How RevOps Supports Each Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

According to Boston Consulting Group, RevOps teams can drive a 100-200% increase in marketing ROI. Per Forrester, organizations that use RevOps can grow revenue 300% faster than those that don’t. 

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RevOps accomplishes this not only by increasing close rates, but driving optimization and efficiency across the entire customer journey. Small actions early in the journey can drive major, outsized revenue growth over the long term. 

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As such, RevOps should be built to impact at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Read on for some tactical examples of how this plays out.

How does RevOps work? 

RevOps isn’t a specific function within an organization. Rather, it’s a process and methodology that aligns and orients existing revenue functions—namely Marketing, Sales, and Customer success—around central goals, objectives, and expectations. 

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By breaking silos and establishing common KPIs, RevOps ensures the whole organization is rowing in the same direction, and that no one team is undercutting another’s work. Key elements and principles of the RevOps methodology include the following.

Cross-functional alignment

With the sheer volume of resources invested in driving revenue, you don’t want those resources canceling each other out. Marketing, for example, can generate all the leads in the world, but without Sales follow-up, no revenue will come of it. RevOps prioritizes cross-functional alignment to avoid this and similar risks. 

Data integration, analysis, & KPI-setting

RevOps teams leverage integrated, cross-functional performance data to maintain team alignment. These integrations also provide holistic insight into how each function actively contributes to revenue. This information is critical not only to assessing performance, but how to fix problems, increase efficiencies, and accelerate revenue growth. 

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READ MORE: See our comprehensive list of RevOps KPIs and metrics.

Process optimization

As a methodology, RevOps assumes that processes matter as much as, if not more than, individual performance. Processes like lead handoff and customer onboarding, for example, can go wrong when the individual teams don’t have clear standards, practices, and active management—which RevOps provides at every stage of the customer lifecycle. 

Integrated technology use

Key to aligning performance and working from a common data foundation is getting everyone to use the same tech stack—CRM, marketing automation, customer support tools, analytics software, etc. Generally, RevOps teams manage these platforms on behalf of the functions they support, guiding all teams toward best practices that maximize their effectiveness. 

RevOps tactics to enhance each stage of the customer lifecycle

By ensuring smooth alignment and connection across every stage of the customer lifecycle—and across all revenue functions—RevOps teams can decrease dropoff and revenue leakage, which ultimately drives customer acquisition and retention.

1. Awareness

During the awareness stage, prospects aren’t actively looking to buy. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging with your brand. RevOps’s primary objective at this stage is to track as much activity as possible and identify the most impactful ways to:

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• Educate prospects on the problem you solve
• Build a sense of urgency around solving the problem
• Provide information on your solution compared to others in the market—whether direct or indirect competitors
• Build brand equity so when they’re ready to buy, they’ll come to you first

CRM setup

RevOps teams should be active in the CRM from Day One, configuring data and workflows to facilitate cross-functional alignment. They also set up and enforce governance processes to avoid data gaps or errors moving forward.  

Lead engagement tracking

As much as possible, RevOps teams should track all interactions with awareness-stage leads. For inbound specifically, this requires an early-stage conversion offer to capture their email address, then building a more robust lead profile through data enrichment. 

Target account list building

RevOps teams also conduct comprehensive market research and analysis to compile target account lists, build out company and contact records in the CRM, and track their activities within your marketing channels. 

2. Consideration

During the consideration stage, buyers are weighing your product against direct and indirect competitors. At this point, Marketing and Sales should be aligned around two common objectives: driving urgency and removing friction. 

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Often, however, companies build brittle inbound flows that either break or create a high-friction user experience. During this stage, RevOps teams build seamless systems and workflows that prevent lead dropoff and drive engagement. This enables Marketing and Sales teams to drive urgency and make customer needs more acute. 

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Core objectives at this stage include:

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• Creating seamless lead flows that drive leads further along the buying journey
• Targeting leads with relevant messages that speak to their core pain points
• Routing leads to the internal contact best able to respond to their concerns

Automated account assignment

As new accounts come in, make sure they’re assigned to the person best equipped to handle that account. Manual lead assignment is unwieldy at scale, so RevOps teams leverage automated systems to establish predefined criteria for assigning leads to the correct internal contact.

Marketing-sales alignment

RevOps teams also help to drive marketing-sales alignment. The most obvious example is making sure Sales is following up on the leads Marketing generates. Additionally, RevOps can build smart automations that halt lead-gen emails when a lead enters the Sales process, and resume when they leave it. 

Lead routing

When a lead downloads a white paper, registers for a webinar, or requests a demo, that’s a sign of high buying intent. It’s critical for Sales to engage that lead as quickly as possible. Even a delay of five minutes can severely hinder your conversion rate. 

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RevOps teams should set up automated lead routing systems to not only deliver the appropriate content to the lead at the right time, but build follow-up workflows to keep them engaged and drive them toward conversion. 

3. Conversion

As deals near the end of the pipeline, you don’t want inefficiencies and poor experiences causing them to fail. What’s more, you don’t want a good experience with Marketing and Sales to turn into a poor experience with Success, reducing the chance of upsell and increasing the chance of churn.

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RevOps teams at this stage focus on the following objectives:

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• Preventing drop-off during contract negotiation, generation, and signing
• Ensuring seamless transition from Sales to Customer Success
• Empowering the customer with the tools they need to be successful and accelerate the value realized from the product

Contract management

Contract management, like any admin, can decelerate revenue. During the contract management process, RevOps teams can automate contract generation, delivery, and proactively manage the signing process. If there are concerns, RevOps can surface and resolve them quickly. 

Onboarding & activation

Once a customer signs the contract, their engagement level is at its peak. RevOps teams need to take advantage by onboarding and engaging them as quickly as possible. For example, automated routing to the appropriate CSM can accelerate product adoption and shorten their path to value.

Monitoring customer engagement

As soon as the customer is won, RevOps teams need to set up systems to monitor engagement—both with customer success teams and within the platform itself. This ensures that when customers slow or drop off, CSMs can step in and identify the issue, reducing the likelihood of churn.

4. Expansion

In addition to driving new business, RevOps teams can help to maximize the revenue from existing customers. This is accomplished in three ways:

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• Driving customer satisfaction, reducing the likelihood of churn
• Identifying areas for upsell and cross-sell to increase ACV
• Gather data on customer usage and satisfaction to involve future marketing and sales efforts 

New vs. existing business routing

In B2B, new contacts will come in from existing companies, or existing contacts will reengage with marketing content. If you don’t have a way to distinguish between new and existing business, they’ll simply drop into an existing marketing funnel, creating an irrelevant and frustrating experience.

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RevOps teams also build automated routing systems to differentiate among new and existing customers, ensuring connection with the right contact and accelerating account onboarding and adoption. 

Measuring customer satisfaction 

Customer satisfaction, measured through Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), Net Promoter Scores (NPS), or other survey-based metrics, can be excellent gauges for customer excitement and likelihood to renew or advocate for the product. 

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For RevOps, however, these surveys provide another purpose: feedback for Marketing and Sales. By automating and accelerating satisfaction surveys—especially by conducting them in real-time—the whole organization can ingest feedback and adjust their activities to better align with market expectations.

Automating upsell & cross-sell

Often CSMs want to upsell or cross-sell, but either don’t know how to identify high-intent moments or what to sell. RevOps can leverage data-driven insights to identify and automate upsell and cross-sell opportunities. 

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For example, a contact visits a feature page for a feature not included in their company’s current package. RevOps teams can automate either internal or external communications to gauge their interest in the feature, and make the path to adding it seamless and fast. 

5. Advocacy

Your best marketing resources are your current customers. The quicker they become advocates, the more effective and sustainable your marketing and sales efforts will be. 

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RevOps teams can add the following value during the advocacy stage:

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• Identifying optimal times in the customer journey for referral automation and testimonials
• Ensuring referral data makes its way back to Sales in a timely manner
• Connecting with Marketing to identify and generate testimonials and case studies

Automated referral requests

There are times when customers are more enthusiastic than others. When they’re highly engaged with the product and generating a lot of value, you can send an automated email with a quick referral request. By timing referrals to align with customer journey highpoints, you increase the chance of a positive response. 

Generating & routing testimonials

The same goes for generating testimonials—which are critical to boosting brand credibility. RevOps teams can not only generate testimonials, but route them to the appropriate team member to be deployed in marketing and sales campaigns. 

Final thoughts on RevOps impact on the customer lifecycle

Because of its cross-functional approach, RevOps adds value throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Although this is obvious in theory, in practice it requires automation and seamless integration across Marketing, Sales, and Success—which is difficult when everyone is using disconnected point solutions.

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Default automates lead conversion, routing, scheduling, and engagement tracking across the entire customer lifecycle. It is the unified platform that RevOps teams need to avoid data leakage and customer dropoff.

‍See how you can unify your RevOps tech stack with one simple decision. See Default in action today.