Derrick Herbst, Director – Business Transformation at Conga (a scalable revenue lifecycle management solution) recently joined us in an episode of The SalesStar Podcast to discuss more on what it takes to drive a better RevOps process and strategy when in B2B: here are some key takeaways:
Understanding The Changing RevOps Game
When it comes to current RevOps trends, there are three key drivers.
The growth of ecommerce, digital businesses and self-serve models as well as the always on environment makes it important for brands to respond to all kinds of customer queries and issues as quickly as possible. No customer or prospect wants to wait for days and years to hear from a brand. They especially don’t have the time to wait for things like a price quote.
There therefore needs to be lot of automation and access to the right information at the right time, whether they end up looking on your website or whether they want to talk to a salesperson: they should be able to find the right option to take that next step, easily.
The next thing is that, well-informed customers are the essence today’s commerce world. Customers are already 80% of the way to a decision before they actually start a brand interaction or before they speak to a salesperson. They compare prices and features and look for information online before shortlisting the brands they want to deal with.
So salespeople need to step up their game to understand the customer with an improved perspective on their previous buying behaviour including their challenges in order to better align the sales processes.
Along with this, it’s crucial to remember that business models are moving to subscription-based formats today. This means that ongoing services should be served or executed with a focus on quality – all of this is why and where revops becomes critical to create a smooth journey for both external and internal collaborators.
A good revops practices ensures consistency in the prospect and customer as well as brand cycle and this is what both marketing and sales teams should keep in mind.
Read More: Sales TechStar Interview with Jonathan Chin, Cofounder of Facteus
Driving a Smooth RevOps Cycle: What Does It Takes?
The key pointer here is – Change management: specialized solutions that focus on improving key features. This involves implementing the right systems and the right methods to help people adjust to the new technologies and revops processes. Business leaders need to help their teams make the transition.
Understand what information you want your revops cycle to transmit and what needs to be shared with each team, information should flow automatically from one team and one step of the customer journey to the other. This influences the type of RevTech a team should choose based on the kind of features they want to focus on in terms of their service cycle and internal or external process.
It’s important to identify this to then go deeper into the larger salestech base: do you need a CRM or CDP to store information and to automate future campaigns, for instance. All of this understanding and shortlisting can help transfer information as well as help maintain good data hygiene and CRM practices, which comes handy when team members leave or move to other roles.
Remember, flow of information from opportunity to quote to contract in a seamless manner can reduce errors and improve speed and efficiency in the customer cycle.
It’s time to go beyond legacy models and legacy systems. These systems should also be able to break down subscription details to give teams an idea of what existing customers have booked in terms of products or services, this information should then be used to drive up-sell, cross-sell opportunities down the line.
Read More: Which SaaS Provider to Choose: Best-of-Breed or All-in-One?
The Future of AI in RevOps
Having a comprehensive salesops and revops solution and process in place means handling massive amounts of data. But AI cannot figure it all out for you though. You need to adopt solutions that make it easy to implement strong processes that are already in place including boosting impact from your clean data, for this, you need to start by having clean data practices in place.
AI can’t fix what’s wrong in a typical salesops or revops process. AI can enhance good practices and the value from good data.
There are a wide range of areas through which salesops and revops can benefit from AI. Managers that leverage AI will be the ones to get ahead faster.
Catch the complete podcast episode below:
