Revenue Operations from a CRO´s Perspective

The term RevOps has exploded in the SaaS world. According to Gartner insights, by 2025, 75% of the highest-growth companies in the world will deploy a Revenue Operations (RevOps) model. When bootstrapped businesses have to choose between hiring a Go-To-Market (GTM) role with clear ROI, and a RevOps role with the promise of efficiencies gained, companies often choose the hire with the clearest correlation to revenue.

But is it the clearest?

Boston Consulting Group has pointed out that the top B2B technology companies have found the following benefits in a RevOps function: 10-20% increase in sales productivity, 30% reduction in GTM expenses, and 100-200% increase in digital marketing ROI, among others.

So, how do executives know what RevOps can bring to their business and when to bring the function in-house?

We wanted to get a first-hand perspective of RevOps from someone who has implemented the model in their organization. We sat down with Rob Joyner, Chief Revenue Officer at Centerbase, to understand what RevOps has done for the business, his advice on implementing the function, and their plans for RevOps in 2022.

“Before we had RevOps, no one knew what it was. Now that we have RevOps, everybody wants a piece of it” – Rob Joyner, CRO

What does RevOps do for Centerbase?

1. Provides data to fuel better decisions
Rob called out a dilemma most of us know well: in today’s world, you cannot report out of one single system. At Centerbase, RevOps has allowed the team to marry data together from multiple sources while also extracting key insights to help inform better decisions for the business, in real time.

As someone who has been integral in the business from the start, Rob says he works a lot off intuition. RevOps, which is based in the data, helps Rob balance the art [intuition] and science [data] that is decision-making in SaaS.

Rob said, “I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing today without RevOps on the team.”

2. Process, process, process
With a headcount that more than doubled within the last year, Centerbase has grown from a collection of people to a collection of teams of people, according to Rob. When you start to add those layers, you need more processes to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Because RevOps provides a birds-eye view of the customer journey, it can help identify areas in which the business can gain efficiencies, improving the experience for the customer as well as the internal teams.

3 . Nails the technical execution
“Ideas are great, and process is great, but technical execution is key,” said Rob who, by his own admission, is a better ideas guy than executor. Enter RevOps (as well as other execution-minded individuals on the executive team) and you now have frameworks and methodologies to integrate ideas into a system.

RevOps helps systemize the way that data flows within a CRM, as well as what processes are being enforced by way of automation or required data capture. These systems reinforce behaviors with GTM reps to ensure processes are scalable. For Instance, the sales methodology requires account executives to obtain specific information at each stage of the funnel. By gating stages by certain mandatory fields within the CRM, the systems can help reinforce that sales methodology and sales training. RevOps also encourages systemic governance, ensuring the correct individuals have access to the right data, at the right time, and that historical data is preserved — all of which is key to understanding company growth.

Centerbase’s top 3 learnings from implementing RevOps

1 . Hire a leader with experience
When Centerbase launched RevOps, they chose to bring in someone more senior to lead the team—someone who had done the role before and could hit the ground running. When implementing a new function, companies often put in a lower-level person to grow into that role. By hiring for experience—not only in RevOps, but also as a seller—Centerbase’s leader could relate to the data and also empathize with the real-world scenarios the GTM team may face.

2. Protect RevOps’ Capacity
RevOps reports directly to Rob, the CRO. As a catch-all function, it’s all too easy for folks to offload tasks on RevOps. By managing them directly, Rob can protect and track their capacity, ensuring they stay focused on key strategic projects. “Before we had RevOps, no one knew what it was. Now that we have RevOps, everybody wants a piece of it and I have to be mindful of capacity, so we don’t get burnout,” explained Rob.

3. Don’t hesitate to start
When we asked Rob if he would have done anything differently in implementing RevOps at Centerbase he said, “I would have done it sooner.” He expanded: “The correlation of revenue to a sales rep is 1:1. They are revenue-generating. It’s evident. But with RevOps and the efficiencies it brings, sales cycles shorten because of better processes and our data is better to help make better decisions, in real time.”

Those returns are hard to quantify up front but are abundantly evident in hindsight.

What’s on deck for RevOps at Centerbase in 2022?

According to Rob, the primary focal points for 2022 are (1) integrating all systems and (2) furthering data simplification. As the company continues to evolve, so too does its need to capture data, clarify processes and nail the technical execution. RevOps helps integrate all of this into the customer lifecycle every day. As that lifecycle develops, so too will the needs of the business and the incorporation of RevOps.

Now it’s your turn

So—what will RevOps look like in your organization? We hope these insights provide helpful takeaways in evaluating the present and future needs of RevOps in your business.

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