Hey

We see a critical shift in marketing, sales, and client success roles nowadays.

In the next few years, there will be a wave of T-shaped teams able to wear multiple hats. 

In addition to aligning all marketing programs with the buying process, the marketing team will be working closely with the sales team on sales enablement and nurturing while they’ll also be running onboarding and deal expansion programs.

On the other hand, the sales team will be in charge of creating content, driving awareness, creating niche communities, nurturing prospects, and onboarding clients.

That said, the client success process will be restructured and run by marketing and sales. Chances are we won’t see departments in progressive B2B companies, but rather a single Revenue Operation team where everyone is focused on hitting revenue quota.

But what does all this mean for B2B marketers?

The faster you understand the full-funnel process and become involved in sales and client success activities, the quicker you’ll run marketing programs that will drive more revenue for your company.

And what does it mean for SDRs?

You will help your company grow quicker if you learn marketing, content creation, and community building.

A while ago, Andrei sat down with Chris Walker, the CEO of Refine Labs, to discuss these shifts and the future of revenue operation teams. In this newsletter, you’ll discover:

• How to determine revenue operations
• The best person that should be in charge of revenue operations
• How to pivot your company from traditional marketing & sales to revenue operations

Read on.

How to determine revenue operations?

A lot of people have a lot of different definitions for the term Revenue Operations. But basically, it is the tools, operations, enablement, and analytics across the entire revenue cycle. So that would be marketing, sales, customer success, or account management. 

Instead of taking sales operations or sales enablement, how do you create a function that goes across the entire revenue cycle that does all those different things?

While other people see revenue operations as a way of getting credit card payments ensure, it is a much more broad topic that takes away siloed functions (sales operations) and allows those functions to work across the entire revenue journey. And of course, with a focus not only on your company's revenue but also optimizing the buying experience. 

Who should be in charge of revenue operations in an organization?

There's a lot of different ways you could slice it because this depends mainly on the skillset of the people that are in the company. You could have a separate C-suite or VP-level person in charge of revenue operations that work alongside the head of sales and the head of marketing. That's one way you could do it. 

There's another way where the person in charge of revenue operations can sit underneath the head of sales or the head of marketing. So, there's no right or wrong way to slice it organizationally. It's really about looking at what skills the CMO, the head of marketing, and the rest of the organization have, and whether or not they're aligned with the core objectives of the revenue operations function. 

How to pivot your company from traditional marketing and sales to revenue operations?

The truth with most companies is that they don’t really do any brand awareness. It's all transactional and direct response marketing. And the ones that do opt for brand awareness do it in expensive and ineffective ways like trade shows and traditional marketing, which are not the most effective use of money to get the results they’re looking for. 

That said, the easiest way to help companies transition is to audit their current activities against revenue rather than leading metrics. And because most companies are doing direct response marketing, whether it's for an e-book or a webinar with the sales cadence after it or a get-a-demo ad, or Google AdWords, most of their prospects will run. And so when you have that type of attribution level, you're going to be able to go in and look back at all the people that filled out those forms and how much money you spent to do that and figure out whether it generated revenue. 

Once you figure out how much revenue you generated, you can compare it against how much you spent from a marketing standpoint and have the marketing CAC. You can calculate it against the marketing CAC payback period. A 3-month CAC payback is exceptional marketing execution. 

But for most companies out there, their marketing CAC payback is several years. And so, several years on marketing advertising cost, and then you have all of your marketing employees, the sales commission you have to pay out, and the percentage of margin you need to deduct on the software. At the end of the day, you realize that it's taking you 05 years to recover the amount of money you've spent to just acquire that customer. 

And when you present that type of information to a CEO, a CFO, a CMO, a CRO, or anyone that is knowledgeable and has an aligned interest in the business growth, you’ll have the conversation about whether or not what you're doing is effective. Oftentimes, you can have them consider whether there may be a better approach. But the problem with a lot of marketers is they don't know what to recommend instead. 

They just know what they're doing isn't working, but they're not sure what to do instead, and they're scared to rock the boat because if they suggest an alternative that doesn't work, they might lose their jobs.

So, it's a tough situation that gets a lot of people stuck in whatever is accepted within the organization: 

• ebook downloads for MQLs, because they can report that they did something 
• Tradeshow booths with badge 
• AdWords for ebook downloads that give them leads

In a nutshell, most marketers get stuck measuring those types of metrics (with direct attribution) in order to demonstrate that they're doing something.

P.S.: This podcast has been condensed and edited for clarity. You can watch the entire interview here.  

Job Opportunity 

Product Marketing Manager at Netsertive

Netsertive is an intelligent online marketing platform that puts big brand marketing to work for local businesses.

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We are a cloud network of scientists, engineers, and developers passionate about AI and machine learning technologies.

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