Revenue operations is about getting all the departments that have an impact on revenue growth aligned with each other. To make the most use of revenue operations, you need a well-designed plan, and most importantly, a team of skilled people.
In this article, we’ll show you how to determine your revenue operations team structure and actionable tips to manage your team effectively.
Why Do You Need a Revenue Operations Team?
A revenue operations (RevOps) team is crucial for tracking your revenue operations activities and maximizing your revenue potential. Specifically, having this team in your organization gives you the following benefits:
- Ensure your sales, marketing, customer success, and revenue teams work in sync with each other. Research from Forrester has found that today’s board members “want to see clear evidence of connection and alignment between revenue-generating functions,” and companies that have highly aligned departments grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable than those that don’t. Your RevOps team will help you achieve this.
- Streamline workflows. Your RevOps team ensures every department knows their goals, gets the tools needed to work effectively, and has structured processes to follow. No more gaps, misunderstandings, or conflicts.
- Eliminate data silos. Your RevOps team brings together all the aspects of your business into one centralized hub of information and then distributes the right data to the right departments.
Revenue Operations Team Structure
The specific roles of a revenue operations team will vary depending on the size of your company, the industry you’re in, the product or service you’re selling, the audience you’re targeting, and more.
For example, a small business probably doesn’t need a revenue operations director. But a large multinational might have two or more RevOps directors to manage revenue operations for specific areas.
Typically, a revenue operations team structure can be the same as a sales operations structure.
Here are some common RevOps roles:
- Revenue operations manager: A manager manages all the RevOps activities of the business, including executing go-to-market strategies, identifying revenue-generating opportunities, improving efficiency, measuring performance, and more.
- Revenue operations director (or head of revenue operations): This role requires higher levels of skills and expertise than a revenue operations manager role does. A director of revenue operations will take ownership of a cross-functional team and guide the entire company in every facet of developing and executing of go-to-market strategies.
- Revenue operations analyst: An analyst is responsible for monitoring pipeline health and analyzing data to discover strategic insights for senior management. They also have to work with other teams to ensure data is captured in a whole and effective manner.
- Revenue operations project manager: This role handles organizing RevOps team members across multiple projects and ensuring every project is on time and on budget. They also need to report performance based on a timeline, budget adherence, and goal attainment to a RevOps manager.
Revenue Operations Team Responsibilities
A RevOps team can handle a lot of duties and responsibilities, but the following are typical:
- Integrating all the functions that generate revenue to provide a consistent, strategic revenue operations roadmap for the entire organization.
- Tracking and evaluating revenue operations metrics like customer acquisition cost, recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, customer churn, customer retention, and more to provide leaders with actionable insights for their decision-making.
- Facilitating communications between teams to ensure everyone is on the same page and every team has what they need to achieve their goals.
- Defining processes, managing tech stack, training other departments, assessing risks and opportunities, and more.
How to Build a Revenue Operation Team
There are many factors to consider when building revenue operations teams. Here are some tips you may want to keep in mind:
1. Determine your goals, objectives, and resources
To tap into the power of revenue operations, first, you should clarify what you expect to see from your dream team, what you want them to achieve, and how that will help grow your business.
Also, think about if you can afford to provide your RevOps team with everything they need to perform their jobs. Technology, training and coaching, and compensation packages are important factors affecting your team’s performance.
2. Ensure all team members are data- and results-driven
Get everyone on board with your goal and objectives. Help them clearly understand revenue goals, data ownership, processes, and organizational structure. You may also want to define a set of metrics to guide your team through tracking activities and performance.
3. Give your team the right tools
Your RevOps team doesn’t need a lot of tools and software — they only need the right tech stack to do the best job.
Some essentials include:
- Revenue operations software like Revenue Grid to keep track of revenue performance, sales pipeline health, deal success, team analytics, forecasting, and data accuracy across channels.
- Project management tools like Asana to manage tasks, track collaboration, and build workflow.
- Collaborative editing suites like Google Suite and Microsoft Office 365.
The future of revenue operations is pretty much guaranteed as it’s the key to revenue success. If you haven’t thought about building a revenue operations team, now is the perfect time to do it.
