What is RevOps?
Most people haven’t even heard of Revenue Operations or RevOps yet, but it has been rapidly adopted by leading tech companies. As this article is being written, there are around 4,000 job postings on LinkedIn just in the US for “revenue operations.” And for good reason–Boston Consulting Group (BCG) research found that the tighter alignment RevOps brings to go-to-market teams quickly delivered substantial benefits, including:
BCG also has a good description of this new function:
“RevOps, the concept of centralizing operations teams from marketing, sales, and customer success, has emerged as a high-impact way to accelerate revenue growth and go-to-market (GTM) operations efficiency through tighter alignment of these functions.”
Building a complete RevOps team takes a lot of time and focus, but everyone can get started with a few simple steps.
The first step is to get everyone aligned and focused on the complete customer lifecycle, even if your sales operations team is separate from other operations teams. The way to get started is to get everyone using the same data and insights.
The most critical metrics used by RevOps also got their start in tech companies, migrated to other industries selling subscriptions, and then moved on to just about any B2B company. They include:
All of those metrics require access to accounting data! The accounting system is the ground truth for customer sales – it’s the official record of what customers bought, the prices they were charged, and when they paid.
Whether using QuickBooks, Xero or others, accounting platforms are a well-structured but untapped treasure trove of customer insights. They are also painstakingly maintained for accuracy and cleanliness for management reporting, filing taxes, etc.
Tally Street easily connects to accounting systems and automates analyses of customer lists, products, invoices, customer payments, and more. It takes only seconds to get started and within minutes businesses have the key results they need to start their RevOps journey.
Sales, marketing and customer success teams aren’t going to log into QuickBooks or Xero or NetSuite to analyze data, nor do accounting teams want them to! Most teams don’t get very excited about adding new dashboards or systems to the ones they already use either. Better to push the results to where other teams already spend most of their time.
For many small businesses, that means Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365. Connecting Tally Street to Google Sheets takes just seconds and creates a “live” version of the Tally Customer Sheet inside Google. Then you can build out your roll ups on other tabs and easily share the results with your team members.
For more advanced SMBs, CRMs such as ActiveCampaign, HubSpot and Salesforce have already become the central hub for all customer communications, contacts and deals. Making the connection between Tally Street and HubSpot or Salesforce only takes seconds, and your company and account records are enriched with their sales and payment histories. Sales, Marketing, Finance and RevOps teams can then add this new information to dashboards, build smarter lists and trigger new workflows.
When sales and marketing teams can visualize account information and see how specific customers have purchased in the past, magical things happen. The smarter lists and new workflows are only the beginning.
For example, the sales/marketing teams can analyze new vs. returning vs. lost customer data. Sales can use the data to determine what’s working on new and returning customers, while marketing can create campaigns focusing on the lost customers.
Speaking of returning customers—this is where the customer success team comes in. When is a customer up for renewal? Was their purchase larger or smaller the second time around? Which customers have the highest LTV?
These are the kind of questions accounting data can answer, and the kind of questions that can help your customer success team boost retention rates and customer satisfaction. The data makes it easier for your team to schedule time with customers up for renewal, understand who is making larger or smaller purchases, and prioritize high-value customers.
Once you’ve enriched HubSpot or Salesforce with a set of shared metrics, you can use the power of your CRM to build cross-department dashboards, build smarter automations and workflows, and deliver our customers a consistent experience.
A few examples include:
If you want to learn more about how Tally Street can help, check out their website.