Building Your RevOps Function: In-house vs. Outsourced vs. Hybrid
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Top Responsibilities of RevOps
Let's start with - what is RevOps? RevOps is the people, processes, and technology that are required to make the sales, marketing and success functions more effective than they otherwise would be.
Though it’s not specifically a go-to-market function itself, it’s more like the go-to-market back office
You might think of RevOps as the 4th leg of the "Go-to-Market stool" with the other 3 legs being sales, marketing and success.
What is Required for RevOps to Add Real Tangible Value for B2B Companies in Growth Mode?
For B2B companies in growth mode there are really two core requirements for RevOps “Done Right”.
- The first is to implement and maintain tools and tech that make the jobs of the sellers, marketers and support staff easier and to train those people to properly use the tools. This is important, but tactical.
- The second core requirement of RevOps in growth mode companies is to own the Go-to-Market data and insights that provides the senior revenue leaders with the insights they need to optimize the go-to-market engine and manage it with science-like precision. This requirement is what makes RevOps a strategically important function.
Unfortunately these two critical requirements of RevOps demand uniquely different skill sets which don’t reside in the same person.
So note #1 to growth stage CEOs, CROs and CFOs…if you want to do RevOps right, you can't do that with one person.
Requirement #1: Implement and Maintain the Tools and Tech
Modern selling and marketing demands you spend a significant amount on "Rev Tech" to enable sellers and marketers.
It's the job of RevOps to maximize the business impact and realize the promise of all that tech that you buy...so it's not wasted spend.
This involves things like CRMs, marketing automation platforms, ticketing systems, cadence tools and so on. This is the first area we see early and growth stage companies often miss the mark.
They typically start buying tools as a Seed stage company, but don’t have a good appreciation for the complexity of the tools when they purchase them. As a result we usually see the first sales leader implementing the CRM, the first marketing leader implementing the marketing automation platform and so on.
The problem is this is not where these folks’ expertise lies. They are amateurs when it comes to the tech and it shows. More times than not the tech adds friction to the go-to-market motion rather than accelerating it. And that’s because the tech isn’t configured in an optimal fashion to match the company’s selling process.
At some point, you’ll often see these companies hire or promote a junior level person to be a dedicated resource administering the tech stack. This just perpetuates the problems of having amateurs maintaining sophisticated technology.
What talent is needed?
To get this stuff initially set-up properly you need what we refer to as a GTM tech stack architect.
These people have 7-10 years experience and have gone through multiple cycles of implementing multiple types of tools, with each of these experiences moving them further down the learning curve. They know how to seamlessly integrate disparate tools so the data is synchronized and consistent rather than siloed and contradictory. They know how to exploit every bell and whistle so the tools really do live up to their promise and accelerate the effectiveness of sellers and marketers. To have this unique combination of breadth and depth of experience these people have typically cut their teeth as one person shops in early, but high growth start-ups. But these people are very hard to find and when you do, they are very expensive demanding up to $200k/year base.
Once you are past initial implementation and go into maintenance mode, you’ll want to use lesser skilled and lower paid GTM tech stack admins to deal with the everyday administrative tasks such as adding/deleting users, crafting reports and dashboards, supporting sales teams with their quoting systems etc.
Without this resource, the architect will constantly be in firefighting mode and unavailable to work on the strategically important stuff which may include things like implementing CPQ systems, customer data platforms or integrations between CRMs and product platforms. These lesser skilled people will typically have 2-3 years experience and most often limited to a single type of tool, like a CRM or a marketing automation platform. In addition to the skills required, depending on the complexity of the environment it might be helpful to leverage change management and change monitoring tools, particularly where multiple people have admin rights.
There is no point in having these tools if the sellers, marketers and account managers don’t know how to properly use them, so an important aspect of ongoing management of the tech stack is what we call enablement, which is really just a fancy word for continuous training of the users so they can fully exploit the value of the tech that has been purchased. In companies that are growing their sales or CS staffs by a handful of folks each year, the enablement function can be handled by the admins. If you’re growing faster than that you will want a dedicated enablement person that can really focus on building optimal techniques and repeatable processes to accelerate onboarding and ongoing tool use proficiency. The best enablement people have a training or teaching mindset and will often leverage training tools like an LMS to maximize effectiveness.
Requirement #2: Surfacing Data and Insights to Senior Revenue Leaders
Now let’s turn to the second core requirement of RevOps - and this one is more strategic - surfacing data and insights to senior revenue leaders so they can manage the go-to-market engine and optimize the strategies, processes, people, messaging and positioning used to acquire and retain customers.
To that end, RevOps must implement a go-to-market data platform and it takes a few different skills to fulfill this requirement.
What talent is needed?
First, you need someone who understands the GTM motions of the company inside and out and what granular insights are critical for senior revenue leaders to make good decisions. This person needs to have a full grasp of the end-to-end sales and customer journey processes.
This requires deep data operations skills and process engineering acumen.
Then, they need to identify all the key data points that need to be measured throughout the process, get consensus on the definitions and KPIs, and then instrument these measurement points throughout the marketing, sales and CS technology being used.
For example - A major consideration here is how to ensure data integrity so that the data you’re capturing is actually legit and you’re not just looking at pretty pictures of garbage data. This includes finding ways to capture data points without relying on manual data entry. It means putting data hygiene maintenance protocols in place to ensure persistent quality. Sometimes the tech stack architect has a solid Data Ops and Process mindset, but more often than not you’ll need someone else who lives and breathes data models.
Now, there is one other critical skill set required to do RevOps right for growth mode companies and that is a business analyst…essentially the person who can interpret the data.
Just like you need a radiologist to interpret medical images, you need someone with business analyst skills to interpret the go-to-market data, separating the signal from the noise and curating the data into presentations that are consumable by the senior revenue leaders. The reality is that the sales & marketing leaders just don’t have the time to properly analyze and interpret data…and in many cases they don’t have that analytical skillset.
So you can have all the best data in the world with impeccable hygiene, but if you can’t curate that into high impact actionable insights, the data has no value. By nature, data analysis is an inefficient and tedious activity. So it’s best to support the business analyst with some data visualization or analytics tools to make them more productive.
In summary, we’ve said that there are two core requirements of RevOps for growth mode companies: first…implementing and maintaining the tools required to help sellers, marketers and CS staffs do their jobs more effectively; and second…implementing a go-to-market data platform that movies the insights senior revenue leaders need to manage the GTM motion with science-like precision.
Realistically, is RevOps Even Affordable at Our Stage?
After reading through all that talent that is required, you're probably wondering if a company your size can access and afford RevOps?
The truth is that building RevOps the right way presents a real challenge for early growth stage businesses under $25M.
They need the capabilities of comprehensive RevOps so they’re not competitively disadvantaged, but they often don’t feel as if they can afford to hire a full team and purchase the associated RevOps tools. And even if they could afford it, while they need all five of the skills that we’ve identified, there isn’t likely enough scale to require each of those skills on a full-time basis, so it would be difficult to retain the employees if they’re underutilized and not challenged.
So often these companies will hire one or two RevOps folks and hope they possess the full spectrum of skills required, but unfortunately that almost never happens, and instead these companies are hamstrung with immature go-to-market tech and data infrastructures.
There is an emerging class of RevOps service providers that provide a very attractive option for these early growth stage businesses. We'll get to that later...
