As a business leader, you know that driving revenue growth is essential to the success of your organization. But achieving this goal can be challenging, especially as your business grows and becomes more complex.
This is where Revenue Operations, or a “RevOps,” team comes in. RevOps teams are responsible for aligning and integrating the various business functions that are critical to driving revenue growth. These functions often include sales, sales enablement, marketing, finance, and customer success teams.
By bringing teams together and aligning their efforts, a RevOps team helps businesses optimize processes and better meet the needs of customers. When executed correctly, RevOps has the power to improve customer satisfaction, boost conversion rates, and ultimately, drive more revenue.
However, for a RevOps team to be effective, it must have a well-defined org chart or team structure in place. In this guide, we explore the common ways to structure a RevOps team and offer key insights for organizing your own RevOps function.
The Benefit of Being Strategic When Designing Your Revenue Operations Org Chart
Having a well-defined revenue operations team structure has a number of benefits. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Improved alignment and collaboration among teams
With a clear revenue operations structure, it’s easier for operations managers and individual contributors to understand how their roles and responsibilities fit into the broader organization. This can improve communication and collaboration among team members, enabling them to work together more effectively to achieve overarching business goals.
When a revenue operations team has clear lines of communication and clear areas of responsibility, the entire organization wins.
More efficient and effective processes
A well-designed revenue operations org chart can help to identify and eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your revenue generation processes. This can result in more streamlined operations, enabling your business to serve customers more efficiently and effectively.
Because RevOps involves multiple departments and key stakeholders, there is plenty of room for error and miscommunication. Think of revenue operations as a giant game of telephone involving disparate teams and tech stacks. Information and mission-critical data is passed from one human or system to another human or system.
This game of telephone looks different depending on the size of any given company. At smaller organizations, this telephone chain might be one or two people. But, at the enterprise level, it may take hundreds of people and systems to move a single prospect through the customer lifecycle.
A clearly defined organizational structure allows for easier identification of gaps or inefficiencies in the flow of information. This helps your team to work smarter, not harder.
Better customer satisfaction and increased revenue
By aligning and integrating revenue-critical functions, RevOps teams can help businesses to better meet the needs of their customers. This can lead to an improved customer experience, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, increased revenue.
The most successful organizations think about the customer life cycle as something that starts when a customer is still just a prospect. This means RevOps must control everything from lead acquisition and hand off to opportunity stages and sales cycles– all before a prospect even becomes a customer.
Every gap or inefficiency you solve along this path leads to additional revenue generated by sales, customer success and marketing teams.
The same thought process applies to the customer lifecycle as well. When someone becomes a paying customer, it’s RevOps’ job to understand the logistics of onboarding and customer success. Closing gaps and making handoffs more efficient during this stage of the customer journey plays a key role in customer retention and revenue generation.
Key Factors to Consider When Setting Up Your RevOps Team Structure
When designing your RevOps team structure, there are a few key factors to consider– let’s take a look!
Define clear roles and responsibilities
It’s important to clearly define the role and responsibilities of each RevOps team member. This includes how they each fit into the overall structure of your RevOps organization and the greater company as a whole. In turn, you improve productivity and collaboration.
Going through this exercise will also help you identify gaps and prevent important work from falling through the cracks. This exercise will also help your team and organization as a whole, work more efficiently. Think about it this way, clear lanes and ownership makes for more efficient communication. When your team knows who is responsible for what, there is less duplication of efforts and work gets done faster.
Recommended reading: Who Should Manage Sales Commission: Sales Ops vs. Finance
Establish clear lines of communication
As we briefly touched on in the previous section, effective communication is essential for any team. And, due to its cross functional nature, this is especially true for RevOps. It’s important to establish clear lines of communication across teams to ensure everyone is on the same page and set up to work together effectively.
This means, as a leader, holding conversations with other departments and sharing org charts, roles, and responsibilities, to all key stakeholders. Think of this as providing other teams with a user guide for the revenue operations function. Doing so makes the organization more productive and also establishes good will with other departments. It shows you’re invested in other teams’ success.
Set goals and KPIs for each team member
Although members of a RevOps team may not hold a revenue goal, it’s important to set SMART goals and KPIs for each team member. This provides necessary focus and direction. These North Star metrics should be aligned with the broader goals of the organization.
As a leader, these goals are important for establishing a culture of accountability. For managers and individual contributors these goals are important for guiding day-to-day decisions and project management.
Think about this while organizing your Revenue Operations org chart. The way you divide functions and teams should align with what each is responsible for. If an individual contributor’s goals don’t have a clear connection to their manager’s goals, the larger team may feel a disconnect. Think: difficulty holding individuals accountable, trouble prioritizing projects, or individual contributors who don’t understand how their contributions feed the organization’s larger goals.
Think of goal misalignment in your org chart like a minor knee injury. You adjust your gait in tiny, almost imperceivable ways to overcompensate for the weakness. At first it’s fine, but eventually, over time, this has a domino effect. A month later, your whole body is suffering because of an initially small injury.
Stay flexible and agile
The business landscape is constantly changing, and your revenue operations org chart should be able to adapt to these changes. It’s important to design a team structure that is flexible and can evolve as your business grows and faces new challenges. This will ensure that your RevOps team is always equipped to support the goals of your business and drive revenue growth.
Clearly defined roles and responsibilities, open communication, and clear goals all play a role in being able to adapt to change and growth quickly.
Recommended reading: Reprogramming Commission Operations for Maximum Growth
Tips for Implementing and Maintaining Your RevOps Team Structure Long Term
After building a revenue operations team, it’s important to implement it effectively and maintain it over time. We’ve compiled some of our top tips to help you do this, below.
Clearly communicate your structure and expectations to all team members
It’s essential to clearly communicate the details of the team structure and the expectations for each team member to everyone involved. This will help team members to understand their roles and responsibilities, and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
We recommend doing so in a broad range of channels and settings. This will increase the likelihood that you reach each team member in a way that resonates with them. You may feel like a broken record, but over-communication doesn’t always feel the same to the recipient. Here’s what we suggest:
- Document and share in a written format that everyone has access to. This is helpful for those who may take longer to process and understand any changes you’ve made. It also makes for a more transparent process.
- Share in 1:1 and group meetings. Don’t blindside your team in a group setting, particularly if major changes are happening. Make sure each team member has a conversation with their manager before making any broader announcements. This reinforces your messaging and shows that you’re having the same conversations in public that you’re having in private.
- Give your team the why behind your decisions. Individual contributors and middle management aren’t always exposed to the same conversations the leadership team is exposed to. Therefore, as a leader, your motivations may not be as clear as you think. This leaves room for assumptions that aren’t necessarily true.
Recommended reading: Communicating Compensation Changes to Your Team
Regularly review and assess the effectiveness of your team structure
Your RevOps team structure should not be set in stone. As we previously mentioned, the most successful teams are agile and flexible. They can pivot.
But, in RevOps in particular, an agile team is difficult to create. Often in revenue operations, we don’t know we’ve missed a chance to adjust or change course until we’re already facing the consequences of inaction. The best way to predict and adjust to change is to regularly review and assess the effectiveness of your revenue operations org chart.
Make tweaks and adjustments to your org chart as needed
Finally, don’t be afraid to make additional adjustments. As your business grows and changes, your RevOps team structure will need to evolve as well.
This may involve role changes, new hires, or team adjustments to ensure that your structure continues to support the goals of your business. Being proactive and strategic about your ongoing review of your team structure will allow you to adjust and make changes proactively.
Be prepared to make adjustments to ensure that your structure continues to support the goals of your business and drive revenue growth. This means building a culture that embraces frequent, smaller shifts in service of the business. Although it may seem counterintuitive, regular team adjustments are less disruptive in the long run than putting your team through a complete overhaul once every few years.
Final Thoughts
A well-defined RevOps team structure is crucial for driving revenue growth and optimizing operations in your business. By aligning all revenue generating teams and functions, RevOps leaders can help businesses achieve their goals goals more efficiently.
Of course, when it comes to generating revenue and maintaining the systems and teams involved, each business is different. One organization’s needs may be vastly different than the next organization. As a RevOps leader you can leverage the tactics included in this article to make more effective decisions when it comes to your team.
About Spiff
Spiff is a leading sales commission platform that automates commission calculations and motivates teams to drive top-line growth. With a combination of an intuitive UI, real-time visibility, and seamless integrations into current systems, Spiff is the first choice among high-growth businesses. The platform enables finance and sales operations teams to self-manage complex incentive compensation plans and provides transparency for sales teams.
