How to Build a RevOps Strategy to Drive Business Growth

Recent data shows that organizations implementing RevOps are outpacing those implementing legacy strategies: 

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• Businesses implementing RevOps strategies are seeing a 100-200% increase in marketing ROI & 30% reduction in GTM expenses (Boston Consulting Group) 
• Sales teams functioning in a RevOps environment are seeing a 59% improvement in win rates and 53% increase in net-dollar retention (HubSpot)
• By 2025 (next year!), 75% of the highest growth companies will adopt a RevOps strategy (Gartner)

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Given the fact that a < 30-minute response to inbound leads makes them 21X more likely to qualify, and a < 5-min response 100X more likely, seamless alignment between marketing and sales—which RevOps provides—can have an outsized impact on your revenue growth.

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So if you’re ready to build your own RevOps strategy, read on to learn what that all entails and some tactical steps you can take to increase your success and ROI of RevOps. 

And if you like reading books, I recommend these RevOps Books.

What is a RevOps strategy?

RevOps isn’t a distinct function separate from marketing, sales, or success. Rather, it’s an operating model based on three fundamental principles: 

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• End-to-end engagement supporting the entire customer lifecycle
• Integration across GTM functions—sales, marketing, and customer success
• Observable systems and processes and visibility into execution and outcomes

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RevOps emphasizes holistic strategy, team alignment, real-time revenue intelligence and analytics, technology integration and optimization, and continuous improvement. It rests on four pillars: people, process, data, & technology. 

Pillar #1: People

RevOps starts and ends with the people managing it. Not only does your RevOps team require a range of hard skills to operate effectively—marketing, sales, finance, data analytics—but also a culture of integration and collaboration across all functions. 

Depending on your business size, you may have a dedicated RevOps team or distribute RevOps responsibilities among existing GTM team members. 

Pillar #2: Process

RevOps is committed to integration and end-to-end management, ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction and materially contributing to driving new revenue. Uniform processes are critical to building accountability and trust among your team and realizing RevOps benefits. 

Pillar #3: Data

Central to RevOps success is data, both external (prospects and customers) and internal (team and campaign performance). Without data, it’s impossible for RevOps teams to align GTM efforts around a single source of truth. 

Pillar #4: Technology

RevOps thrives on automation, which enables teams to not only monitor but proactively manage the whole revenue cycle. This is why centralized technology stacks are critical to RevOps success—it’s difficult to automate seamlessly when you’re managing a bunch of point solutions. 

4 common RevOps frameworks

Different RevOps organizations will organize these four pillars differently, depending on the specific needs of the business. Let’s quickly take a look at four common RevOps frameworks so you can see what this looks like in practice.

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For a more comprehensive deep-dive into these four RevOps frameworks, click here. 

Waterfall framework 

The straightforward, linear waterfall framework involves passing leads and opportunities through sequential, pre-defined stages. While simple and straightforward, it often fails to account for the complexities of modern B2B buying. The result is often lead stagnation and a process that doesn’t align with customer realities. 

Agile framework

Much like its counterpart in product development, Agile RevOps emphasizes flexibility, cross-functionality, unified performance metrics, and interactive planning & execution. While this approach is flexible enough to map to complex customer journeys, it’s often challenging to implement without the proper technology, people, and processes in place. 

Product-led growth (PLG) framework

Product-led growth (PLG) RevOps is a SaaS-specific framework that emphasizes the product’s role in driving leads and sales. While highly scalable, it requires technological complexity and carries a high risk of churn.

Account-Based Everything (ABX)

Account-Based Everything (ABX) RevOps unifies Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Sales (ABS) under one roof to provide a framework for selling high-value accounts. It can deliver a high ROI, but requires significant upfront investment and tight cross-functional alignment to succeed. 

How to optimize revenue operations for business growth

Regardless of which RevOps strategy you implement from the options above, here are some actionable steps to implement it across your organization. 

1. Choose your RevOps framework & establish goals

The first step in building a RevOps framework is to choose which one to adopt. Then you can quickly identify the key metrics and targets needed to drive growth and achieve your goals. 

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While revenue is the ultimate goal, other intermediate objectives are important to measure ongoing progress. These include increasing marketing-sales alignment, streamlining resources, accelerating customer acquisition cycles, reducing churn, and automating GTM systems.

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Over time, RevOps will help you improve in all these areas. Right now, however, it’s important to focus on the areas where you can have the greatest (and fastest) impact, and optimize your strategy around that focused goal. 

2. Assess & integrate your current teams

Key to RevOps is an integrated, aligned effort among your current teams. Before you can integrate marketing, sales, and success efforts, first you need to identify where those efforts currently sit. 

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Often, you’ll find gaps between your current capabilities and what you need to implement your RevOps framework. That’s to be expected. Part of your integration efforts includes filling those gaps with new or upskilled people or technologies.

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Then, once you have the right teams, it’s vital that they start talking to each other. Clear, open communication is key to GTM alignment. This is especially helpful when you have a common technology stack and data which serves as the organization’s single source of truth. 

3. Prioritize data-driven decision making

There are lots of opinions in the market on what good marketing or sales looks like. But if you want to optimize your revenue operations for business growth, decisions must be made through data.

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That’s why measuring RevOps metrics is a key part of the process. Because RevOps is a cross-functional strategy, the metrics you track span GTM functions:

• Sales & revenue metrics (e.g. recurring revenue, weighted pipeline value, sales velocity)
• Forecasting metrics (e.g. pipeline predictability and customer acquisition forecast)
• Process & operation metrics (e.g. lead to customer conversion rate, sales cycle length to annual deal size ratio)
• Marketing metrics (e.g. marketing-sourced revenue, CAC & LTV by marketing channel)
• Customer success metrics (e.g. net revenue retention, ACV growth)
• Technology metrics (e.g. system performance, internal adoption rates)

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Only with these key metrics at your disposal can you make the decisions necessary to optimize and accelerate your revenue. 

4. Focus on continuous improvement

When you execute your RevOps strategy, you’ll quickly figure out whether or not it’s working. If things are moving in the wrong direction, you’ll need to make adjustments quickly, otherwise you’ll waste resources, leak revenue, and stall your GTM success. 

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That’s why it’s important, no matter which framework you adopt, to regularly review and assess your processes. That way, you know where to make changes so you can drive better results. 

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Often organizations can’t track their progress because the necessary data is dispersed across their tech stack. The solution: a unified RevOps platform—lead qualification, segmentation, and routing combined into a central tool—that brings all your data together for accurate, real-time analysis. 

5. Invest in software built specifically for RevOps use cases

Finally, the agility, integration, and real-time responsiveness of RevOps requires technology built for this use case. A string of point solutions with brittle integrations won’t cut it. Neither will a siloed infrastructure. You need technology built specifically for this use case, otherwise you’ll struggle to handle the demands of successful RevOps management. 

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For example, Default simplifies RevOps by unifying lead qualification, segmentation, routing, scheduling, and automation into one platform. Users have found an overall 70% reduction in implementation time, 30% average cost savings, and 10 hours saved per week.

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To launch your RevOps strategy with a fitting tech stack, see Default in action today. 

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