance teams inadequate to manage the speed, changes, complexity and collaboration associated with recurring revenue streams.
Who better to come alongside the CFO to help manage the speed, changes, complexity and collaboration across GTM of these recurring revenue streams than RevOps?
On the other side, CFOs can guide RevOps with insight into the health of the business and advise them as they invest into different initiatives that will progress efficiency and overall growth.
The two working together creates a force that can be proactive and make well-informed data-driven decisions to increase overall revenue and progress growth.
Common challenges, such as:
❌ Misaligned objectives
❌ Limited visibility
❌ Inefficient processes
These can be overcome through effective collaboration. CFOs can bring their financial expertise to the table, while RevOps can provide insights into customer behavior and market trends.
Together, they can develop strategies that optimize revenue generation and ensure financial stability.
One critical area where CFOs and RevOps can collaborate is optimizing the cost of customer acquisition (CAC).
Funnel visibility is essential for both departments to make data-driven decisions that maximize returns on investment. Using techniques, such as:
✅ Cohort analysis
✅ Customer segmentation
✅ Funnel mapping
CFOs and RevOps can identify the most effective channels for customer acquisition. Leveraging data and analytics, they can make informed decisions about how to allocate resources and optimize their Marketing and Sales efforts.
Gaining greater visibility into your funnel starts with mapping out your lifecycle stages that occur from Prospect to Closed Won. Your lifecycle stages will depend on your business, but the 5 common stages are:
The purpose of identifying and defining your stages is to ultimately understand the rate of conversion between each stage and the velocity, or the rate at which leads are progressing between each stage.
RevOps configures your lifecycle stages into your CRM and marketing automation systems and creates time stamping mechanisms to track the delta of time that lapses between each stage to track funnel velocity and rate of conversion.
This rule criteria is an example of what can be used to mark the time of a lead being moved to the Customer (final) stage.
Funnel mapping and using lifecycle stage tracking is half of what needs to happen to answer the question: “Which channels and campaigns will generate leads and progress them through the funnel at the fastest rate for the cheapest cost?“. The other half comes from disciplined campaign reporting.
To optimize the CAC, you need to have your marketing attribution reporting optimized. There are 6 essential elements that need to be in place to achieve this. But prioritizing the setup will pay off dividends because the data will highlight what is working and what is now — empowering leadership to cease investments on what is not yielding results and double down on what is to maximize their return on investment.
Revenue operations can collaborate with Marketing and ensure that all the mechanisms are set up to capture every campaign touchpoint of the buyer’s journey and foster accuracy as contacts are associated with opportunities to report attribution.
Marketing then needs to make sure they are keeping track of the cost of each campaign and adding the cost to the CRM — so that RevOps and CFO’s can have a more accurate understanding of their CAC.
Marketing measures campaign ROI. RevOps can collaborate with them using this intelligence along with the data they get from lifecycle stage tracking to understand the campaign paths that are progressing leads through the funnel at the fastest rate for the cheapest cost. This helps to inform them what can be done to make the progression as efficient as possible and optimize the company's CAC.
Startups often have limited resources and must be creative to maximize their returns on investment. CFOs and RevOps can collaborate in several areas to reduce startup costs and drive overall financial efficiency. Here are some key areas where collaboration can make a difference:
Companies are putting 53% more toward SaaS licensing compared to five years ago. At the same time, 57% of IT teams say they are under pressure to significantly reduce software spend at their organizations.
By conducting a thorough audit of the current tech stack, you can identify areas of redundancy and potential savings and prioritize technology investments based on their cost, benefits, and ROI. RevOps and CFOs can also develop a standardized process for purchasing and evaluating technology to avoid overspending and ensure that new technology is aligned with the organization's goals.
Collaborate on tech evaluations: By working together to negotiate and manage contracts with vendors and partners, CFOs and RevOps can ensure favorable terms that minimize costs and mitigate risks. By evaluating and selecting the right technology solutions that support their objectives, you ensure that investments are made wisely and deliver the desired ROI. In order to make the evaluations successful, ask more questions:
Unlock discounts by paying upfront: Many SaaS vendors offer large discounts for paying them upfront. When you use a tool like Gynger, you can access these discounts while still paying monthly. Gynger pays your vendor upfront, unlocking significant savings, and you pay them back in the terms that work for you. This is a win-win for all teams — get the tools you need while paying on your terms, at lower costs.
Optimize your procurement process: Using a platform like Vendr, you can easily find, buy, renew, and manage your software subscriptions in one place. Vendr provides a centralized system for managing the entire procurement lifecycle, from vendor evaluation to contract negotiation and renewal. This can help you quickly compare features, pricing, and user reviews of different software solutions, making it easier to identify the best-fit tools that align with your budget and needs.
By working together, RevOps and CFOs can ensure that the organization is using the right technology, in the right way, to meet its business objectives. With global software spend expected to grow to $879B in 2023, focusing on streamlining SaaS procurement and management and negotiating savings will be key to maintaining capital efficiency.
Developing strategies for customer success and retention can help reduce churn rates and increase customer lifetime value, ultimately reducing costs associated with acquiring new customers.
Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. By analyzing current cash flow patterns and implementing proactive management strategies, CFOs and RevOps can ensure the long-term financial health of the company.
By spreading out large upfront expenses over 3-12 months you can smooth cash flow. This enables you to hold onto your cash longer and prioritize it for high ROI investments, like hiring or acquiring customers. It’s also an easy way to arbitrage discounts by offering to prepay your vendors in exchange for a discount.
The cash flow benefits are similar to #1 above, while also enabling you to offset delayed payback periods of customer acquisition costs by delaying some of the costs incurred from onboarding/acquiring them. In short, this is another way you can preserve cash longer.
Send invoices to customers as soon as you’ve rendered services or even before services or products have been purchased (if you use a subscription-based model). Delayed invoices can result in customers forgetting and ignoring the bill, disrupting your cash flow.
Likewise, if customers know they can pay their bills late with little consequence, they generally will. You can implement late fees to avoid disrupting cash flow caused by delinquent payments.
→ Bonus: Offer Discounts for Early Payments
Customers will be willing to pay their bills early if you offer a small discount. This keeps late payments to a minimum while preserving cash flow.
Building a resilient revenue operations framework requires alignment between teams and processes, disciplined and accurate reporting, and building and investing in critical systems that will contribute towards your revenue growth.
There is one metric that aligns your departments and that is revenue. What is the revenue goal that you are working to achieve for this quarter, the next, and the year? What is the YoY growth that the business is striving to accomplish? Making sure that all teams understand this then trickles down into each of their departments for what they will need to do individually and cross-functionally to make the goals a reality.
The CFO and RevOps team can collaborate using the data they have and their expertise to communicate and inform departments of what can be done from an optimization standpoint to help make the revenue goals achievable and hit them faster.
RevOps can bring valuable insights to the CFO, but if reporting is not optimized and data is not reliable to prove effectiveness, then a negative effect that can happen is the CFO starts to view RevOps as a cost center.
“Top B2B tech companies that leaned on RevOps to accelerate their growth experienced significant benefits, including 10% to 20% increases in Sales productivity.” (Sources: Boston Consulting Group)
RevOps needs to be able to have reporting in place that proves this and captures the impact that it has on the business. Which is why capturing baselines is so important. They need to be able to point to where processes, productivity, and output were before optimizations and where they are now as a result, measuring growth quarter over quarter and YoY.
Answering questions, such as:
Being able to have reliable data that answers these types of questions across Marketing, Sales, Service, and Customer Success, proves the value and the impact that RevOps is having on the business.
In turn, having insight to this data and communicating trends, predictions, and recommendations to the CFO fosters stronger collaboration and supports a resilient revenue operations framework.
Systems include the processes that happen among your teams and the technologies used to execute those processes. RevOps is focused on building systems that either contribute towards optimized efficiency or provide data insight to make well-informed strategic decisions. Efficiency and insight both contribute towards scalability and growth, but as discussed, you need to measure the impact along the way to prove this out.
To build systems that contribute towards growth, supporting a resilient revenue operations framework, we recommend the following steps:
👉 Audit your processes
If RevOps has not done so already, we recommend auditing your processes across sales, marketing, service, and customer success. Note the technologies being used. Are they siloed or have they been integrated with your other tools? Are there any manual or repetitive processes taking your team’s time that could be done more efficiently to foster scalability and accelerate funnel progression? Are the managers of each department and leadership able to get the data insights they need to lead their teams to success?
👉 Identify areas of need
From the audit, define areas of need, prioritize the ones that will make the greatest impact on the business and establish your plan of execution.
👉 Plan your resources to invest in
Resources can include people and technologies. Founder & CEO of SaaScend, Craig Jordan, always cautions, “Don’t buy technology for the sake of buying technology.” Tools that will contribute towards efficiency gains, revenue growth, and data insight are worth your investment.
For example, Chili Piper can double your inbound conversion rates, and get more meetings booked on your Sales team’s calendars to accelerate the progression to pipeline. Knowing and defining the goals that the resources will help your team to achieve will help to plan from a priority standpoint of what should be invested in first to make the greatest impact.
👉 Align with leadership
As RevOps identifies areas of need and plans resources for investment, they need to be aligned with leadership, including the CFO, and the managers of each department to fully understand how each department is operating, the goals they are working to achieve, and how those goals align to the overall company objectives.
RevOps then needs to be communicating their plans to the leadership and department managers to foster collaboration and deepen their alignment. Taking the time to position rev ops strategically with the leaders of the business will help to ensure the systems you are building will contribute towards growth and will create a more resilient revenue operations framework.
Effective communication channels are crucial for collaboration between CFOs and RevOps. Adopting technology solutions such as Chili Piper can also drive growth and enable organizations to adapt to changing economic conditions.
Continuous improvement and adaptation are essential for long-term success. CFOs and RevOps should continuously monitor their performance and adjust their strategies to reflect changing market conditions.
Collaboration between CFOs and RevOps is essential for organizations to thrive during economic instability.
By optimizing the cost of acquisition, reducing costs, optimizing cash flow, building a resilient revenue operations framework, and learning from real-life success stories, organizations can adapt and thrive in the face of economic uncertainty.
This guide is an original piece of content created in collaboration with Gynger, SaaScend and Chili Piper. Thank you to Hubspot, Maxio, Driveway and Sweep for their input.
Audrey is a Sr. Partner Marketing Manager at Chili Piper. In her free time, she enjoys rock climbing, yoga, and time spent in nature. After years spent in France and Australia, she is now settled in sunny Lisbon, Portugal.
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