New technology and shifting buyer expectations are pushing B2B companies to rethink their acquisition and retention strategies. Leaders across sales, marketing, and customer success are investing in centralizing their operation teams to drive efficiency and accelerate revenue. Revenue operations, or RevOps, is an emerging function in B2B companies that leverages cutting-edge technology to achieve better team alignment and meet changing buyer expectations.
What are revenue operations?
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is the alignment of sales, marketing, and customer success operations across the entire customer lifecycle to drive growth through operational efficiency and keep all teams accountable to revenue. Operational efficiency is especially important given the current economic climate and teams are doubling down on their RevOps investments to fuel growth.
But perhaps the most important reason that RevOps has become such a focal point for B2B companies is that it’s become necessary for meeting customer expectations. Put simply, your prospects have grown frustrated with traditional sales cycles.
Avoid leaky lead funnels for smoother customer experiences
Shifts in B2B buyer expectations have your prospects craving a frictionless, B2C-like experience with every SaaS evaluation. If it takes longer than five minutes for someone to reach out to them after their initial inquiry, they’re significantly less likely to convert.
Five minutes. For many businesses, that sounds like a pipedream. But when studies show that 78% of customers buy from the company that responds to them first, it may be time to rethink how you currently manage your lead lifecycle processing pipeline.
And there’s a lot to rethink. Just take a look at all the steps in the lead lifecycle today.
With so many processes occurring across different applications, it’s easy to see how leads can fall through the cracks. Leaky lead funnels account for a 30% loss of potential revenue, leading many B2B organizations to invest in RevOps and rethink how their leads are processed. But before fixing your funnel, you must first identify the gaps.
What’s causing your leaky funnel?
The most common issues affecting your lead funnel are outdated technology, scarce dev resources, and the limited integration capabilities of your current tools.
- Lead data is siloed across legacy and new platforms. Teams across sales and marketing must spend an inordinate amount of time on manual processes such as uploading, cleaning, and routing leads.
Not only does siloed data lead to slower follow-up times, but it also results in a bunch of lead management headaches such as duplicate lead lists that incorrectly inflate lead counts, routing leads at the wrong stage to the wrong destination, or accidentally continuing to contact leads that have opted out. - Point-to-point solutions require resources you don’t have. Cobbling together point-to-point solutions using custom code requires dev resources, which are usually not available or very limited. On top of that, as APIs inevitably change, your team remains on the hook for updating and maintaining the integrations. Put simply, it’s not a scalable solution.
- Out-of-the-box integrations don’t fit your business needs. Many sales and marketing platforms offer limited connectivity to a handful of tools. It’s likely that your most important apps aren’t seamlessly integrated to the customized use cases you need for your business.
In other words, the most important lead data stays locked up within each application. Without robust integrations, none of your individual apps can deliver important insights on the full picture of where, how, and why your leads engaged with you, or the best way to follow up with them.
Rethink your lead lifecycle with a cloud-first low-code approach to automation
RevOps is a relatively new function in organizations today. As such, RevOps professionals must leverage the most modern tools available today to help them achieve their day-to-day business tasks.
Using a low-code, cloud-first approach to automation with a platform like Tray.io, RevOps professionals can integrate their sales, marketing, and customer support applications and completely automate the entire lead lifecycle.
Eliminating the manual processes involved in lead capturing, cleansing, recording, monitoring, and engagement results in highly-accurate lead data rapidly flowing through your funnel. Then, you see higher conversions and increasing revenue.
To learn how low-code automation can repair your leaky funnel, check out this Mardreamin’ session on The Age of RevOps: Reinventing Lead Lifecycle Management.
