Unlocking business agility: why RevOps can’t wait for IT
As more companies consolidate their tech stacks, it’s tempting for them to assume IT can take over all the various processes that other departments have been managing up to this point. From an outside view, this looks sensible: IT works with processes, change management in technology use, and ensuring that everything works well together, WHY NOT align, for example, SalesOps and MarketingOps processes under IT?
There are several reasons this is a bad idea, but two of them stand out:
- RevOps processes involve data used in very specific ways by diverse end-user groups with unique requirements
- RevOps processes often need changes in a matter of hours, days, or weeks; while IT projects tend to change processes over months, quarters, and years
It’s the latter that will cause the biggest hurdles to achieving your company’s targets. Instead of IT consolidation helping your company to run faster and more efficiently, it will slow things down and make you less nimble in the market. But let’s talk first about the data needs.
RevOps data requirements: meeting unique team needs
RevOps caters to the needs of both sales and marketing teams. The data can be used in several ways. As an example, let’s take opportunity data. The marketing team might want to know about opportunities so they can identify the quality of the leads they’re bringing in, the conversion rates, and campaign performance data so they can understand which of their activities are generating the most and best leads. Sales leadership might be looking at opportunity data to understand their progress towards quarterly targets, the next steps for those opportunities, and if any sales reps need assistance in their pursuits. At the same time, the customer success or implementation team might be looking at opportunities at the end of the pipeline to assess which customers they might need to work with next, the team’s capacity needs based on how many deals are expected to close, and what types of expertise might be needed to attend to those potential new customers.
While the data they’re starting with might be the same, those three teams will look at the data from different perspectives and need different fields associated with it. The marketing team would want more aggregated data about opportunities with regard to campaigns, but the customer success team would have no interest in associated campaign data, only caring about the opportunities, the products that are being sold, and the timeline on when the deals might close. Sales leadership might be interested in the account owner pipelines, the deal sizes, the roles of the contacts at the account, and the industries of those accounts.
It’s all related information that hinges on the opportunity data, but each lens is specific to the needs of each department. While IT can place all that data in the same location, an MDM (Master Data Management) solution for example, they won’t necessarily be alert to the needs of the teams using that data and may not be able to make it available in the way the different teams need. Additionally, IT teams generally aren’t focused on creating apps that enable different teams to access the data in different ways. They are more likely to create a data lake where the data sits, but not the required resources so that each team can get exactly what it needs, when it needs it.
In these cases, the teams that need the data, because they want to reach their quarterly or annual targets, will often create workarounds to get what they need, using non-authorized tools and creating their own mini-databases and processes. Suddenly Master Data Management looks more like the Wild West, with teams each doing their own thing and thwarting data governance and compliance needs–which wasn’t the goal of the IT department at all.
Empowering teams to adapt at the speed of growth
For marketing teams, operations processes like deduplication, list loading, unification, normalization, and lead-to-account matching need small adjustments, often. Once these processes are in place, they can often run without a lot of day-to-day management…until the moment they need a quick change.
Several years ago, the job title “growth hacker” suddenly cropped up. A lot. For teams inferring job level and job role from titles, this meant that they quickly needed to add that title to the data matrix that enabled automations to identify this as a marketing role (job role) and either manager or director (job level).
For a marketing team managing their own data and own processes, this was a quick fix. A matter of minutes. If that same team had had to submit a ticket to IT, wait for it to be prioritized, and wait for it to be acted on, it could be weeks, months, quarters, or even never happen because it wasn’t big enough to make a big deal about–for IT. If that company was targeting marketing titles, however, it could have meant a lot of missed opportunities.
In another example, the sales team might grow. An SDR gets promoted to an Account Executive. Another SDR is hired to replace them, plus one more because the company is expanding. Now the leads, contacts, and accounts need to be reassigned so the different people can work quickly to increase opportunities and sales.
If Sales management has to wait for IT to get around to reassigning these records, it could be weeks or months of idle sales reps, which is a very expensive problem. In addition, sales needs access to the way territories are laid out, regardless of whether that is by industry, geography, or named accounts, to assess if accounts are divided proportionally or if adjustments need to be made. These scenarios might be run multiple times and get adjusted just a little each time, a chore that IT definitely doesn’t want to do.
Frequently, IT teams have a list of projects that have been requested and only about 10% of them are approved to move forward. If this is the case with sales, marketing, and RevOps requests, businesses will quickly lose momentum and be unable to achieve their goals.
Act fast
Of course there are exceptions. Some companies have Business IT teams that look not only at the technologies, but also the business impacts of processes and technologies. These IT organizations work collaboratively with the departments they support and have an awareness both of the needs of the end users and the speed with which processes need to change.
What it really comes down to is that RevOps processes are not so much technology processes as they are business processes, regardless of which technologies are employed to accomplish them. Whether the market is down, up, or somewhere in between, RevOps teams need to move at the speed of business, not at the speed of most IT departments.
That means having data governance in place, so the rules and regulations are adhered to, but also enabling RevOps teams to be flexible, own their own processes, and are enabled to make changes to them, so that companies can continue to move forward at speed.
Your team could be driving more revenue.
Clean data and automated processes free up time for strategy—and prove the business impact RevOps can deliver. Grab the Trailblazer’s Guide to Marketing, Sales, & RevOps to show why data quality is worth the investment.
