Revenue Operations Trends for 2020

The idea of revenue operations has seen rapid growth during 2019, and is sure to become a major trend during 2020. By tearing down the walls between sales, marketing, and customer success teams, revenue operations is helping companies become more efficient, effective, and successful by integrating data, tools, processes, and strategies to create a streamlined revenue engine.

More and more companies are creating revenue operations teams and wrapping both their sales and marketing operations people into them, all headed by a new role, the Chief Revenue Officer. Here are the revenue operations trends that will come to fruition in 2020.

Revenue operations is now its own individual team

Revenue operations is now an independent team. Typically, sales enablement (what is sales enablement?) or sales operations roles sit within the sales group. Recently there has been explosive growth in revenue operations job titles on LinkedIn. SiriusDecisions found an 81 percent increase in title changes to include “revenue” on Linkedin between October 2018 to February 2019.

However, to best strengthen sales, marketing, customer success, and operations teams, it now functions independently to eliminate ownership and/or dependence by or on a particular business unit. The same study saw that 46% of organizations in which revenue operations is an established function, it reported to a Chief Revenue Officer. Another 24% of those organizations indicated that it reports to a centralized operations leader like a COO.

Revenue operations tears down silos and integrates teams

Perhaps the most important function of revenue operations is its capability to collect and share data across departments. Sales, marketing, and customer success are all important revenue-generating teams that can quickly become cost centers if not properly managed.

Typically, each of these teams functions within their own vacuum with their own set of goals. In reality, these teams all have the same goal – drive revenue, and should work in unison to accomplish it.

Revenue operations will connect marketing, sales, and customer success teams around the same common goal and align their efforts so they can work as effectively as possible.

However, not only does revenue operations unite teams around goals, it consolidates and streamlines their data. RevOps collects, consolidates, analyzes, and distributes data to and from each team. Meaning that marketing has full access to sales data, sales can utilize customer success info, and so on. This increases the effectiveness of every team exponentially. SiriusDecisions research found that when an organization’s sales, marketing, and product functions are aligned, that organization achieves 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability.

Revenue operations will consolidate sales tools

Most organizations have separate sales, marketing, and success tech stacks that sometimes link into a centralized CRM, others may contain all of their information within thier silo.

As revenue operations work across teams to gather and analyze information, they will prefer not to work with a large number of tools across multiple departments. Hubspot found the average sales development team alone uses six tools. In the future, revenue operations teams likely will look to consolidate the stacks of multiple teams with applications that can perform sales, marketing, and success functions to not only maintain data consistency, but to save costs and streamline processes.