To me, one of the hardest parts about RevOps is finding and prioritizing the most impactful initiatives to work on that can help increase revenue. There are plenty of ideas flying around, and frankly, more things to do in a RevOps department than you'd most likely have resources to do.
I have set a structure to the data I am tracking, to help tie initiatives to specific revenue numbers. In this article, I am sharing how I am seizing the data I am tracking, and how I choose the initiatives that I believe can help my stakeholders and the company improve the revenue numbers.
For the data I track, I am looking at the Sales Velocity formula, here is an example picture from Hubspot.
However, instead of looking at the specific number, I like to look at the historical trend for these numbers.
The data I look at specifically is:
I then track this over time, for how long depends on the average sales cycle, if longer sales cycles (6 months+), I would track for 18 months minimum. The data of the 6 graphs can look something like this.
Now that you've started to track the trend, it's time to dive into the data and see where the business can use a helping hand.
Number of Created Opportunities in a Given Quarter:
For me, this is one of the most important metrics to track, as big fluctuations in this number can tell a story, and can be crucial to fix if there is a constant downward trend.
This would be my call to action based on the trend.
Downward trend:
Lead analysis: this might be a bigger project you have to get started with to understand what's going on, I'd start with:
Categorize your leads into hand-raisers (demo request, contact us, etc.) and leads who are interested but need nurturing by marketing to get ready to talk with sales (webinars, subscribers, etc.). Track the trend of these leads, have the leads increased, decreased, or maintained? If drastically decreased, try to talk to your marketing to understand why there is a decline and work on a plan to turn it around. There could be singular events that could explain it, such as website changes or a specific campaign being stopped.
If the lead volume has maintained or increased, try to check the quality of the leads based on your ICP, are the companies and job titles within what you'd expect based on the existing customer base. If that seems to be consistent, the main culprit is most likely the handover between sales and marketing. To elaborate on that, when a hand-raiser is ready to talk to sales, the slower it goes, the chances of conversion decrease, so make sure that leads are being followed up on in a timely manner.
If slow handover is the issue, I would work on an SLA between marketing leads and sales handover to get ahead of it and set up some metrics that can be tracked, such as time to contact. While making sure that routing and notifications to the reps are sufficient.
If your sales length is getting longer, it might be worth looking into ways to reduce this.
Digital sales rooms: One of my favorite suggestions is digital sales rooms, this could be already included in your current tech stack. Otherwise, you can check a wealth of options here: Digital Sales Rooms.
Digital sales rooms can create a wonderful customer experience if done right, you can learn more about sales rooms here.
Stage analysis: It could be worth looking into which stage is the longest one in your sales cycle and identifying with your sales department what the blockers are, and if there could be enablement done around it for reps to go through these stages faster.
You might also want to set up reporting that monitors deals, so that the reps can get support if deals are sitting in a stage longer than average, it might be good to flag it and see if the rep needs any help to progress the deal. This could be incorporated into a weekly or bi-weekly review.
If you need ideas for initiatives, I'd recommend trying out ChatGPT to get some suggestions.
While your standard reporting systems can get the job done, a BI tool such as Tableau can supercharge your analysis and also save you some time.
BI tools often store the data in a way that you can slice and dice the data in seconds, whereas with HubSpot or Salesforce standard reporting, it will take quite some time to load every time (this might just be me who is impatient here).
The more important part is using an enrichment tool (in HubSpot you can use the native enrichment fine) to get good data on all prospects and customers, this allows you to get an accurate idea of the industries, size of companies, etc. that your company is engaging with. Fully understanding where the biggest opportunities are found and replicating that can be useful knowledge to pursue your next big deal with a client you know can get value out of your offerings. This knowledge can also be used to avoid deals that are not in your or your prospects best interest.
Finding a RevOps initiative can be difficult, I hope with this framework and the dataset suggested, that you can find good initiatives and use the data to tell a compelling story. While I know this approach is far from perfect, and most likely won't work in larger companies, I think it provides a simple structure for start-ups and smaller companies to get a proactive RevOps department.
From my experience so far, using a sales velocity number to explain why an initiative should be run resonates very well with most stakeholders, if nothing else, it will inspire a conversation about other initiatives that could be run in order to improve revenue growth with RevOps initiatives.
Want to learn more about setting up a RevOps framework in startups? check out my paid Udemy course here.
If you read this far, thank you, and curious if you have any thoughts or feedback.