What do all B2B SaaS businesses have in common? A will to achieve sustainable growth.
And what helps? A well-oiled go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
What is the biggest challenge facing B2B SaaS businesses today?
It's not just achieving sustainable growth but plugging revenue leaks, optimizing funnel conversions, and bettering the lead-to-revenue ratio.
A well-functioning go-to-market (GTM) strategy can align product offerings with market demand, offering efficient customer acquisition and retention.
However, the full potential of even the most meticulously planned GTM strategy can be undermined by disconnected processes and siloed teams.
This is where Revenue Operations (RevOps) comes into play.
RevOps integrate and optimize business processes across sales, marketing, and customer success. This contributes to sealing potential revenue leaks and enhancing funnel efficiency to make sure every lead moves smoothly toward becoming revenue.
Here’s how RevOps fit in:
RevOps fosters unity and collaboration by aligning teams with centralized tools, processes, and data across the customer lifecycle.
Result? Enhanced visibility and driving efficiency.
Why does this matter?
Such visibility impacts a business’s ability to acquire, retain, and grow customer relationships—the lifelines of any SaaS enterprise.
Also, Gartner predicts that 75% of the global high-growth businesses will deploy the revenue operations (RevOps) model.
Are you ready?
Let’s drill further and explore how RevOps fits into the GTM strategy by first understanding the significance of RevOps for effective GTM.
Why Do You Need RevOps for Effective GTM?
RevOps is a high-performance fuel that provides the necessary boost for reaching your desired goals.
While there are GTM teams who function to bring products to market by
- Aligning marketing activities in a way that positively impacts revenue
- Carrying out sales tasks targeted toward achieving predefined revenue output
- Implementing customer experience strategies to effectively engage the market and maximize sales.
But, here we’d discuss GTM not merely as a function or department within a company but as a strategic framework. It includes multiple functions working together with which RevOps helps coordinate and optimize.
By integrating RevOps into GTM strategy, B2B SaaS firms streamline their operations and boost their growth trajectory.
Here’s what it can do.
- Ensure Alignment Across the Board
RevOps shatters silos wherein the marketing, sales, and customer success teams operate as a single, well-coordinated unit.
The result?
Smoother handoffs with shared goals ensure an elusive customer journey. This alignment creates a flywheel of success, where each team's efforts positively impact the next.
- Refine the Processes and Tools
With RevOps chipping in, GTM teams can systematically integrate and optimize tools and processes across departments. This reduces friction and operational bottlenecks to enhance productivity, where routine tasks are automated so humans can put effort into revenue improvements and customer experience.
- Unlock Operational Efficiency
GTM teams can leverage RevOps to streamline processes and integrate sales, marketing, and customer service data.
This unified approach eliminates silos and optimizes resource use to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making.
- Enhance Customer Experience (CX)
Implement a GTM strategy by aligning all customer-facing operations to enhance their experience. Such coordination ensures the customer journey is smooth and consistent across sales, marketing, and customer service, increasing satisfaction and loyalty.
Your CX teams will solve customer problems and gather valuable feedback, while RevOps puts the customer at the core of your growth strategy.
What Revenue Leaders Have to Say about RevOps's Role in GTM
Want to know the secret sauce of GTM success? These revenue leaders reveal how RevOps unlocks growth potential and how it can impact their businesses.
1. Nektar AI Podcast: The Revenue Lounge hosted by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Co-Founder & CEO at Nektar AI
Episode #4 (Season 2) was on - Moving from a Siloed GTM Structure to a RevOps Structure ft. Dan Jiao.
This episode featured Dan Jiao, VP - RevOps, Signifyd.
He defines RevOps as “Aligning all the go-to-market functions that might be more disjointed without having the kind of this unifying force that we call RevOps.”
This way, he considers RevOps a function that unifies and aligns different GTM teams under one umbrella with one vision.
2. The Handshakr Huddle hosted by Leon Hardwick, Head of OpX at Reinvigoration.
Episode 4 (season 3) featured Brad Rosen, President at Sales Assembly prev G2 CRO. He narrates his work experience to Leon, mentioning when his former CEO at G2 asked him to do RevOps (over 7 years back).
So he worked around RevOps and acknowledged what worked in his favor by saying “... it was a great combination of my go-to-market experience and my analytical background and being able to see the business as a whole. And understand where our efficiencies were…let's lean into those. And where our gaps are… let's make sure that we're addressing those.
He worked on RevOps for over seven years, when he overlooked all GTM functions and helped build them out.
3. GTM Innovators: Hosted by Mike Weir, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Finalis
Episode 10 of Season 1 was about - Building Successful RevOps & Combating Silo Syndrome.
This episode featured Jen Igartua, CEO of Go Nimbly. She was asked how great RevOps leaders and teams practically bring their organizations together.
In response, she iterates that “RevOps is not a strategy behind their company; they are helping go-to-market teams with their strategy. Teams can play a major role in addressing the silo syndrome, which is responsible for creating friction within and outside the teams.
She builds on her experience and adds, “I'm discussing with sales leaders, marketing leaders, and CS leaders to define our go-to-market strategy. I'm not sitting in the background and coming up with it on my own. So we're facilitating those kinds of meetings and conversations along with strong analytics that tells us you know where we're losing deals and where the pipe is slowing down, and so we're the ones who are aligning these three teams.”
Mistakes Companies Commit with GTM Strategy
Well-thought-out GTM strategies can often falter if teams cannot avoid common pitfalls associated with implementing departmental strategies. Such slip-ups result in wasted resources, slower acquisition, higher churn rates, and stunted growth.
We’ll explore key mistakes your GTM teams make and ways to avoid those.
Not Setting the Right Expectations
Expectations mismatch stems from a lack of clear communication about the goals, timelines, and success metrics for new initiatives or product launches. This may lead to GTM teams pursuing conflicting objectives, resulting in inefficient resource allocation and disappointing outcomes.
For instance, if the sales team expects a high volume of leads from a new product launch but the marketing team isn't geared to deliver. This mismatch may reduce internal morale, where either of the departments bleeds money.
Here are some key strategies to overcome this mistake:
- Establish Clear Communication Channels
Conduct alignment meetings to implement regular, structured communications between GTM teams. Shared dashboards help clarify goals since metrics are updated and reviewed in real-time.
- Cross-Departmental Collaboration
RevOps fosters regular touchpoints and communication channels between teams.
Such cross-departmental communication unlocks open discussion, which makes way for clear handoff procedures for shared accountability.
- Drive Interdepartmental Collaboration
Encourage collaborative planning sessions where teams can understand and contribute to the broader revenue objectives to break silos.
Such a holistic approach ensures all departments work towards the same goals to prevent misalignment.
Siloed Operations
Siloed functions will have individual departments or teams operating independently. They lack sufficient interaction or information sharing with other business segments.For B2B companies, such a separation leaves a void in understanding how different parts of the organization impact each other. For example, if the product development team doesn't align closely with customer support, they may miss critical feedback that has the potential to improve product features.
To avoid this, RevOps can chip in the following way.
- Process Mapping & Standardization
RevOps can map the entire customer journey by identifying bottlenecks and areas for improvement. This standardizes best practices and ensures consistent execution across departments.
- Technology Integration & Automation
RevOps connects systems (like your CRM and marketing automation platform), reducing manual data entry. Such seamless data flow gives everyone the complete picture and eliminates unnecessary tasks.
- Building a Culture of Collaboration
Shared KPIs and cross-functional meetings will take center stage with RevOps. It will cultivate a sense of ownership for the entire GTM strategy and isolated departments.
Doing Patchwork Instead of Structural Fixes
Quick solutions to immediate problems may only work for a short period. Such patchwork fixes do not address the underlying structural issues because they do not resolve the root causes, leading to recurring problems.
For instance, your B2B company is struggling with high churn rates. Instead of deeply analyzing customer feedback and usage patterns to understand the churn, offering promotional discounts to retain users may only be a temporary fix.
Here’s what RevOps can do instead.
- Root-Cause Analysis
RevOps champions a data-driven approach to problem-solving with a root cause analysis process.
It digs deeper into performance metrics to uncover the underlying reasons for recurring issues, not just surface-level symptoms.
- Process Optimization
RevOps helps map out end-to-end GTM processes by identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks that compensate for temporary fixes. This drives process optimization for long-term solutions rather than short-term relief.
- Cross-Departmental Alignment
RevOps provide solutions that address the needs of all stakeholders involved. It discourages patchwork fixes that might work for one team but negatively impact others downstream.
Putting Data Before Processes
Data is a powerful tool, not the finished product. Without established processes, even the best data is just a collection of raw information with no clear path to actionable improvements for your GTM teams.
Hence, a marketing team meticulously tracking website traffic and email open rates may fail to hit revenue targets due to a lack of a structured lead nurturing process. Sure, the data may show prospects are interested, but a lack of a defined system to guide those leads further down the funnel may lead to missed conversion opportunities.
Here’s what RevOps can unleash with data by their side.
- Defining the 'Why' Behind the Data
RevOps can establish the purpose behind each data point and track KPIs to ensure that strategic decisions are data-backed.
- Standardized Data Collection & Reporting
Building robust processes around data ensures consistency and reliability while instilling confidence in data integrity, making it easier to draw valid conclusions.
- Actionable Insights
RevOps translates complex data into clear, actionable insights tailored for specific teams. Sales understands how to qualify leads better, marketing generates richer content, and customer success can identify upsell opportunities.
Waiting Too Long to Track Efforts
Functioning in a B2B SaaS industry requires thriving on timely feedback and making data-driven adjustments. However, delayed tracking and analyzing your GTM efforts may cause you to miss critical insights that could refine your strategies.
For instance, waiting until the end of a quarter to review the performance of a new product launch instead of monitoring metrics in real time. This prevents you from identifying and addressing issues early, leading to extended periods of suboptimal performance.
RevOps helps eliminate this mistake in the following manner:
- Real-time Reporting & Dashboards
RevOps establishes robust dashboards and reporting systems to provide up-to-date insights on key GTM metrics. This allows for immediate feedback and proactive adjustments across all departments.
- Defined Tracking Cadence
RevOps instills a systematic routine for data review and analysis. Rather than waiting for an unspecified time, teams can now evaluate their performance regularly, creating a culture that embraces ongoing improvement.
- Automation & Alerts
RevOps heavily leverages automation to reduce delays. Alerts can flag key changes or anomalies in metrics, prompting immediate investigation and swift resolution.
For instance, Relitix Alerts.
Your marketing and sales team can set up KPI tracking across every channel. Here, audits are automated, and you are alerted of any anomalies to quickly identify pipeline leaks and close the gap.
Conclusion
Siloed teams may hinder a seamless customer journey by presenting bottlenecks at different touchpoints. Hence, RevOps must remain central to GTM teams to align marketing, sales, and customer success teams.
This will help break departmental barriers and promote a data-driven, streamlined approach to your GTM. While the principles of RevOps are powerful, achieving them without the right tools can be an uphill battle.
Hence, if you want to harness the power of a unified GTM strategy, Revlitix is the answer.
Revlitix gives you crucial insights into funnel, SQL, and MQL data. This will empower GTM teams to stay synchronized and drive efficient, targeted initiatives.
Ultimately, you’ll be bridging the gaps between your GTM teams so that every part of your organization moves together towards a common revenue goal.
Request a Revlitix Demo to understand how it helps unlock the revenue potential of GTM teams.