Over the last few years, businesses have started to understand that in order to retain customers and drive more predictable revenue, there needs to be better alignment with customer data across departments that are involved with influencing revenue. 

As a result, revenue operations have become an increasingly important business function across many organizations. 

An emerging software category: Revenue Operations

Revenue operations teams were created in order to better align cooperation between various teams that work with customer revenue data. Teams that commonly work with customer revenue include marketing, sales, customer success, and finance teams. While all of these teams have the same goal of increasing overall revenue, these teams also often operate in their own siloes, often retaining valuable revenue information in their own tech stacks that never gets shared with other teams.

An example of this is a marketing operations team that holds valuable data based on the likelihood that a customer will sign a deal only if they were reached out to through specific marketing campaigns. For instance, if marketing operations teams notice that mid-market companies are five times more likely to sign a deal if they respond to an email marketing campaign versus a social media marketing campaign, then that is valuable information that should be communicated to sales teams. Sales teams can then identify whether or not they are engaging with mid-market companies via email campaigns, which will allow them to run more strategic nurture campaigns and drive deal acceleration.

Oftentimes, valuable marketing data, as discussed above, get siloed and is never communicated to other teams. This results in lost opportunities and can have a major impact on lost revenue. Organizations are taking note of this, and there has been an emergence of technology vendors that provide revenue operations software, leading to a new G2 category.

The features of revenue operations products vary, but at their core, revenue operations products pull and organize customer revenue data from systems such as CRM software, marketing automation platforms, email software, conversation intelligence software, and other software that hold valuable customer revenue data. Within these platforms, there are often lots of unorganized valuable customer information such as call logs, marketing campaign data, specific customer concerns from calls, and the level of customer engagement from each account.

Furthermore, each customer account is updated in real time whenever a change happens across any software that relates to the account. For example, if a call takes place with a specific account, and the conversation is recorded with a full transcript, the account that is linked within the revenue operations software will get updated based on what was discussed on the call. This is because the revenue operations software can link to data within a company’s conversational intelligence software, which is most likely where that customer conversation data is stored. The new data that will be reflected can be a new estimated revenue forecast or the likelihood that the deal will close. Either way, this will help inform the level of engagement within the account and tap into valuable revenue insights that might not otherwise be seen.

The benefits of revenue operations software

Looking forward

Since May of 2018, monthly search volumes for the term “revenue operations” have increased by over 500% (according to data from Ahrefs). Additionally, over 25% of the revenue operations vendors on G2 have received additional funding rounds in the last two years, as per Crunchbase.

Both these statistics point to the common theme that revenue operations are growing in popularity, and the confidence in this software market is being backed up by new funding rounds from investors. With this in mind, we should expect revenue operations solutions to grow exponentially in adoption, and even have a more positive impact in the coming years.