A report by Forrester found that companies that align the people, process, and technology involved in the demand engine will experience 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability.

But it's not just about numbers. Ask any customer why they chose Slack over Microsoft Teams, or why they switched from Salesforce to HubSpot. Often, it's because one company provided a more consistent, personalized experience at every touchpoint. That's RevOps in action.

Yet, for every success story, there are companies still wrestling with departmental silos, data gaps, and misaligned goals.

This guide is for those companies—and maybe yours. Whether you're a startup looking to scale rapidly or an enterprise aiming to stay agile, RevOps could be your game-changer. We'll outline the best practices to ace RevOps in your company in 2024.

10 RevOps Best Practices to Promote Growth

RevOps isn't just a buzzword; it's a strategic approach that can transform your business. But like any major shift, it requires careful planning and execution.

Pillars of RevOps - Source

Let's dive into the Revops best practices that will set you up for success.

1. Understand The Current State of Your Business

Before you can improve, you need to know where you stand. Start by mapping your entire customer journey, from first touch to renewal. Note every interaction, tool used, and team involved.

This exercise often reveals gaps—maybe marketing's leads aren't meeting sales' needs, or customer success lacks context from sales interactions.

Next, survey your teams. Ask sales reps if they have the right content, marketers if they get feedback on lead quality, and support staff if they can access a customer's purchase history. Their answers will highlight pain points and opportunities.

Also, look at your numbers. What's your lead-to-customer conversion rate? Average deal size? Customer lifetime value? These metrics offer a quantitative view of your current performance.

2. Align All Departments

Revenue doesn't just happen in sales. It's nurtured by marketing, closed by sales, and sustained by customer success. RevOps aligns these teams around shared goals.

Start with a revenue summit. Gather leaders from each department and set collective targets—say, increasing annual recurring revenue by 30%. Then, break this down: marketing aims for 5,000 qualified leads, sales targets 500 new customers, and success shoots for a 95% retention rate.

Next, foster collaboration. Have marketers shadow sales calls to understand objections. Let support teams teach sales about common customer issues. When everyone appreciates each other's challenges, silos start to crumble.

Consider reorganizing around customer segments rather than functions. Instead of a generic "sales team," you might have groups dedicated to enterprise, mid-market, and SMB clients, each including marketers and success managers.

3. Consolidate & Optimize Your Tech Stack

The average company uses 20+ marketing tools alone. This fragmentation leads to data silos, redundant work, and a disjointed customer experience.

Start with an audit. List every tool each team uses, its purpose, and integration capabilities. You'll likely find overlap—three email tools, multiple CRMs. Now, make tough choices. Which platforms offer the most cross-functional value? Salesforce might win over HubSpot because it integrates better with your billing system.

As you consolidate, prioritize tools that span the customer journey. A platform like Gong, which records sales calls, helps marketing refine messages and guides support on common issues. Similarly, a robust CRM like Salesforce or a comprehensive suite like HubSpot can serve as your central nervous system, connecting all customer data.

Don't forget integration. Use tools like Zapier or native connectors to sync data between systems. This ensures that when a lead engages with a marketing email, sales sees it instantly in their CRM.

4. Determine the Right Metrics

Traditional metrics often incentivize the wrong behaviors. Marketing chases lead volume over quality; sales rushes to close deals without considering lifetime value.

Instead, focus on metrics that reflect the entire customer journey:

  • Marketing: Move beyond leads to "Sales Accepted Leads" (SALs) or "Pipeline Influenced."
  • Sales: Look past quota to metrics like "Average Contract Value" or "Time to Productivity" for new logos.
  • Customer Success: Go beyond retention to "Net Revenue Retention" (NRR) or "Expansion Revenue."

Most importantly, establish shared metrics. "Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to Lifetime Value (LTV) Ratio" holds all teams accountable for bringing in profitable, long-term customers.

Regularly review these metrics in cross-functional meetings. If NRR is slipping, sales and marketing can adjust to target better-fit customers.

5. Document Everything

As your RevOps machine hums, document every process. This isn't busy work; it's your playbook for scaling and continuous improvement.

Start with customer-facing processes:

  • Lead scoring criteria
  • Sales qualification questions
  • Onboarding checklists
  • Upsell triggers

Then, map internal workflows:

  • How leads move from marketing to sales
  • Deal approval chains
  • Customer escalation paths

The key is making them easily accessible. A new sales rep should quickly find the "Objection Handling Guide" in your shared drive.

Update these docs religiously. After each quarter, gather teams to refine processes based on what worked and what didn't.

6. Orchestrate Your Siloed Data to Unite Cross-Functional Teams

Data is the lifeblood of RevOps, but it often sits in departmental silos. Marketing's data shows high engagement with an ebook, but sales doesn't know which prospects read it. This disconnect hinders personalization and smart decision-making.

The solution? Data orchestration. This means taking data from various sources, cleaning it, and making it universally accessible. Start by identifying key data points each team needs:

  • Marketing wants lead source and content preferences
  • Sales needs firmographic data and engagement history
  • Success requires product usage stats and support tickets

Next, choose a data orchestration tool like Segment or Tealium. These platforms ingest data from all your apps, standardize it, and pipe it where it's needed. Now, when a sales rep opens a lead's profile, they see not just contact info, but which webinars they attended and features they've used.

7. Pay Attention to Your Burn Multiple

In the quest for growth, it's easy to overspend. The "burn multiple"—how much you burn in cash to generate each dollar of new revenue—keeps this in check.

Here's how to calculate it:

  1. Net Burn Rate = Total Cash Out - Total Cash In (monthly)
  2. Net New Revenue = This Month's Revenue - Last Month's Revenue
  3. Burn Multiple = Net Burn Rate ÷ Net New Revenue

A burn multiple above 2 is concerning; above 3 is alarming. It means you're spending too much to acquire customers.

Review this metric monthly with all revenue teams. If it's high, dig in:

  • Is marketing spending on low-converting channels?
  • Are sales cycles too long?
  • Is poor onboarding causing quick churn?

Use these insights to reallocate resources. Maybe you shift budget from broad LinkedIn ads to targeted industry events, or invest in sales enablement to speed up deals.

8. Capture, Utilize, and Democratize Data

In RevOps, data isn't just for analysts; it's for everyone. Start by capturing more. Use tools like Clearbit to enrich lead data automatically. Install Hotjar to see how prospects navigate your website. Enable conversation intelligence in Gong to transcribe every sales call.

Next, make this data actionable:

  • Surface content engagement data in your CRM so sales can reference a prospect's favorite whitepaper.
  • Send product usage alerts to success managers, prompting them to suggest advanced features.
  • Push NPS scores to marketing, helping them target happy customers for case studies.

Most importantly, democratize access. Use a business intelligence tool like Looker or Tableau to create dashboards anyone can explore. A marketer shouldn't need to request a report to see how their campaigns impact sales velocity.

Train everyone in data literacy. Hold workshops on SQL basics or Excel pivot tables. When all teams can slice and dice data, they make better, coordinated decisions.

9. Use Revenue Operations Software

While you can cobble together RevOps best practices with various tools, purpose-built software streamlines the process. Platforms like Clari, Gong, and People.ai offer features spanning the entire revenue lifecycle.

For instance, Clari provides:

  • Real-time pipeline visibility across teams
  • AI-driven forecasting that learns from all reps' behaviors
  • Activity capture to see every customer interaction

Gong, meanwhile, offers:

  • Call transcription and analysis to improve sales techniques
  • Deal risk alerts based on conversation sentiment
  • Sharable snippets for marketing to craft better messages

And People.ai delivers:

  • Automated data entry from emails and calendar
  • Account mapping to spot influencers and blockers
  • Performance insights compared to top performers

Start with core needs—say, forecasting and conversation intelligence. As your RevOps maturity grows, layer in more advanced tools.

10. Promote Continuous Learning

The best RevOps teams are learning machines. They constantly adapt based on data, market shifts, and internal feedback.

Foster a culture of curiosity:

  • Hold monthly "Revenue Roundtables" where each team shares a lesson. Maybe success explains why certain onboarding flows reduce time-to-value.
  • Create a "RevOps Book Club." Read and discuss titles like "The Challenger Sale" or "Product-Led Growth."
  • Launch "Shadow Days" where team members observe another role. A marketer might join sales calls, noting language that resonates.

Leverage external resources:

  • Send teams to conferences like SaaStr or RevGenius
  • Bring in consultants for workshops on topics like "Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Development"
  • Join communities like RevOps Co-Op to learn from peers

But the ultimate revops best practice is to make learning measurable. After a sales enablement session, track if reps handle objections better. When success teams adopt a new playbook, monitor its impact on expansion revenue.

What is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?

RevOps, short for Revenue Operations, is a business strategy that breaks down the walls between your sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Think of it as getting everyone on the same page to drive more revenue.

In the past, these teams often worked in silos. Marketing would generate leads, toss them over to sales, who'd close deals and hand customers off to the success team. Each department had its own goals, tools, and data. The result? A disjointed customer experience and missed opportunities.

RevOps changes this by aligning these teams around a single goal: growing revenue. It's about creating a seamless journey from the moment a prospect first hears about you to when they become a loyal, repeat customer.

Why Should You Invest In RevOps?

You might be thinking, "My teams are doing fine. Why shake things up?" Here's why:

  1. Customer expectations have skyrocketed. Today's buyers demand a consistent, personalized experience at every touchpoint. If your marketing promises one thing, but sales delivers another, you'll lose them.
  2. Data is everywhere. Each team collects valuable insights, but they often stay trapped in departmental silos. RevOps breaks these silos, giving everyone a 360-degree view of the customer.
  3. Competition is fierce. In many industries, products are becoming commoditized. The company that provides the best end-to-end experience often wins.
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61% of overperforming sales leaders use automation in parts of their sales process.

Benefits of RevOps: RevOps is The Most Comprehensive Strategy

RevOps, Revenue Marketing, and Growth Marketing all aim to boost revenue, but in different ways.

  • Revenue Marketing aligns sales and marketing, often neglecting service.
  • Growth Marketing uses data to increase leads, conversions, and loyalty.
  • RevOps is more comprehensive, unifying all revenue-driving teams—sales, marketing, and service—to optimize the entire customer journey.

Some companies combine these approaches for even better results, with RevOps providing overall alignment and the others offering specialized support.

Adopting RevOps isn't just a nice-to-have; it delivers tangible results:

  1. Increased Revenue: This is the big one. Companies with strong alignment between sales and marketing see 20% annual revenue growth, according to Aberdeen Group.
  2. Better Forecasting: With a unified view of your pipeline, you can predict revenue more accurately. No more surprises at quarter-end.
  3. Higher Win Rates: When teams share insights, sales can tailor pitches to each prospect's needs. HubSpot saw their close rates jump by 20% after adopting RevOps.
  4. Improved Customer Retention: A smooth handoff from sales to success means customers stick around longer. Zendesk credits their RevOps approach for a 10% boost in retention.
  5. Greater Efficiency: Shared tools and processes cut down on duplicate work. Employees spend less time on admin and more on high-value tasks.

What are the Challenges of RevOps?

RevOps offers big rewards, but the transition isn't always easy:

  1. Cultural Resistance: Sales, marketing, and success have traditionally had different cultures. Sales might be aggressive, while success is more nurturing. Getting them to work as one team takes effort.
  2. Technology Hurdles: Each department often has its favorite tools. Deciding which ones to keep, integrate, or replace can be contentious.
  3. Data Quality Issues: When you merge data from multiple sources, you often find inconsistencies. Cleaning this up is crucial but time-consuming.
  4. Metric Alignment: Each team has its key metrics—MQLs for marketing, quota for sales. Agreeing on shared KPIs that reflect the entire customer journey is challenging.
  5. Skills Gap: RevOps requires people who understand all three functions and can work cross-functionally. These "unicorns" can be hard to find or train.

Advanced RevOps Strategies to Look Into

  1. Predictive Analytics: Utilize predictive analytics to forecast trends and make proactive adjustments to RevOps strategies.
  2. AI and Machine Learning: Leverage AI and machine learning tools to automate complex data analysis, providing deeper insights and enabling more strategic decision-making.
  3. Customer Journey Mapping: Develop detailed customer journey maps to understand and optimize every touchpoint in the customer experience.
  4. Segmentation and Personalization: Use data to segment customers and personalize marketing, sales, and service efforts, enhancing the customer experience and improving conversion rates.

Wrapping Up!

We've covered the essentials: aligning teams, optimizing tech, setting metrics, and fostering continuous learning. It's not just theory—companies are using these practices to dominate their markets.

But RevOps isn't static. New tools, buyer shifts, economic changes—your aligned, data-driven teams will adapt faster than siloed competitors.

The shift to RevOps isn't coming; it's here. Industry leaders are already reaping the rewards. The question isn't whether to adopt it but how quickly. You have Revops best practices and roadmap. Now, it's time to build your revenue engine for hypergrowth.

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