Have Success with Revenue Operations After Moving to Hybrid Work
6 Tactics for Revenue Operations Success in a Hybrid Landscape
Enabling Revenue Operations When Teams Aren’t in the Same Room
The new professional landscape of remote and hybrid work has definite pros and cons. While many workers find their productivity is the same or higher than in the office and they’re saving invaluable time that was spent commuting to and from the job, hybrid working also presents some very real challenges—especially for roles like revenue operations, which relies heavily on alignment and collaboration.
To better understand this dynamic, let’s look at revenue operations holistically—what it is and why it’s so effective today—and uncover some simple actionable tactics to help ensure it continues to be an effective role in a hybrid landscape.
What Is Revenue Operations?
Revenue operations (or RevOps) is relatively new in the B2B sector, but the role is quickly gaining traction in organizations. RevOps essentially takes responsibility for all the revenue-generating teams within a company. This often includes the following:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Customer success
- Systems
This role aims to provide visibility within each revenue-generating team and to increase efficiency for more predictable revenue that grows year over year.
Why Is RevOps Important to a Company’s Success?
Alignment between departments has been an increasing focus of sales organizations. Companies have seen the benefits of removing siloes and facilitating communication between departments, and revenue operations acts as the overarching facilitator to those ends.
Bringing these groups under one umbrella often makes sense and, ultimately, improves revenue generation. When sales, marketing, and customer success all work together to optimize the buyer’s journey, sharing information, relevant data, personnel, and sales technologies and systems in the process, it’s helpful to treat them not as discrete entities but parts of a greater whole.
Another major contributor to the rise and prevalence of RevOps is the focus on lifetime opportunities of an account. Companies are increasingly realizing that what happens with an account after that initial sale can have a dramatic effect on the bottom line, and bringing customer success into the picture can yield not only predictable, dependable revenue but previously unforeseen opportunities for growth and expansion. (To learn more, check out this on-demand webinar about enhancing account strategy.)
According to Boston Consulting Group, companies utilizing these tactics and relying on RevOps saw some dramatic results:
- 100 to 200 percent increase in digital marketing ROI
- 10 percent increase in lead acceptance
- 15 percent increase in profits
How Hybrid Work Affects RevOps
Anecdotal and statistical evidence show RevOps can have a profound impact on a company’s bottom line, but there are unmistakable hurdles it must overcome in a hybrid working environment.
At its heart, RevOps is all about alignment, visibility, transparency, accountability, and collaboration. When teams aren’t always meeting face to face, those goals become more difficult to achieve.
Here are just a few tactics you can use to battle these difficulties:
Overcommunicate
Communication between revenue-generating teams is essential to RevOps. As a RevOps leader, actively encourage all individual members to overcommunicate with their peers. Keeping everyone in the loop can help minimize the data loss that often happens when teams get spread out over multiple geographic spaces.
Lean on Internal Collaboration Tools
Collaboration between team members—no matter where they are in the world—is easier than ever with tools like Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and more. These channels are always open and available and often indicate who is away from the desk, available, or unplugged for the day.
Set Goals…the Right Way
Goal setting is especially important when the teams under your revenue operations efforts aren’t always in the same office. Goals help ensure everyone is on the same page and working toward the same aims, but be cognizant of setting goals in a positive, effective manner.
Don’t hand down goals from on high. Work collaboratively with your teams to talk about what should be prioritized. Getting this team consensus helps ensure buy-in, dedication, and commitment. This is all the more important in a hybrid environment, where team members can easily and quickly feel isolated and disconnected from both peers and leadership members.
Respect Team Members’ Time
It’s easy to think that holding lots of meetings will help ensure everyone feels just as engaged as they did when they came into the office every day, but don’t overdo it. There shouldn’t necessarily be more meetings just because teams aren’t always together. Unless the meeting directly contributes to a goal, gets everyone on the same page, or has actionable items, don’t needlessly take your team members’ time. It’s just as valuable in a hybrid environment as it ever was!
Don’t Be Overly Rotated to Tasks
So much information is gained every day just by the idle conversations and interactions between employees. (One team member casually mentions a problem he or she is consistently having in the customer relationship management tool; another team member has a work-around.)
One issue with hybrid work is that interactions are usually centered around specific tasks. There’s a Zoom meeting to discuss this account. There’s a Slack chain to detail this new project.
Consider having an open video call where team members can filter in and out as desired through the day. This gives coworkers the opportunity to chat, it helps foster a feeling of connection and well-being, and it facilitates those organic interactions that can uncover important misalignments or unconsidered issues.
Check In
Whether your company has gone entirely remote or is doing some version of the hybrid environment, these are stressful, unprecedented, unsettled times. As a manager, make yourself available to your employees for check-ins. Just because an employee continues to produce doesn’t mean his or her mental state is ideal. A stressed, unhappy worker isn’t able to be a consistent contributing employee, and check-ins can help ensure all team members feel safe and comfortable expressing when they’re struggling.
Be equally open to hearing what is and isn’t working logistically in the hybrid system you’ve implemented. Identifying the problem is the first step to fixing it, and no one knows the good, the bad, and the ugly better than those on the front lines.
Want to Take a Deeper Dive into RevOps and the Hybrid Work Environment?
Interested in learning more about how revenue operations fits into a hybrid workplace? Join a panel of industry experts on August 26 at 1:00 p.m. (EDT) for the upcoming webinar, Enabling RevOps in a Hybrid Working Environment.”
Link: https://vendorneutral.com/enabling-revenue-operations-hybrid-environment/
Have questions specific to your company? Want guidance on something else related to business optimization? Simply reach out. We’re always to happy to lend our expertise.
Be equally open to hearing what is and isn’t working logistically in the hybrid system you’ve implemented. Identifying the problem is the first step to fixing it, and no one knows the good, the bad, and the ugly better than those on the front lines.