It is common to see misalignment between departments in an organization, with Marketing being the hardest department to align.
This is because Marketing focuses on metrics based on leads or accounts, while Sales, Finance, and Customer Success are entirely revenue-driven. Marketing’s tools, terminology, and how it measures success are usually isolated.
The problem is made more acute by the fact that marketing is completely dependent on aligning with downstream stakeholders. To get the most out of Marketing’s demand, the sales team and inside sales must work together. Otherwise, marketing dollars will be wasted at the top. CMOs are, therefore, concerned with the alignment of Marketing and Sales and their handoffs.
Enter revenue operation or RevOps. This innovative practice was created to increase visibility and align customer experience across the entire customer lifecycle. It combines marketing, sales, and customer success into one RevOps team.
It is important to ensure that Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success all paddle in the same direction.
Although many companies advertise that they are focused on DevOps, in reality, they are more concerned about improving the efficiency of sales processes such as forecasting and pipeline. These are important business initiatives, but they’re not a new practice. They’re simply sales ops rebranded. They do not address the disconnect that exists between Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales teams, which don’t speak the same language when discussing what drives revenue.
RevOps promises a more unified business, but it is not a system that pulls in data about the entire customer journey.
Businesses today are overloaded with inadequate tools, which is the cause of this common misconception. Marketers can choose from more than 7,000 technology tools. Some teams track data and campaigns using up to 31 different tools.
These increasingly complex tech stacks overwhelm go-to-market teams and make it difficult to connect data between tools and functions. They also leave no room for standard metrics, models, or systems.
The majority of DevOps tools that promise to solve that problem focus so much on sales forecasting that they do not address the need to connect the demand engine. Even with thousands of tools and countless hours of work, many businesses still struggle to link marketing activities to revenues.
To truly unite a business, the marketing, sales, and customer success teams must adopt a standardized approach to metrics and models around which systems are designed. Because sales and customer success are already focused on revenue, marketing needs to change. In fact, 89% of executives agree Marketing should align with the same success metrics as Sales.
A Revenue Marketing model is the first step to achieving true DevOps. It focuses marketing metrics around opportunities and revenues to create a language that the entire business can use. This is the first step in achieving a RevOps front that is unified and more coordinated.
What is revenue marketing?
Revenue Marketing is an innovative approach to Marketing that shifts the model to one based on revenue and opportunities. The opportunity object can then be used to track every activity, from the initial engagement of a customer through to the close. This allows Sales and Customer Success to finally integrate the analysis of the journey taken by the customer. It enables common metrics to be used across the organization. It also eliminates silos and allows predictive forecasts to be made from marketing data.
Using this approach, Marketing systems can be linked directly to Sales and Customer Success, allowing all three teams to agree on metrics to measure the customer journey and determine the most effective paths to growth.
In current lead-based and account-based models, marketing attribution is too focused on justifying specific investment channels, such as choosing between Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads. By focusing only on conversion rates, Marketing is missing the bigger picture.
When you directly link marketing to revenue and opportunities, it is much easier to understand how marketing investments lead to successful deals and where to prioritize those investments.
A Normalized Data Model Creates Common Ground
A normalized data structure is often the reason why Revenue Operations projects do not unify business. A common data model across all stages of the customer journey unifies disparate data silos. Popular RevOps platforms lack this and are unable to connect Marketing and sales.
In Revenue Marketing, data is normalized using the common opportunity object. This results in go-to-market success and alignment throughout the organization. Gathering information on what is working in the demand engines should be seamless rather than forcing Marketing and Sales teams to create and manage their isolated systems.
The use of marketing dollars to pay consultants to configure these systems should not be the norm. These resources could be used to allocate more funds for campaigns, ads, and events.
What to look for in a Revenues Marketing Solution
It can be a game changer to select the right Revenue Marketing solutions that allow Marketing to communicate its value to executives who are concerned about revenue and opportunities. A viable and effective Revenue Marketing Solution will have the following attributes:
- Unified View of Demand Engine When Marketing metrics are aligned with revenue, a system should be able to provide a 360-degree view across Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing activities so that users can assess the impact of their initiatives.
- Interactive dashboards that are in-depth: Due to the importance of customer segments, campaigns, and regions, static dashboards will not suffice. Users must be able to easily slice and dice data and drill into the details of metrics.
- No need for technical effort: Finding compelling data stories throughout the customer journey shouldn’t be a technical challenge. The setup for a customizable view of the impact of sales and marketing initiatives should be minimal.