What we learned at Dreamforce: Sales Ops Stars

Dreamforce 2019 was an incredible time for Revenue.io, we all got to meet some incredible people, attended some awesome sessions, and participated in some super impressive events.

One of our favorites was the 2019 Sales OpsStars conference that took place alongside Dreamforce. There, we meet at the intersection of sales, marketing, and demand generation to discuss the emergence of revenue operations.

Revenue operations aligns sales, marketing, and other data to transform the operations roles into a strategic component of an organization that is capable of driving revenue. According to research from SiriusDecisions, companies that utilize revenue operations grow 12% to 15% faster and are 34% more profitable than their competitors.

The goal of revenue operations is to merge every piece of a company that is involved in revenue generation through its data and information. When sales, sales ops, marketing, marketing ops, and customer success can share one another’s data, as well as align on goals, metrics, and processes, the companies effectiveness multiplies,

One of our biggest takeaways from the OpsStars event was that this merger between data and teams will significantly impact the tech stack that each team uses. More importantly, organizations will need sales tools capable of tying together sales actions and revenue. In the years to come, we will likely see more tools that are used cross-functionally across teams and departments or at least tools that offer complete integration with one another. This will allow teams to both share and utilize one another’s data. Teams will be able to determine precisely what activities generate the most revenue. With a conversational analysis tool like Revenue.io, teams can decide that calls placed at a particular time, or that conversations containing certain keywords contribute more to sales revenue, and therefore create strategies to maximize the outcome.

At the center of all of this is where revenue operations will sit. Revenue operations will act as the epicenter for data aggregation and analysis, as they will determine which tools, activities, and methods generate the most revenue for the organization. RevOps will help streamline methods across sales, marketing, and customer success to ensure the best possible outcome for the organization.

The next question is who will run revenue operations? It is possible that they will become a team of their own. The number of LinkedIn members with a director of revenue operations title grew 81% between October 2018 and February 2019. Sales operations could also simply transform into revenue operations and stay slotted within the sales organization, as they are already the largest revenue-generating team within a company.

Regardless of where they end up, one thing is for certain. Revenue operations are the future of highly successful companies. We now have the ability to capture and analyze a massive amount of data from every part of an organization and to not share it cross-departmentally would be silly. Without a fully dedicated revenue operations team, there is no way that a company would be able to take advantage of it all.