More B2B companies today understand the value of revenue operations (RevOps). One recent Gartner study found that organizations using RevOps were 1.4 times as likely to exceed 2023 revenue goals by 10% or more – and that explains why adoption has skyrocketed.
But there are many ways to implement RevOps – and they are not equal. This article leverages our RevOps experts’ insights to explore how different RevOps frameworks function, and help you select the best one for your company.
A RevOps framework organizes your RevOps program around a central “approach” to the concept. Rather than simply charging in and trying to improve every revenue process, a framework helps you prioritize and coordinate efforts to ensure your program reaches maturity faster.
Imagine trying to “optimize” your sales processes: where would you even begin? There are so many ways you could tackle the challenge, and so many potential theories about which tasks or processes would have the greatest impact. This can lead to a lot of internal conflict, wasted resources, and ultimately sub-optimal results.
But how does a framework actually help you avoid those problems?
There are four core pillars every RevOps program revolves around:
But let’s imagine you don’t have the time or resources to attack all these simultaneously – or at least not with equal emphasis. How do you identify which areas of each pillar should be prioritized?
Most RevOps frameworks solve this problem by establishing a central focus for all RevOps efforts; to understand how, let’s look at a few examples.
The Waterfall Framework is built around optimizing the traditional, linear B2B buyer journey. It assumes that leads pass through predefined stages – and the right processes can therefore lead to faster, more impactful deals.
This has clear implications for our “RevOps pillars”:
However, this approach risks overlooking the complexity of the modern B2B buying process – which is increasingly non-linear. Buyers may move back and forth between “stages” multiple time, creating a lot of confusion for organizations that assume they’re going to move seamlessly through like a “waterfall”.
The Agile Framework borrows from agile software development methodology to place a heavy emphasis on flexibility and cross-functional collaboration. It reflects the unpredictable B2B buyer cycle and is built on a belief that adaptability is the best path to revenue:
This solves the core problem with the Waterfall Framework – but risks creating inefficiencies by never establishing best practices or fixed processes that are often necessary to make revenue generation reliable.
The Product-Led Growth (PLG) framework is built upon the idea that your product is the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. RevOps teams therefore focus on optimizing the product (and product-focused marketing) to maximize revenue:
This is clearly a very specific approach and can produce powerful results for the right company. But this brings us to the key point: every framework works for someone – you just need to figure out whether that someone is you.
The ultimate goal of all RevOps programs is to maximize revenue while minimizing costs. But there are several other factors that must also be considered, such as your:
These shed different light on RevOps and help demonstrate how each of the frameworks explored above could benefit a specific business:
But the truth is most companies don’t quite fit any of these pre-built frameworks and should either see existing frameworks as a “jumping off point” - or simply develop their own from scratch.
Our experience helping over 50 companies implement RevOps has found four key steps are required to develop a framework that delivers strong results:
RevOps is pointless without a deep understanding of how buyers engage with your company – and what is required to make a purchase. But B2B buyers vary wildly in their expectations and behavior between industries and even specific niches.
Your ideal buyers prioritize extensive research early in their process - or they might engage with salespeople quickly to get the lay of the land. Maybe it’s relatively easy to capture their contact details (they download lots of gated content) but take a long time to move to the “demo” phase.
This is why your RevOps framework must be built around a comprehensive “map” of the ideal buyer journey:
From this will likely emerge a “theory” that underpins your RevOps framework; you have a clear idea of what will help your specific company drive the most revenue. Now you just have to figure out how to achieve.
Set aside a period of time to “go deep” on your existing marketing and sales performance – and establish what is and is not working. There are two basic components to this:
Many companies skip this process; they see RevOps as a “fresh start” and want to overhaul as much as possible. But this leads to a lot of waste and missed opportunities – especially for companies that have had at least some success in the past.
Now that you can compare your ideal funnel with your existing one, it’s time to ask the hard question: what exactly will your RevOps program focus on? For most companies, the gap between their ideal funnel and the one they current operate is vast – and simply building the ideal one will be out of scope.
Instead, use the comparison to evaluate each RevOps pillar and establish which elements of it you will prioritize. The following steps are crucial:
This will give you a clear set of tasks; a goal for each RevOps pillar; and a shared vision for the program you’re introducing. But what if you don’t have the time or resources to complete that process?
ProperExpression is a full-stack B2B marketing agency that specializes in RevOps strategy and execution. From mapping your buyer journeys to managing your RevOps program, we can help you generate the maximize possible revenue – all while bringing costs down.
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