RevOps: The Key to Addressing Today’s Productivity Challenges

As we navigate a rapidly shifting business landscape, the need for productivity has reached a critical point. RevOps is the key to streamlining operations and aligning teams, but selecting the right revenue technology to respond to market changes is essential.

Is your business ready to make the shift?

The Productivity Imperative and Why It Matters

At the close of 2023, McKinsey emphasized three major challenges pushing productivity to the top of the business agenda:

"...business leaders face three key challenges that all point to the imperative to increase productivity. Macroeconomic headwinds will challenge economic growth, demographic shifts and changes in employee preferences will intensify the competition for talent, and high capital and labor costs are expected to continue unabated."

• Economic Headwinds: Persistent economic challenges limit growth, and companies must adapt to sustain competitive advantage.
• Demographic Shifts: Evolving employee expectations are reshaping talent dynamics.
• Escalating Costs: Both labor and capital costs remain high, demanding more efficient approaches to stay profitable.

Now, nearing the end of 2024, these trends have only solidified. Revenue leaders are expected to deliver better results, often with fewer resources, placing strategic, data-driven insights at a premium.

Facing Reality: Four Major Revenue Challenges for Leaders

Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), Chief Sales Officers (CSOs), Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), Chief Experience Officers (CXOs), and other revenue managers all confront a landscape in constant flux:

1. Internal Data Alone Isn’t Enough
   To accurately assess market risk and customer readiness, it’s critical to monitor external factors like inflation, energy costs, and interest rates.

2. Learning from the Past to Predict the Future
   Analyzing historical data is essential for forecasting and scenario planning. Revenue leaders must leverage past trends to inform future decisions.

3. Navigating Black Swan Events
   While unpredictable by nature, Black Swan events offer competitive opportunities for those prepared with robust data-monitoring processes.

4. Priorities Shifting Rapidly
   As market demands shift, the ability to pivot quickly is critical. One offering’s demand might suddenly surge while another declines, so agility in response is essential.

Success is now strongly dependent on our capability to get on top of changes, adapt and take advantage of emerging opportunities while managing risks. The rollercoaster economy can be a paradise for those capable of making most of it.

Looking at the EPU index (in the picture) clarifies what we're currently living through.

Economic Policy Uncertainty aka EPU reflects how a national economy fluctuates due to unpredictable fiscal, political, regulatory or monetary policies. EPU-related research has accelerated since 2016, when a team of U.S. academics developed this index.

EPU index is constructed from newspaper coverage, provisions in federal tax codes that are set to expire and disagreement among economic forecasters. To learn more about EPU and managing uncertainty, head over to our blog.

The Solution: RevOps as the Productivity Engine

RevOps, or Revenue Operations, aligns sales, marketing, and customer success functions under a single strategic umbrella. By unifying data and processes, RevOps eliminates silos, fosters team alignment, and improves agility.

A unified RevOps technology brings three essential benefits:

• Enhanced Collaboration: Teams work from a single source of data, sharing responsibility for revenue and creating agility across departments.
• Alignment with OKRs: RevOps ties Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to shared KPIs, improving agility and fostering customer-centric operations.
• Increased Satisfaction and Efficiency: Shared data increases clarity and team morale, helping teams understand and impact their success more effectively.

When everyone works from the same insights, alignment flows naturally, leading to faster, more effective decision-making.

Revenue Intelligence Technology:
Bridging Strategy and Execution

RevOps as a framework has fueled a wave of new tools and technologies designed to support it. However, many solutions (like Gong, Clari and ZoomInfo) on the market today focus primarily on internal data, optimizing pipelines through CRM integrations and tracking internal metrics.

While beneficial, this inside-out approach lacks a true understanding of why changes are happening, especially from the customer’s perspective.

To know WHY something is happening or changing, and to be able to plan and react to it, you need to shift your focus to the customer and to an outside-in perspective.

The Outside-In Approach of Revenue Intelligence

To understand why a change occurs, businesses need an outside-in approach, which sees customers as vital indicators of market trends. This perspective allows companies to assess how external factors affect their offerings and customers’ readiness.

180ops’ B2B Revenue Intelligence platform exemplifies this approach by connecting internal data (e.g., billing, CRM, customer service) with external data (e.g., macroeconomic trends, firmographic insights). This minimum data, maximum value approach delivers:

• Current and Potential Market Value: Analysis by size and standard industry classification (SIC).
• Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities: Revealing hidden potential for ARPA and penetration growth.
• Billing Forecasting: Projected revenue at the offering and customer level.
• Risk Projection: Likelihood of customer attrition at the offering level.
• Readiness Projection: Forecast of customer buying potential, pinpointing the obtainable market.
  
  

Addressing the Productivity Imperative with RevOps and Revenue Intelligence

Ultimately, a great RevOps tool helps companies answer four critical questions:

1. WHAT to sell
2. TO WHOM
3. WHEN
4. WHY

Equipped with these insights, teams can adapt quickly, act strategically, and capture growth opportunities. This clarity and direction make RevOps essential for thriving amid today’s challenges.

Ready to Unlock Your Company’s Revenue Potential?

RevOps isn’t just a function; it’s a competitive advantage. If you're ready to experience the power of RevOps for your business, book a demo with us today and discover how 180ops’ revenue intelligence solution can help you uncover untapped growth potential.

For a deeper dive into the optimal team and tech setup for revenue intelligence, check out our earlier blog: Revenue Intelligence: Analyst Team and Resource Requirements vs. 180ops Data Factory.

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