My 4 takeaways from the State of RevOps and Intelligence Summit

As a marketing professional, I focus revenue teams on the markets, opportunities, and approaches that maximize business growth. Over the last few years, I've heard more and more about revenue operations and how it's transforming how we do business. 

To learn more about revenue operations and its impact on businesses, I had the opportunity to participate in the Revenue Operations and Intelligence Summit roundtable with other leaders in the field - Udi, chief evangelist of Gong, Brendan, founder, and CEO of RevPartners, and Lindsay, CMO of Mediafly. 

In this blog post, I'll share some key insights and takeaways from the roundtable discussion and why marketing and revenue professionals must pay attention.

RevOps teams go from data pulling and reporting to ingesting, rationalizing, and cleansing data across multiple systems and organizations.

• The role of data collection and insights has exploded with the rise of fragmented orgs, technologies, and touchpoints. Ops need help to meet the rising need for clean and unified data, reports, and the number of specialized systems. Ops teams that fail to scale have become IT service desks, with over 2/3 of their time gathering data and responding to requests.
• According to the State of RevOps survey, the most significant fail points have been prioritizing meaningful revenue signals and delivering on targeted ABM programs, improving pre and post-sales coordination, and removing friction/automating RevOps processes.
• Takeaway: Efficient growth requires leveraging data from the entire customer lifecycle. The adages remain true - you can't manage what you can't measure, and garbage in, garbage out!

The shift from Big Data to Big Ops 

• The last five years of big data have been to bring together the data at APIs across the revenue funnel. Udi laid out the rise of multiple systems of execution like Gong and pools of data to tap (e.g., CDPs stuck at collecting data vs. operationalizing data - see Forrester webinar) to enable insights into the sales cycle and what contributes to funnel velocity.
• The prevalence of big data enables the shift to big Ops (see Brinker's Open22 keynote), defined by the rise of no-code solutions like Openprise, which allows those who know the problem and data to have the automation tools to solve them. This automation starts departmental, expanding quickly from MOPs and SOPs to RevOps and quickly including DataOps and FinOps.
• Takeaway: To succeed in RevOps, being masters of data and the systems that control it is crucial. RevOps Data Automation cloud platforms like Openprise can help.

RevOps helps you own your corner of the room.

• Lindsay Tishgart rightly points out that the economic uncertainty has forced organizations to revisit messaging from growth to saving money, reducing the cost of ownership, and highlighting the cost of doing nothing.
• RevOps and engagement tools like Gong provide real-time reports and leading indicators to improve relevance, performance, and adoption of new messaging or strategies.
• Takeaway: RevOps can be the canary in the coal mine, detecting inconsistencies in sales cycles and language between sales and website, identifying what leads are not converting and why, and determining if the positioning is working or if changes are necessary.

RevOps should be strategic tacticians ... just don't ask to whom they report.

• Brendan from RevPartners Drive had the word of the day - strategic tactician! These RevOps Builders weaponize data across key funnel metrics of volume, conversion, and time.
• The "what" of RevOps is easy, but the "how" is defined by the RevOps builder like a product manager of the funnel system, not just a project manager.
• Udi rightly raises that MOPs teams, albeit better paid, see themselves as marketers first. While we joked this creates a shadow marketing ops, we agreed Ops sits on the spectrum of alignment. Alignment that spans departmental, federated, and centralized.
• Takeaways: The ultimate role of RevOps is to define the funnel system and deliver feature releases the revenue team will use. Use is what produces the data, as well as the organizational trust needed to align the revenue teams.

Summing up, RevOps is transforming how we do business, and marketing and revenue professionals must pay attention. RevOps teams are shifting from a data-pulling IT service desk to one at the head of the Big Ops movement, empowered by the breadth of data and services managed by the rise of no-code RevOps solutions like Openprise. RevOps builders are the strategic tacticians who can first create a shared foundation of data and processes and then increasingly define the funnel system to deliver on the RevOps promise.

To learn more, join our next RevOps Live roundtable this Thursday, April 13, at 10 AM. I will be drilling into the State of RevOps survey with an industry analyst, the founder of a fractional RevOps consultancy, and an Ops practitioner/leader. We will discuss the key RevOps initiatives for 2023, priority use cases and projects, and their tech stack implications. Sign-up and add yourself to the conversation! RevOps Live sign-up page or Linkedin event page.

OK, what did I miss? Email me at mike@openprisetech.com and let's continue the conversation!

#revops #marketingops #roundtable #GTM