Well, 2023 has been quite a year for revenue operations. As mentioned by Jordan Greaser, CEO at Greaser Consulting:
2023 was a year of consolidating tools, cutting costs, and fighting for every efficiency gain.
As for 2024? We’re calling it the year of the reset. If you work in RevOps, then 2024 will be the perfect opportunity to build a solid, resilient foundation.
We talked to dozens of leading voices in the world of RevOps to find out where they’ll be focusing their efforts in 2024, and pulled out the most actionable insights from the following people:
- Jen Nelson, the VP of Customer Operations at scaleMatters
- Stacie Sussman, the CRO at RevUp Advisory
- Taft Love, the Commercial Strategy & Operations Leader at Dropbox
- Nicholas Gollop, the Founder and RevOps Advisor at RevOps On-Demand
- Brad Smith, the Co-Founder & CEO at Sonar
- Feras Abdel, the Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Outreach
- Jen Igartua, CEO at Go Nimbly
- Jasmine Powers, the Digital Marketing Manager at Supplier.io
- Mary Grothe, the Chief Revenue Officer at PNI•HCM
- Mark Lerner, the Director of Growth Marketing at DealHub
Here are the five key to-dos that top RevOps leaders will prioritize next year:
Rediscover The Soul (Pun Intended) Purpose Of Revops
If 2023 has been a scramble, then 2024 is the time to “go back to the basics” of RevOps, Stacie Sussman, the CRO at RevUp Advisory, told us. It’s time to double down on aligning GTM functions to reduce costs and grow revenue.
Jen Nelson, the VP of Customer Operations at scaleMatters, agrees:
“The genesis of RevOps was to create alignment between the investments and activities of the core revenue functions (i.e., Sales, Marketing, Success). To this day, that remains the biggest potential value of RevOps, but sadly, it is one of the least realized values.”
Nelson’s recommendation? In 2024, you should focus on the foundational principles of RevOps:
- Get collective agreement on the most important metrics to track your team’s performance and, more importantly, the effectiveness of your overall GTM strategy
- Define your full-funnel business processes and secure team member compliance with those processes
- Make sure you have the right tech stack in place to capture all data you need to monitor performance
Develop, deploy, and intensely manage an operational reporting and meeting cadence that includes all key GTM leaders
Play The Long Game And Ditch The Growth-At-All-Costs Mindset
“We spent 2022 and 2023 focused on getting lean via consolidation and rep efficiency,” says Taft Love, the Commercial Strategy and Operations Leader at Dropbox.
“In 2024, the focus for RevOps leaders should shift to sustainable growth by building the foundation we’ve all been neglecting for years.”
For Nicholas Gollop, the Founder and RevOps Advisor at RevOps On-Demand, the current shift from “growth at all costs” towards “doing more with less” is the perfect opportunity for RevOps leaders to step forward:
“That’s where RevOps comes in: to bring efficiencies to everyday processes and allow stakeholders to focus on their jobs rather than admin work.”
Perhaps it’s time to say No more. Brad Smith, the Co-Founder & CEO at Sonar, explains that RevOps leaders need look for opportunities to sunset what’s no longer working:
“Leadership teams should be asking RevOps leaders, ‘What should we no longer be doing?’ instead of always asking, ‘How can we improve what we’re currently doing?’”
It seems like tough market conditions will continue in 2024, Smith goes on to say. “Now, more than ever, we have to optimize our time wisely. This involves very deliberate prioritization, and the ability to say ‘no’ to specific requests and initiatives.”
Focus On Foundational Processes, Roadmaps, And Frameworks
So, if you’re saying “no” to growth-at-all-costs, what should you say “yes” to? Our experts had plenty of good suggestions:
Improve your internal communications
Instead of getting bogged down in internal requests, Jen Igartua, the CEO at Go Nimbly, proposes that RevOps leaders invest in:
- “An intake process with their senior stakeholders
- A support process with their GTM users
- A visible roadmap
- A team with the right skillsets
- And a system without tech debt that slows you down.”
“You won’t have the luxury of deciding where to invest your time in 2024 if you are not able to pull yourself out of the day-to-day tactical and fire drill work,” Igartua warns.
Feras Abdel, the Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Outreach, agrees:
“RevOps leaders should invest their time in building scalable operating rhythms, efficient intake processes and optimizing communication channels for their org.”
Jasmine Powers, the Digital Marketing Manager at Supplier.io, recommends that RevOps leaders prioritize “process mapping, documentation, and agile project management.”
Her reasoning? It makes no sense to invest in new systems or tools until you’ve got solid processes in place. “The value of investments in system administration is lost without full team alignment or scalability.”
Prioritize customer experience
“No more focusing on reps to the exclusion of customer experience,” says Taft Love. According to Love, there’s been a tendency for RevOps teams to prioritize what makes sense for the organization over the needs of their customers and prospects, resulting in short-term thinking.
Instead, you should be spending more time “understanding your customer base, adequately segmenting it, understanding usage, adoption, and where true value lies for each customer,” according to Nicholas Gollop,
By orienting your efforts around the customer experience instead of what’s easiest for your organization, you’ll unlock greater revenue growth in the long-term.
Get serious about data hygiene
GTM teams need clean, up-to-date data to make the right decisions — and every RevOps leader needs to make data access a priority in 2024.
Without it, your GTM leaders and reps will feel like they’re flying blind. They won’t know what’s in the pipeline, what’s likely to close, and where they should focus their attention. They’re more likely to drop the handoff from Marketing to Sales. And they’ll lose deals.
Accurate revenue intelligence is a lifesaver for GTM organizations — but the responsibility for data hygiene shouldn’t be on the Sales team, points out Mary Grothe, the Chief Revenue Officer at PNI•HCM:
“RevOps leaders should eliminate as much data scrubbing and qualification from the Sales team as possible. Salespeople can no longer afford to spend time prospecting data that is old, inaccurate, or unqualified.”
Instead, here’s what Grothe recommends: “RevOps teams can use data tools or other methods to scrub their databases and help prepare ICP-qualified company and contact information for each salesperson, ensuring their prospecting efforts have maximum conversion.”
Don’t Get Distracted By Toys (*Cough* Ai), But Know When To Use Them
AI and other shiny new technologies will continue to make waves in 2024, but many of our experts caution against tech bloat. To quote Mark Lerner, the Director of Growth Marketing at DealHub,
“RevOps has always been about the delicate balance between processes and technology. Too often, RevOps leaders will default to finding a new tool rather than focusing on a broken process. Doing so will only magnify the problem, rather than fix it.”
Instead, Lerner urges RevOps leaders to focus on fixing the process first. This will help you understand whether you really need a new tool — and if so, which tool would be the best fit for the problem.
Of course, that’s not to suggest that you should ignore the potential of AI altogether. You should focus on creating a tech stack that increases efficiency, rather than adding tech for tech’s sake. “Having a disjointed or bloated tech stack can lead to even more confusion and noise across the board, potentially delivering a sub-par experience to prospects and customers,” warns Nicholas Gollop.
In terms of AI use cases for RevOps, Jen Igartua suggests it can be best used as to surface relevant information from your knowledge base, and reduce the number of inbound queries from the rest of the GTM organization: “Gives you more time for the fun, innovative work.”
Sounds good to us.
Looking for more advice from RevOps experts?
If you’re ready to learn more about the trends and challenges revving up RevOps leaders, check out our latest report: The State of Revenue Operations and Intelligence
We talked to 500+ companies to learn the latest RevOps trends, gain actionable insight into how they’re using RO&I technologies, and create a detailed roadmap to leverage the full potential of RO&I.
Just a few juicy tidbits:
- 98% of companies are expected to adopt RO&I solutions in the next 10 years
- 85% of RO&I tech adopters have seen revenue grow by more than 10%
- 47% of sales leaders say that increased revenue is the main benefit of RO&I software
You can read the full report here.