With enterprises focused heavily on customer interactions in a world where attention span for digital interactions is ever shrinking, it has become imperative to ensure that customer interactions, invariably, lead to revenue recognition. As anyone who has worked in any organization will be quick to point out, it is an inexplicably long journey from a customer interaction to revenue recognition, involving several departments and multiple individuals, who often have misaligned charters, siloed data sources and detached processes. As such, it becomes a challenge for revenue optimization to take affect even if done with the best of intentions. This is where Revenue Operations comes to the rescue.

What is RevOps?

Revenue Operations (or RevOps) is an enterprise model that lays the foundation for uniting the entire revenue lifecycle.  It focusses on key customer interactions across the entire lifecycle and unifies the personnel, the processes and the enterprise technology stack with an aim to optimize and enhance the flow of revenue.

Simply put, RevOps tries to integrate the disparate, siloed operations across several departments under a single umbrella – product management, marketing, sales, and finance. If it has to be broken down into its elements, RevOps essentially constitutes the below cyclical process:

Key Tenets of RevOps Framework

Any RevOps Framework will be built around the following central concepts:

• Pooled 360-degree data source: A common, integrated source of data that can present a 360-degree of a customer with all their interactions, services, contracts and all other related entities is the core of an effective RevOps model. This availability of data dissolving the departmental silos is what lies at the core of RevOps.
• End-to-end process and charter alignment: Another key element that RevOps models rely heavily on is establishing common goals for revenue operations across departments. At any given point in time, Sales, Marketing, Finance and every other department should be aligned in terms of processes and revenue goals to work towards the same inflection points.
• Hyper-automation: RevOps Frameworks aim to identify and automate high-volume, low-impact activities (like generating credit notes, responding to inquiries on invoice line breakdowns) to allow people to focus on low-volume, high-impact tasks (like identifying plugs for revenue leakage, introducing new revenue sources, optimizing pricing structures) that require human expertise and informed decision making.
• Insightful analytics: An enterprise-wide pool of customer data is only useful if actionable insights can be generated from the same. RevOps frameworks aim to establish an analytics framework that produces actionable intelligence for revenue optimization and enhancement based on the interconnected datasets made available by utilizing data points across departments.

Key Goals of RevOps Frameworks

The aim of RevOps is to achieve the following:

• • Improved revenue efficiency: The most important goal a RevOps framework sets out to achieve is to maximize the revenue efficiency by increasing the generation of revenue and stopping the leakage of revenue. This is aided by insights generated from the connected revenue datasets for faster, informed and more accurate decision-making.
  • Reduced manual intervention: As the automation of high-volume, low-impact tasks is a core tenet of RevOps frameworks, one of the key goals, therefore, is to reduce manual intervention in the overall revenue lifecycle from an end-to-end perspective.
  • Faster revenue stream introduction: To maximize the revenue generation, often, introduction of new revenue streams becomes imperative. With an integrated, end-to-end RevOps framework in place, the introduction of a new revenue stream from product design to revenue recognition, should become exponentially faster.

Desirable Characteristics of a RevOps software platform

In a highly digital world with petabytes of data flowing across continents every day, the success of even the best conceived frameworks depends heavily on the software platform underpinning it. For a software platform to be able to support a dynamic and mature RevOps framework, the below characteristics are desirable:

• Automation capabilities: The platform should allow for easy, fast, maintainable configuration of automation of revenue processes to allow system users to focus on high-impact tasks instead.
• AI-driven data insights: With the amount of data around customer interactions being captured by enterprises, it is imperative for any platform for RevOps to be able to generate actionable insights using a self-improving ML model backed by Generative AI capabilities for conversational data exploration.
• Lifecycle management capabilities: A key capability any RevOps platform should have is to manage the lifecycle of various entities, the key ones being customer, product and services / assets. The platform should allow easy configuration of lifecycle automata with relevant actions to be triggered in a rule-based manner.
• Hyper-scalability: The platform needs to be scalable to support higher transaction volumes during peak business seasons, while also being cost-effective to ensure a reasonable TCO and ROI.
• Secure and compliant: With all relevant customer data residing (or at least available) on the platform, it becomes crucial that data is made available using strict security policies, with data residency, availability and editability controlled in a highly granular and yet easily configurable manner. There should be auditing capabilities to track and report on access and change of data with appropriate non-repudiation measures.

Gartner predicts that in the next two years, three quarters of the highest-growth companies will embrace a RevOps model as compared to the less than 30% now. The key to exponential growth for enterprises lies in choosing and implementing the right RevOps framework and to continuously improve on it. RevOps will also be a major area of growth for consulting firms with a sharp surge in demands for Revenue Optimization and RevOps consulting exercises coming in the next couple of years. For software manufacturers, too, preparing platforms that cater to the needs of a mature, flexible and dynamic RevOps model is going to be an area of focus with the advent of the new year.