Can social selling help me with RevOps?, Tim Hughes

In this article, "The Rise of Revenue Operations - What is RevOps?", Michael Lowe, gives a great definition of RevOps.

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is placing all of the revenue generation roles under one leadership structure.

If you think about revenue generation there is

Marketing
Lead generation / demand generation
Business development
BDRs - Business development representatives
SDRs - Sales development representatives
AE - Account executives and then in a SaaS / cloud environment you will have
Renewal sales, customer service, customer success
Often this is all looked after by sales enablement and reported on by sales operations

It's a long supply chain, from market creation to after sales support.

Michael describes RevOps as

"Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the end-to-end business process of driving predictable revenue, across marketing, sales, renewals, and expansion through transparency and execution rigor.

The role of Revenue Operations is to deliver visibility across the entire revenue team, improve efficiency across the revenue process, drive revenue predictability, and achieve revenue growth.

How can you do that in your company? Focus on the following:

People
Aligning teams around a single view of the business with shared revenue targets
Data
Connecting business and activity data across organizational silos and technology stacks
Processes
Increasing operational rigor through integrated cadences, including sales 1:1s, QBRs, forecast calls, and more"

Michael asks the question

What's Causing the Rise of Revenue Operations?

"A profound shift is happening in the way companies are thinking about their revenue process. The need for transparency, accountability, and predictability from the boardroom to the front line is greater than ever before.

Partially, this is due to the way customers purchase products has changed. They’re conducting their own research well before a salesperson even reaches them. Plus, subscription-based business models mean what happens after the sale is just as important as what happens before.

This means teams responsible for driving revenue—sales, marketing, customer success, and account management—must be aligned throughout the entire funnel if they want to succeed."

This is why social selling is made for RevOps

In the old days you had to do different things at different stages of the sale, it was all very confusing. To start a sales there was cold calling or often called telemarketing. Then you did different things in the middle of a sales and different things at the end of the sale.

With social selling, you follow the same process regardless if you are prospecting, accelerating deals through the pipeline or closing. As long as you work to a methodology, that is, if you follow the steps, for example the DLA Ignite methodology then you create pipe, you accelerate pipe and you close deals. The same process.

That means the whole of the RevOps team can use the same methodology, Marketing, SDRs, BDRs, AE as well as people within the customer success team that look after renewals.

We also have a methodology called "Grid selling" which is often used in Account Based Marketing (ABM) environments for getting dominance in an account or a set of target accounts.

Michael says. "Historically, alignment has proved elusive and challenging. But that’s all changing. Here are four reasons we’re seeing a rise in RevOps teams right now (hint: it’s about people, data and processes mentioned above)."

RevOps measures

The big opportunity about social selling is measurement. Typically a business is making decision off the back of a data in a CRM and we know these are just full of hopes and dreams.

With social selling, you are able to great and measure leading indicators way before a deal hits the CRM, this means you are able to get far greater and earlier insight as to contribution and therefore you are able to direct corrective action, such as coaching, earlier. This means you have salespeople with a greater sense of purpose and motivation.

Michael also found this research on RevOps outcomes

"The Benefits of Revenue Operations

In addition to better collaboration and more predictable business growth, companies that align all go-to-market functions outperform those that don’t.

Top B2B tech companies that leaned on revenue ops to accelerate their growth experienced significant benefits, including 10% to 20% increases in sales productivity, according to Boston Consulting Group. Their research also showed that tighter alignment between go-to-market teams resulted in:

100% to 200% increases in digital marketing ROI
10% increases in lead acceptance
15% to 20% increases in internal customer satisfaction
30% reductions in GTM expenses

Public companies with revenue ops also saw 71% higher stock performance."

This certainly aligns with the results that DLA Ignite get which is a 30% increase in revenue and a 40% reduction in the sales cycle. If the business took a RevOps approach, we could certainly see these figures being achieved.

DLA Ignite also work with business around digital dominance, this is where a business owns the digital channels, pushing out the competition. This has a major impact on pipeline and win rates as the buyer see you as the obvious choice to their business issue and as they don't see any competition. You become the only choice.

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

I don't believe you Tim!

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course.

Here at DLA Ignite we don't do "hints and tips sessions" we don't want you to waste your money. Our social selling and influence methodology will provide your sales team with the stable platform for growth. It is also the only social selling program based on 70:20:10 change management principles which gives your business the mindset change and habit change they need in this digital world.

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Roles including the word “Revenue” have been steadily increasing in recent months. And Director Revenue Operations, VP Revenue Operations, and Chief Revenue Officer are among the fastest growing job titles on LinkedIn.

https://www.clari.com/blog/the-rise-of-revenue-operations-infographic