The revenue picture is incomplete if RevOps doesn’t have the same visibility into technical sales’ revenuegenerated activities as it does with sales, marketing and customer success.

RevOps (Revenue Operations) aligns sales (sales development, account executives, technical sales), marketing and customer success departments across the prospect and customer life cycle to drive growth through operational efficiency. The RevOps approach is designed to break down silos between departments and obtain a complete picture of the company’s revenue engine that fuels growth on net new and existing business. It is common for the RevOps team to work with various departmental systems of record (SOR) that are purpose-built to support their corresponding departmental personas. These departmental SORs co-exist and securely interoperate with the company’s single source of truth (SOT), which typically may be a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Marketing, sales, sales development, account executives and customer success have their own SORs to capture data on their corresponding functions. Technical sales, however, has had to make do with general purpose presales tools like spreadsheets and/or CRMs. Neither of these are designed to effectively support the technical sales engineers’ daily work or capture pertinent department data that would help RevOps deliver a complete and accurate view of the business. Since the technical sales department is one of the most critical components of the revenue engine, it deserves its own SOR to effectively capture data to complete the whole RevOpspicture.

 

RevOps Visibility

rev ops visibility HUB graphic table

As the figure above depicts, RevOps typically has little to no visibility into the technical sales department’s revenue-generating activities. Without this visibility, RevOps will NOT be able to provide the executive team a complete picture of the business. And it is ill advised for RevOps to try customizing an existing, generalpurpose CRM system to gain additional visibility into technical sales for two reasons. First, the amount of customization required will further burden an already over-worked RevOps team. Second, the economics of embarking on such an effort will not provide the right ROI versus just purchasing a commercial SOR for technical sales. For instance, would it make sense for RevOps to customize the CRM to support the marketing, sales development or customer success department? No. It’s not necessary, because a number of purpose-built vendors already provide software as a service (SaaS) solutions that support those departments and co-exist with the CRM, the company’s SOT.

 

RevOps for Technical Sales Engineers

Technical sales engineers need their own SOR, one that can securely co-exist with the CRM and SOT. RevOps serves their own interests — delivering a complete view of the business to drive growth —by ensuring that technical sales obtain their own SOR to support their daily work, capture reliable data on their daily revenue-generating activities and securely co-exist with their CRM in a way that enriches their SOT.

Here are seven points for RevOps to consider when supporting the company’s growth.

revops infographic longform

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