RevOps adoption continues to expand as a perfect storm of economic and technological changes drive enterprises to invest in optimizing their revenue engines. Although RevOps has primarily been a tech company movement, we will start to see the concepts and methods begin to be adopted in more traditional industries as they embrace digital transformation. From our unique vantage point in the evolution of RevOps, we believe the following trends will shape the RevOps software industry as a whole. Keep your eye out for them in 2023.
Shift From a Product To a Service Mentality
Digital experiences are now the norm for companies across the product spectrum – from B2B technology to pure consumer goods. Regardless of the core product, all companies are looking for the predictable revenue that comes with a subscription. For instance your doorbell was likely sold at a loss in order to lock in the ongoing subscription revenue.
This trend will further accelerate the unification of Sales and Customer Service teams and, as a result, the adoption of RevOps. When buyers buy online, they don’t care about your organizational silos. They only care about having a seamless, streamlined experience.
This means that organizations need to think strategically about the end-to-end lead to renewal process. They need to have RevOps systems and processes in place that break down barriers between revenue teams and ensure a consistent flow of data, leads, and accounts across them. Companies that win this game will build greater trust, brand loyalty, and drive greater customer value.
The Industrialization of Sales
B2B selling has never been more complicated. As companies scale, buying groups grow and sales cycles lengthen. Led by technology companies, many organizations are finding great value in creating specialized sales roles to execute their GTM strategy. As the benefits become apparent, we expect to see this trend spread to more traditional industries.
Sales specialization works because complex selling cycles have many different phases: research, prospecting, qualification, discovery, demonstration, negotiation, quoting, proposal, pipeline management, account management, and account expansion. Each of these stages requires different sales skills. Whereas one person may have previously managed the entire cycle, many organizations are now employing 5-6 people to cover these activities. BDRs/SDRs conduct research and outbound prospecting, Account Executives or Sales Managers negotiate the deal, Sales Engineers conduct demos, and Account Managers grow the business. Product and industry specialists may be brought into deals as needed. Having the right person on the right job at the right time drives sales productivity. It’s not unlike Marketing where you would never expect your PR person to manage Google ad bidding with any success.
All this said, multiplying the number of sales roles can easily become a jumbled mess if not managed properly, defeating the actual purpose of specialization in the first place. RevOps technology is needed to automate important processes related to territory and quota assignments, lead and account handoffs, role and strategy changes, commissions and crediting, and other processes that impact the ability to operate efficiently.
Distributed Work Environments Are Here to Stay
In many industries, remote work is now the norm. While this has enormous positive lifestyle and productivity implications for many workers, it also comes with its share of challenges. Given this reality RevOps technology is critical to manage and grow revenue operations.
Communication is one of the biggest remote work challenges. How do you engage with people you never see? More importantly, how do you enforce consistent behavior and foster a learning environment? In the old days, 100 BDRs sat together in a room so it was easy to track their productivity and provide impromptu coaching. Now those same reps are cranking calls from home without any real-time oversight. That’s why it’s now more important than ever to have software and automation tools, like revenue intelligence tools, to track and improve performance.
Similarly, how do you organize your remote sales resources effectively? When sales reps no longer need to sell in person, the lack of geographic constraints opens up a world of territory segmentation possibilities. Organizations can build territories based on criteria that give all reps a fair shot at making their number. However, as territory segmentation gets more sophisticated, spreadsheets get more complicated. That’s where territory management software comes in. It replaces manual spreadsheets with automated processes, making it easy to ensure that the right rep is covering the right territory, as well as making it easy for team members to collaborate on planning activities no matter where they are located.
Consolidation of RevOps Tech Stacks
Even though technology is often the solution, it can also be the problem. We have all seen the various Sales and RevOps vendor landscapes with literally thousands of tool options. The proliferation of point tools has made it overwhelming to select the right software, and costly and time consuming to implement and manage them. Although most vendors claim to increase agility, the overabundance of tools is causing exactly the opposite result. The size of the tech stack at most organizations has put a strain on Ops and IT departments and increased technical debt. It is revealing that despite all of the sales technology now available, quota attainment is still lagging at most organizations. The promised ROI for most tools is simply not being realized.
As a result, in 2023 we expect to see companies shrink and consolidate their tech stacks. Yes, RevOps tools will still be critical to achieve operations efficiency and sales productivity. However, organizations will look toward RevOps platforms that integrate key functions together, thereby eliminating the amount of coding required to keep everything in sync. For example, one RevOps platform can easily integrate territory, quota, and capacity planning, as well as runtime activities like lead routing or managing account hierarchies, creating dramatic efficiencies in planning and operations.
What additional RevOps trends do you expect in 2023? Reach out to us and let us know.
