How RevOps can add value during an economic downturn

Team Iceberg

In an economic downturn, the natural response for business owners is to tighten their purse strings and wait for better days. This is a mistake. While the thought of spending money might seem counter-intuitive, an investment in revenue operations (RevOps) during tough times could very well save a business from failure.

Think about it.

If freezing up during times of economic uncertainty is common behavior, your competitors are likely doing just that. A recession is a perfect opportunity to put your best foot forward and try out any new ideas you’ve been considering so you can stand out from the crowd!

When a recession’s looming, it’s not easy to make long-term decisions. But doing nothing to address the issues causing your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to underperform won’t make the problems disappear. Tinkering with them half-heartedly is worse because RevOps done poorly is simply a cost center that can’t justify its existence.

An economic downturn is not the moment to hastily crowdsource RevOps to executives whose time is too valuable to spend in the weeds of a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Now more than ever, you want your senior executive doing what they’re best at – devising effective go-to-market strategies and heading off long-term threats to your business. This is an opportunity to go all-in on RevOps and fully exploit its potential to deliver the cost savings and increased efficiencies that can mitigate risk in a dangerous time for your business.

Table of Contents

RevOps in action

Revenue operations (RevOps) is the operational infrastructure that supports a company’s executives as well as its revenue-generating teams with the data, automation, productivity, and reporting tools each group needs to maximize revenue growth.

With a RevOps team to optimize technology and processes across the customer life cycle, you can break down the departmental silos that typically lead to repeat work, lost opportunities, and poor customer service. This means Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service work in alignment to create operational efficiencies, enable each team to get better results, and drive growth.

Nail Your First Ops Hire and Avoid Costly Mistakes Most Startups Make

When you’re ready to hire in-house for operations, what should you look for? What combination of skills will make the biggest impact? How can you make a smart hire today and support a long-term hiring strategy? This white paper steps through:

Categories for a first operations hire
Recommended interview questions
The exact evaluation matrix Iceberg uses to hire for its own team

Getting the most out of your marketing campaigns

Marketing teams are responsible for the concepts, campaigns, and content that bring new prospects into a sales pipeline. RevOps teams can help your marketing efforts in several different ways, including:

Providing you with meaningful data on which market segments are most likely to respond to your message
Accurately showing the ROI for each lead channel so you only spend your limited resources on the ones that work
Creating and maintaining the back-end infrastructure necessary for your salespeople to quickly and effectively respond to marketing leads generated and ensure an ROI on your marketing investment

Enhancing sales success

RevOps helps sales reps establish connections, nurture relationships, and close deals by:

Optimizing a CRM to match your sales strategy
Creating reports that allow for data-driven decisions
Integrating multiple sales and marketing platforms
Ranking the leads most likely to close, listing them in priority order, and even routing them to specific sales reps

RevOps can also provide an infrastructure to identify where in your customer journey deals will most likely go dark or become “Closed Lost.” On the basis of this intelligence, sales teams can design and implement new approaches and behaviors aimed at closing deals successfully.

Facilitating customer relationship management

Maintaining good relationships with your existing customer base is crucial when demand is low. RevOps can support customer service teams in their customer retention efforts by creating automated systems in your CRM that:

Signal customers needing attention
Provide information regarding the nature of customer problems
Identify upsell opportunities within your customer base

Enabling data-driven decision making

RevOps teams support executive decision-making by providing visibility into team performance via customized reporting. Advanced Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software can also guide executives in making decisions around which products are most likely to sell, which to de-emphasize or drop, and which would make the most sense to bundle together.

Calculating the RevOps value-add

From an overall budgeting perspective, RevOps should not be viewed in isolation – as is IT for example.

IT’s contribution to sales is the provision of computers and internal cybersecurity and technical support to sales reps. The way RevOps contributes to sales has a different texture because it’s inextricably bound up with sales activities themselves.

Examples of the RevOps contribution include presenting helpful reports, optimizing BDR-AE handoffs, predicting quota attainment, forecasting sales performance, optimizing territory and quota designations, purchasing tools to eliminate administrative effort, and generally doing whatever is required to keep sales reps focused on selling.

When budget cuts become necessary, there’s often a temptation to cut RevOps early on. But because RevOps touches on multiple go-to-market functions, that makes no sense. CFOs need to view RevOps as an integral function when they’re putting departmental budgets on the chopping block.

When budget cuts become necessary, there’s often a temptation to cut RevOps early on. But because RevOps touches on multiple go-to-market functions, that makes no sense.

Click to Tweet

How Iceberg RevOps can help

Are your revenue-generating teams spending too much time on operations?

Is the line between your revenue teams blurred?

Does unreliable data hinder your decision-making?

We work with growing companies to build and maintain clean, scalable revenue operations. For a fraction of the cost of an in-house team, you can have unlimited access to a team of seasoned operations and systems experts.

Get in touch with David, our Head of Sales, to find out how we can help you.

Keep Reading and Improving your RevOps Knowledge

Leveling Up: Designing a Customer-Focused Sales Strategy for Next-Stage Growth

Team Iceberg

September 28, 2023

In the span of the last two decades, the dynamic between sellers and buyers has experienced a seismic shift. Initially, sales were all about the product, with a spotlight firmly trained on its many features and benefits.

Continue Reading Leveling Up: Designing a Customer-Focused Sales Strategy for Next-Stage Growth