To kick off the new year, LinkedIn published its Jobs on The Rise Report for 2023 in January and Head of Revenue Operations was #1 on the list. So especially as the broader technology sector undergoes a rightsizing phase with layoffs and budget cuts, RevOps professionals are still sought after. Companies understand that you can’t build a well-oiled go-to-market (GTM) machine in this day and age without knowing your way around technology and data, and RevOps is the resident geek that makes data and technology work for the GTM team. Unlike business IT, RevOps has a deep understanding of the GTM process along with an agile mindset that can help the GTM team move 10 times faster than an IT team can provide support. Here are three reasons why I’m not surprised that RevOps is the hottest job on the rise.
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1. RevOps tracks engagement
Modern marketing is all about engagement. The sheer volume of digital marketing activity out there also means the noise level is at an all-time high—and will continue to increase. For any B2B company to get noticed among the sea of emails, ads, sponsored search results, and influencer endorsements, it must have a well-designed and well-orchestrated, multichannel engagement strategy. Depending on the research you cite, it takes anywhere from 12 to 30 touches before a prospect engages, and Forrester Research says a typical B2B deal involves an average of 8.5 people in the buying process. So not only do you have to get through all the noise in general, but you also have to get through it to reach many of the right people.
Every digital engagement leverages technology, and modern marketers need data automation platforms to help them integrate, unify, and make use of the avalanche of data that generates. RevOps are the data and technology specialists who help architect and administer the technology stack, map out the buyer’s journey, and measure the attribution to see which engagement strategy is working.
2. RevOps makes it personal
The ever-increasing digital noise level is making engagement more and more difficult to achieve. Breaking through the noise requires a highly targeted approach built on a deep understanding of the prospect. For example, I make a decision about whether to read an email based on the subject line and the first three sentences, and I decide whether to listen to a voicemail based on the text transcript of the first few sentences. If an attempt to engage isn’t personalized, your prospect may unsubscribe or worse, air their grievances about your brand on social media. The key to getting through to prospects is how well you personalize your engagement, and the key to personalization is how well you know your prospects.
For B2B marketers, knowing your prospect doesn’t mean Facebook- and Google-level, dystopian, big-brother tracking. It means you not only have to profile the person but also the company, which is just as important, if not more so. You need to know if the company is likely a good fit for what you have to sell. Is it too big, too small, or just the right size? Is it in the right industry, region, or phase of growth? Is the person an influencer, a decision maker, or an economic buyer? All your communications should be tailored to the person’s role, seniority, and where they are at in their journey because if your content is relevant to the person and the company, you’re more likely to break through the noise and achieve engagement.
This success requires a RevOps team pulling together different data sets across internal silos and external data sources. Once the data is collected and unified, RevOps also has to segment and score each account and person, which in turn enables the GTM team to determine who is best to engage and how best to engage with them.
3. RevOps coaches the team
Some engagement channels may be better than others, but every channel’s engagement efficiency declines over time. A prospect needs to be touched through multiple channels if your company is to have any hope of cracking the door open. This is why account-based GTM (like ABM and ABX) is a key tactic for most B2B companies. B2B selling is now a team sport, because successful B2B selling requires collaboration across sales, marketing, channel, and even customer success. Multichannel engagement also has to be highly orchestrated; in order to coordinate efforts across teams, you need to create alignment goals and orchestrate execution using data and technology. Most importantly, you need a common set of metrics the teams have agreed to and an impartial party to measure their progress. RevOps is uniquely positioned to have the independence, sitting outside of sales and marketing, to coach everyone toward a common goal. Without RevOps, you often end up with teams telling one-sided stories, ,resulting in orchestration challenges as well as distrust in the data by the CxO teams. RevOps reduces that friction and guides teams toward shared data and shared goals.
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GTM won’t be successful without RevOps excellence
We are still in the early days of digital transformation for marketing, and if possible, even earlier days for sales and customer success. New technologies like generative AI will further accelerate the pace of change and can revolutionize the achievement of at-scale personalization. Traditionally, a seller could craft four high-quality personalized emails per hour. Now, with generative AI technology like ChatGPT, one can easily crank out 20 emails and be supported by hyper-personalized microsites, content, and videos. If you’re a GTM leader, to be successful moving forward, you don’t have any choice but to be comfortable with data and technology. In fact, you need to embrace it wholeheartedly, and the only way you can be successful in leveraging the exploding data and technology options is by having a very good RevOps team led by an experienced RevOps leader. I expect the Head of Revenue Operations to remain number one on the LinkedIn job list for years to come.
