Most businesses treat revenue like a race.
They want to generate more of it faster than the competition.
But the reality is revenue generation is more like synchronized swimming, where Sales, Marketing and Service functions must work together to produce great results.
The process of coordinating these activities is known as RevOps - and companies that implement it experience nearly 3x faster revenue growth.1
In this article, we explain why RevOps is so important and how to leverage HubSpot tools to realize the function’s full potential.
What is RevOps?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the process of improving revenue-generating activities by increasing visibility into the funnel, funnel velocity and volume of prospects at each stage of the funnel. This is achieved through analytics, automation and aligning Sales and Marketing processes around shared goals - all of which are tied back to revenue.
What Are the Benefits of RevOps?
B2B buyer journeys are more complicated than ever, with larger decision-making groups using more channels. As a result, the distinction between Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and various other functions is increasingly unclear. Yet most businesses still treat them as discreet activities with little view of how they impact one another.
RevOps enables businesses to create an end-to-end strategy that treats everything as part of a single process - revenue generation. This enables you to:
- Formalize the ideal customer journey
- Quantify the impact each Sales and Marketing activity has on revenue
- Remove data silos and friction points in the buyer journey
- Improve communication between teams
- Optimize every activity across the buyer journey, to increase efficiency and produce more reliable revenue
All of which explains why 75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy a RevOps model by 2025.2
How HubSpot Supports RevOps
One of my favorite things about HubSpot is that it dramatically simplifies and consolidates your tech stack. When moving clients to HubSpot, we usually replace at least 10 tools (the average enterprise now uses 110 different pieces of software)3 This immediately saves them money, gives them more time and creates new efficiencies for the teams because they don’t have to do so much context switching.
No matter what you do, syncing tools will create conflict between data points. So fewer tools means less maintenance, clearer and more trustworthy data - and a more efficient, revenue-generating funnel.
The Best RevOp Tools in Hubspot
Dashboards
The Dashboard tool enables you to keep reporting for all Sales, Marketing and Service activities in one place. This is a foundational requirement for RevOps, enabling you to understand the state of your end-to-end buyer journey and see which activities from each department are having the most positive effect on revenue.
Custom reports
HubSpot also makes building custom reports simple and intuitive. You can view separate charts for each conversion target and channel:
As a result, you understand how your leads progress throughout the funnel, how effective your nurture campaigns are and which activities produce the best returns. It also gives you strategic control; you can use dashboards to view whichever performance factors you want to analyze, understand and optimize.
This is the real power of HubSpot’s reporting tools: you can combine data from any objects in your reports with an out-of-the-box function. So it’s easier to create bespoke reports, unlocking faster and more impactful insights.
Sales Reports
HubSpot gives you visibility of individual sales reps’ performance through the Sales Analytics tool. These are out-of-the-box reports that help you answer questions like:
- Are we artificially inflating my pipeline with old deals that should be closed?
- Are my sales reps reaching out to leads fast enough?
- Where do deals get stuck?
- Why are we losing deals?
The better you become at reading and cross-referencing these reports, the more insights you will gain, the more questions you will answer - and the more revenue you’ll be able to generate.
Source: Hubspot Community BlogLifecycle stages
Marketers and sales reps alike gain better visibility into the status of each lead in the funnel when using the Lifecycle Stages tool. You can create custom lifecycle stages to reflect your specific buyer journey or use the default stages (which track the lifecycle from Subscriber through to Evangelist.)
By understanding where each lead is in the buying process, both the Marketing and Sales teams can customize campaigns to send relevant messaging at the right time to the right audience. Lifecycle Stages also provide more clarity around how leads are passed off from Marketing to Sales.
Sequences
You would think that any sales team not stuck in the early noughties already has a sequencing tool. But in reality, many teams still send emails and create reminders for themselves manually.
The Sequences tool allows users to manage, analyze and schedule automated emails, calls and LinkedIn campaigns. You can then view how each campaign has performed, allowing RevOps officers to highlight the most effective sequences, identify improvement opportunities and encourage teams to use them.
Workflows
The Workflows tool lets revenue teams automate their nurture through simple instructions. You can program outreach campaigns to automatically begin when a certain criteria is hit (this could be a period of time since the last contact, for example) so that individuals don’t have to think too much about nurture - it just happens.
We use this tool at every stage of the funnel. When a new contact enters the database, for example, they receive a series of automated emails designed to introduce them to the brand (all of which is customized based on how they entered the database!) and help them bypass the funnel.
Another example is when a specific contact hits a designated threshold for lead scoring points, they are automatically enrolled in Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) and eventually Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) campaigns with appropriate CTAs to push them through the funnel.
We also leverage the Workflow tool to keep properties up to date, make sure data is clean and fill custom properties to understand which marketing channels are driving results - allowing us to make better decisions and ultimately increase revenue for our clients.
Start Achieving Your RevOps Goals with HubSpot
While HubSpot makes RevOps easier, the sheer scope of the platform can be daunting. ProperExpression is a performance marketing and RevOps agency that helps marketers realize the full potential of HubSpot to manage RevOps and transform how they operate.
Get in touch today!
