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By Catherine Mandungu, Founder of Think RevOps 

Catherine Mandungu, Founder of Think RevOps

In a tough financial climate it can be easy to get sucked into a fire fighting mentality, but this is the time when clear systems and processes can be the difference between business success and failure.

For any business creating sustainable growth, they have to also juggle the joy of improving external and internal factors and delivering a smooth customer experience. We live in a world where technologies continue to advance, and certainly buyers’ behaviours are increasingly sophisticated, changing the landscape of how we acquire and retain customers

In this article, we look at how a smooth customer journey could be the key to your success.

Inefficient customer journeys

A study by IDC Market Research found that businesses lose 20 to 30% of their revenue due to inefficiencies. A great customer journey is a multi channel opportunity for you to interact with your customers before, during and after a sale. Common inefficiencies include processes that are not streamlined, ill-defined engagement models, tech misalignment, and not enough clarity around ideal customers. 

Go-To-Market processes that aren’t streamlined style=”font-weight: 400;”> 

There is often a disconnect between the moment a prospect becomes a lead and the business development team reaching out and converting them into a client. Or between business development teams and sales, where there is no smooth handover. This means the speed from lead to win will be much longer than it should be.

Ill-defined engagement models

Often we see customer life-cycle engagement models that haven’t been properly defined. Most organisations manage customers with some basic activities, but often miss the fundamentals of deliberately engaging with a customer in the stage they’re at. A customer in the adoption phase needs a different engagement activity than one in an early awareness stage. 

Tech stack mis-alignment

Most companies have a marketing automation tool, a sales CRM, and potentially a sales engagement tool, and they all don’t properly connect or talk to each other. This causes breaking of processes and leads to poor quality of data and wasted time and money

Unclear customer profile

With a lack of clarity on your ideal customer profile, you will find you will waste time targeting the wrong groups. 

Lack of insights 

If you don’t have the right data and insights, you cannot truly understand the customer journey. Usually the issue here is that data has been an afterthought, rather than part of the Go-To-Market Strategy. 

Why we need RevOps

RevOps, or “Revenue Operations”, is a B2B function that uses automation to help teams make the right decisions to grow their business. RevOps brings everyone together, ensuring collaboration, from marketing, sales, service, customer service and finance. 

Excellent customer journeys and resulting business growth involve every department, and RevOps is the function that will enable alignment and therefore growth. 

RevOps ensures that all go-to-market departments are centralised, moving towards the same goal, keeping all teams accountable to revenue. According to SiriusDecisions, this alignment can drive up to 36% of your growth.

RevOps is a way to create a ‘revenue engine’. Often the first step is to map out the customer journey to ensure that internal processes are aligned to a customer journey. Part of this work is mapping a data plan against the customer journey to ensure deliberate strategy around what data needs to be captured and shared across the organisation, which will allow the business to gain valuable insights.

Once the journey is designed, the RevOps specialist will build the tech infrastructure, including all the processes for marketing, sales and customer success, to create a customer 360. This included any integrations, such as marketing, sales engagement tools, billing and subscription management tools. 

RevOps enables companies to quickly assess the productivity of the team, customer acquisition and customer conversion. It creates a rhythm to the business and gives a business the opportunity to become more proactive and organise activities to drive customer satisfaction and revenue. 

About Author:

Catherine Mandungu is the founder of Think RevOps, a revenue operations consultancy, helping business and revenue leaders achieve growth, agility and competitive advantage by bridging the data & buyer journey challenge and transforming their revenue operation to ensure alignment, optimisation and focus.