How RevOps gives you sales and marketing alignment, Tim Hughes

Back in 2018, Adam Gray, Hugo Whicher and I wrote a book called "Smarketing - How to achieve competitive advantage through blended sales and marketing".

The book tells a story of how a business, (it's based on a case study) was more efficient and effective by aligning sales and marketing.

At the time, there was lots of talk about merging sales and marketing and articles that it should happen, but nobody seemed to want to come up with an answer, so we did.

If I wrote the book today, It would be called "RevOps - How to achieve competitive advantage through blended sales and marketing".

What is RevOps?

RevOps or Revenue Operations is about bringing all of the revenue generations parts of the organisation under one leadership. Marketing, business development, lead generation, SDRs, BDRs, AE, sales people, account managers, renewals, customer success all under one roof. All with the same strategy and all "singing to the same hymn sheet".

Is this Sales taking over marketing or marketing taking over sales?

No, in our book, we share a case study of how the world has changed and rather than throwing rocks at each other over email, a sales department and marketing department learned to co-exist.

First there was a lot of open and honest conversations, then there was a common language and then there were measures.

But RevOps is more than that - it is

In the same organisation the SDRs sitting in a different part of the business and had different objectives and while you could "work with" the leadership to make sure were were "aligned" it would have been more efficient and effective if there had been common objectives. For example, the resource could have been spread differently. The SDRs could sell into the accounts of the sales people below $100,000. This meant that deal that should have been sold for way over that level (there was revenue and margin loss) were sold at $99,995 to meet the criteria.

The organization also had a renewals team, that reported into a different part of the business, they quoted data privacy rules to stop sales people getting at customer data.

RevOps is not a land grab or shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic

I can see people thinking that RevOps would be a great way to build an empire, grab everything and put it to use of the new management.

This would be shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

RevOps is the leadership opportunity to create a new environment, building a new organization for this new digital world.

RevOps gives you sales and marketing alignment

In our book "Smarketing" we use the sales funnel as an example and explain that in the sales funnel, everybody has a role, but the role is different for where we are in that funnel.

For example, marketing maybe at the top because they are good top of funnel (To-Fu), where as sales is about closing so they are at the bottom of the funnel (Bo-Fu). Either way it gives a business a great opportunity to align the team across the whole customer experience from brand to selling, to ABM (account based marketing) to renewals.

What do you need to do?

The ideal catalyst for RevOps is to adopt social selling, it is a platform that allows your business to do something different, to adopt digital strategies to work with the digital buyer. Social selling, because it uses digital, has different, digital, measures. No longer is the business tied to making decision based on the CRM data. The business is able to see other leading indicators to drive the business.

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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What is RevOps?

Is this Sales taking over marketing or marketing taking over sales?

But RevOps is more than that - it is

RevOps is not a land grab or shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic

RevOps gives you sales and marketing alignment

What do you need to do?

So who's social selling?

I don't believe you Tim!

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