What Revenue Ops should actually focus on

Importance of Creating Separate Teams for Focus and Specialization

Creating separate teams within an organization enhances focus, coordinates priorities effectively, and fosters skill specialization. By segmenting teams, organizations streamline operations and allow specialized skills to flourish.

Enhancing Focus

Teams centered on specific functions or projects can concentrate on their objectives without broader distractions, leading to higher quality outputs and innovation. For example, a marketing operations team can focus on processes and systems without unrelated tasks of campaign deployment.

Priority Coordination

Separate teams establish goals and timelines aligned with the organization's mission, tailored to their context. This approach optimizes resource management, allowing demnd and campaign teams to prioritize timely campaigns and operations teams to pursue long-term innovations.

Specialization in Skills

Grouping individuals by expertise allows them to refine skills (aligning to thier core tasks/responsibilities, increasing efficiency and contributing to organizational success. For instance, reporting and insights teams can enhance analytical skills, while account management teams improve communication abilities.

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

Maintaining collaboration among teams prevents silos. Encouraging knowledge sharing through inter-team meetings and collaborative projects ensures cross-pollination of ideas, enhancing overall performance.

Importance of Separating Operations Teams from GTM Teams

Operations teams play a critical role in supporting Go-To-Market (GTM) teams, but it is essential for them to remain separate to maximize their effectiveness and achieve broader company goals. Here are several reasons why this separation is beneficial:

Focused Responsibilities

Revenue Operations can encompass various responsibilities tailored to the company's needs. A clear delineation of roles ensures that:

• Marketing Operations: Manages systems and processes that create awareness and interest among prospects for the company's products and services.

• Sales Operations: manages systems that Coordinate outreach and follow-up with prospects, focusing on understanding their challenges and offering suitable solutions.

• Account/Support Operations: manages systems that Facilitate relationship building, customer onboarding, and ongoing support to enhance customer satisfaction and retention.

This structure guarantees a seamless and consistently excellent experience for all prospects and customers across various touchpoints.

Enhanced Optimization and Scalability

Operations teams support GTM teams by providing techniques for optimization and scalability through:

• Streamlined processes

• Best practices

• Metrics reports

• Technology (tooling)

While significant improvements in campaign responses may not always be realistic, operations teams can enable a 6-10X increase in campaigns with the same effort by fostering incremental response rate improvements through testing various elements such as content, imagery, layout, and journey sequences.

Avoiding Conflicting Priorities

Day-to-day customer campaigns often come with high urgency and shorter timelines, which can clash with the longer-term projects typically managed by operations teams. By keeping these teams separate, organizations can:

• Prevent conflicting planning and scheduling needs.

• Ensure that each team can focus on their respective priorities without compromising the quality of their work.

• Utilize distinct skill sets effectively, aligning them with the appropriate tasks.

Marketing Operations Focus Areas

Marketing Operations should concentrate on the following areas that differentiate it from demand and campaign teams:

• Marketing Process Optimization: Streamlining marketing processes and workflows to enhance efficiency and effectiveness across campaigns.

• Data Management: Ensuring accurate data collection, storage/governance, and analysis to support marketing strategies and decision-making.

• Technology Integration: Overseeing the implementation and maintenance of marketing technology stacks to facilitate seamless operations.

• Performance Measurement: Developing metrics and KPIs to evaluate the success of marketing initiatives (create or accelerate pipeline, support deal progression, etc.) beyond just demand generation.

• Collaboration and Alignment: Ensuring alignment between marketing, sales, account management and other departments to support overall business goals.

• Task to Avoid: Campaign deployment, content creation, pulling ad-hoc reports or micro segments etc. While Ops teams should create templates to make these processes self-serve and repeatable.

Sales Operations Focus Areas

Sales Operations should focus on the following areas that set it apart from Sales and Account Development:

• Sales Process Improvement: Analyzing and refining sales processes to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

• Data Analytics: Utilizing data to inform sales strategies, forecast revenue, and identify opportunities.

• Sales Enablement: Providing tools, resources, and training to empower sales teams to perform at their best, following best practices of top performers, and deal composition and prospect communications.

• Performance Tracking: Monitoring sales performance metrics (i.e. deal age, stage age, deal value, as compared to deals similar companies and teams) and providing insights to drive improvements.

• Compensation and Incentives: Designing and managing compensation plans to motivate and reward sales teams.

• Task to Avoid: Crafting prospect email/call script content, pulling ad-hoc reports and call down list, etc. While Ops teams should create templates to make these processes easy, self-serve, and repeatable.

Account Operations Focus Areas

Account Operations should focus on the following areas that differentiate it from Account Management and Support:

• Account Strategy Development: Creating strategic frameworks for managing accounts to maximize value and growth (usage or users, etc).

• Data Governance: Ensuring the accuracy and security of account data (Annualized contract value, Life time value, customer satisfaction, current open cases, etc) across systems.

• Process Standardization: Developing standardized processes for account handling (onboarding, growth plan, issues and feature wish list etc) to improve consistency and efficiency.

• Performance Analysis: Analyzing account performance metrics to identify trends (user issues or development, common usage scenarios at customer, contract value trend) and areas for improvement.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Facilitating collaboration between account teams and other departments to enhance service delivery and client satisfaction.

• Task to Avoid: Campaign deployment, content (email / customer business review decks / etc) creation, pulling ad-hoc reports and customer segment list, etc. While Ops teams should create templates to make these processes self-serve and repeatable.

Separate Teams One Organization

In summary, keeping operations teams distinct from GTM teams enables each to thrive in their specific domains, ultimately propelling the company toward its objectives. This arrangement fosters a more efficient workflow, improves customer experiences, and supports scalable growth strategies. Are there exceptions? Certainly, but they should be rare. When an initiative requires cross-team collaboration for tactical tasks and a deep understanding of systems and data, Ops teams can assist. Just ensure this is reflected in the team's project management and isn't a frequent occurrence, as long-term projects may suffer, or the team may experience burnout from using personal time to compensate.