Getting Started in RevOps Part 3: System Design

By: Matt Solomon  |  August 18, 2021

In a previous post, we discussed how you can evaluate internal functions and processes to better understand how to achieve your ideal customer journey. The next step is ensuring you have the appropriate technology in place to effectively run these processes.

RevOps is a relatively new role within SaaS businesses and even without a full-time revenue operations leader, you can begin to run these processes.

Systems Design, the third in our series highlighting how to get started with Revenue Operations.

Evaluating if you have the right tools for the job

We believe there are two types of business technologies that every organization should invest in: the “need-to-haves” and the “nice-to-haves”.

Need-to-Haves (Customer/Prospect Tracking Solutions)

  • Customer Relationship Management software (Salesforce, HubSpot or Dynamics!)
  • Marketing Automation solutions (HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, Drift)
  • Customer Support solutions (Service Cloud, Zendesk, Freshdesk)
  • Product Analytics solutions (Pendo, Mixpanel, Segment)

Nice to Haves (Go-To-Market Enablement tools)

  • Sales Acceleration tools (Outreach.io, SalesLoft, Gong.io)
  • Customer Success tracking and analytics (Gainsight, Churnzero, Totango)
  • Integration solutions (Incycle, Mulesoft, Domo, Zapier)
  • Payment Processing solutions (Payrix, Paysimple)
  • Business Insights and Analytics tools (Tableau, Looker, Power BI)
  • Conversational Marketing solutions (Drift, HubSpot, Intercom)
  • ABM Tracking (Terminus, DemandBase, Rollworks)
  • Data Enrichment Services (ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, Prospect.io)

Whew—a long list!

While each of these technologies can contribute to your business success in the long run, we believe it is critical to start with a strong foundation of need-to-have technologies. Then, you can layer on the nice-to-haves over time. As you evaluate each tool, look across its features and capabilities to see if there are features that could replace the need for future software purchases. Further, look at how each of these systems communicate with one another. Do they have native integration or would it require building customizations with their API?

Follow the trail of the customer account

For tech implementation to be successful, you should be able to look at your customer journey map next to a flow diagram of your tech stack and see clear alignment between the two.

To achieve this alignment, have your RevOps team meet with stakeholders as well as any team members who interface with customers. The goal of these meetings should be to glean an understanding of how each group interacts with the customer and what information is needed for them to determine the customers’ health or the prospects’ chance of closing.

These insights will help your RevOps function further solidify what needs to be incorporated into the internal process to effectively manage a customer through your systems.

Mapping out how your information is connected

A great exercise to determine what you need from a technical perspective is to look at your customer journey and list out the features you need in your tools to achieve the desired flow.

For example:

Walking through these customer journey triggers and considering the related tech features will help your RevOps team prioritize which new tools should be layered on or, potentially, when you need to switch to a more robust solution to meet the needs of the customer journey.

The ideal output in this exercise is to create a visual diagram of how data moves through your system and how it aligns with the customer journey.

Create rails in your system—not roadblocks

Once you’ve begun implementing your technology and updating your process, it’s a good idea to create tools that help keep everyone working within the process to ensure data quality and completeness. It’s tempting to create validation rules, errors, and required fields for instances in which the process isn’t being followed, but rather than disrupting workflows, offer recommendations to get the team back on track.

For example, Salesforce offers the ability to block someone from saving updates to a customer account if they don’t complete certain fields. But, rather than creating a disruptive error, you could also create a pop-up that indicates what information is missing, so they don’t have to scroll through the customer profile to find the error.

Creating rails helps your team achieve its desired process without disrupting or frustrating the end-users.

*Chef’s Kiss* It all comes together!

At this point, you have started to create the infrastructure to manage and track your customers. A unified tech stack helps bridge ties across the go-to-market functions, so you can best serve your customers and bring transparency to the organization across your KPIs.

In our next post (#4 of 5 in this series), we will discuss how you can operationalize this data to review potential revenue of both new and existing business. Stay tuned.


Matt is Senior Revenue Operations Manager at Mainsail. He supports the firms sales operations and sourcing strategies.
More by Matt Solomon
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