How RevOps science is driving data-driven success for sales promotion

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We are all familiar with devops, the feature that bridges the silos of development and operations so that software is built faster and more efficiently. The devops movement began to coalesce sometime between 2007 and 2008, as IT operations and software development communities raised concerns about what they believed to be a fatal level of dysfunction in the industry. By creating clear and strong connections between silos, devops has since solved a huge number of production problems.

Fast-forward to 2022, when e-commerce, customer experience and business intelligence applications rule the world. The new complexities that come with all this new cloud-based IT and fierce new market competition are being solved by a similar solution called revenue operations or RevOps. RevOps brings science to sales and uses real-time buyer/seller engagement signals to take a data-driven approach to enabling and executing sales.

RevOps is the key to breaking the silos in which sales, marketing and customer success operate; eliminating these silos allows these disparate teams to work more harmoniously. Successful RevOps does for sales/marketing what devops did for software production and what digital transformation has done for modernizing systems management.

Key data points about RevOps

A successful RevOps strategy brings sales and revenue together, but still requires coordination and communication between sales marketing and customer service teams. Problems orchestrating processes across multiple tools aren’t limited to lead management: If you’re working in RevOps, you’ve had the challenge of trying to get multiple software tools in your go-to-market organization to play nice with each other. RevOps tries to solve this by advocating for sales and customer success to become more intertwined. It’s all about uniting three different departments through common expectations, data and tools.

According to Gartner Research, the RevOps feature is catching on; the researcher predicts that by 2025, 75% of the fastest growing companies will adopt a silo-breaking RevOps model.

“As baby boomers retire and millennials mature into key decision-making positions, digital buying attitudes will become the norm,” Cristina Gomez, managing VP for Gartner’s sales practice, said in a media advisory. “As customers increasingly learn and buy digitally, merchants become just one of many possible sales channels. Therefore, sales organizations must be able to sell to customers wherever the customer expects to interact with, interact with, and transact with suppliers.”

Gartner said buyers typically spend only 17% of their time meeting potential suppliers when considering a purchase. With less time in front of the customer’s face, virtual sales through digital channels will predominate, Gomez said.

“Sellers will need to embrace new tools and channels, as well as a new way to engage customers, by aligning their sales activities with their customers’ buying practices and information gathering needs,” Gomez said.

One of the key tenets of RevOps, the unification of those three different departments through connected technologies, has exposed an important myth that salespeople’s work should be done in a customer relationship management (CRM) application. This is because their business relies on data in a CRM, which promotes the idea that the work salespeople do must be done within the CRM itself.

This is how it has been sold for years. However, salespeople in 2022 are doing their job in a disparate set of applications that are typically disconnected from a CRM, creating problems for the business with process compliance, data hygiene, and frustrated salespeople switching between too many tools.

Why is this happening? Traditional CRM applications were never designed as a place for end users to actually do their work and have not been modernized quickly enough to fit into today’s new sales workflows. The downstream effect on the business is that data hygiene suffers, process compliance is a nightmare and salespeople become frustrated and unhappy and walk in and out. Too many workarounds and shortcuts are used.

To change this, RevOps teams create workflows in Slack or email to remind salespeople, prompt them to complete a task, or take an action in CRM. This is a major reason why RevOps is now catching on with many sales teams.

According to market analyst G2.com, the top 10 software makers for revenue operations & intelligence (RO&I) are:

GongClariGrooveInsightSquaredBoostUp.aiOutreachAvisoRevenue.ioMediaflyPeople.ai

Early RevOps Leaders

Clari quoted by Forrester Research

Clari, based in Sunnyvale, California, revealed on March 28 that Forrester Research named it a leader in the first-ever Forrester Wave report for Revenue Operations and Intelligence (RO&I), scoring the highest in the category with the current offering out of 14 evaluated suppliers.

According to Forrester’s evaluation, “Business sales leaders in all industries seeking accountability, transparency and predictability in revenue management should consider Clari.”

Clari also received the highest possible score (5/5) on 14 criteria capabilities measured in the report, including deal/opportunity insights, pipeline management and forecasting insights.

To download a copy of the Forrester Wave report for Revenue Operations and Intelligence (RO&I), go here.

BoostUp.ai’s AI-driven solution

BoostUp’s SaaS platform, founded in 2018, claims to solve the RevOps challenge by serving as the sole source of revenue truth. It provides intelligent forecast submission and a review, audit, and roll-up management workflow that keeps everyone on the team aligned at all times.

The platform ingests unstructured data from sources such as emails and messaging apps and then matches it with accounts and opportunities in CRM applications. Natural language parsing, sentiment analysis and proprietary indexing of spoken and written keywords are applied to better understand sales trends and more accurately predict whether deals will close.

In this space, BoostUp.ai offers a flexible architecture built for custom objects and complex business data models, unstructured communication data information, and NLP and buyer sentiment analysis of emails, conversation transcripts, and recordings. It also has an intuitive interface that can be used by line-of-business employees.

Mediafly launches a command center application

Mediafly’s revenue promotion and revenue intelligence application, called the Revenue360 suite, includes four comprehensive solutions that connect sales promotion, revenue intelligence, value sales, and buyer engagement. This new suite serves as a command center for revenue teams to more effectively coach, assess, forecast and communicate with audiences at every stage of the buyer journey. With Revenue360, Mediafly brings science to sales, using real-time buyer and seller engagement signals to take a prescriptive, data-based approach to enabling and executing sales.

“Digital selling has become indispensable, it gives the buyer enormous control and puts the seller in a reactive mode. B2B revenue leaders everywhere are watching this shift unfold and are faced with two options: embrace it proactively and take advantage of the related signals or sit back in wait-and-see mode,” said Carson Conant, CEO and co-founder of Mediafly, in a media statement. “With contextual insights into how buyers are engaged every step of the way, dynamic training and coaching, and interactive experiences that grab and hold buyers’ attention, Revenue360 puts sellers back in charge so they can meet and exceed goals.”

As companies increasingly move to a RevOps model, consolidation of the tech stack is inevitable, Conant said. Revenue360 features a robust insights engine, enterprise-level security, and a scalable data lake architecture that supports seamless integrations. The suite can be deployed together or as individual solutions, Conant said.

Challenger using AI for sales training

Challenger, an Arlington, Virginia-based startup, uses AI in its SaaS-based application to provide sales professionals with training, technology and advice.

On April 1, it launched Challenger Loop, a first of its kind SaaS app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to bring out real-time customer feedback and close more deals. This brings transparency and clarity to the sales process by adding the customer perspective to the sales performance. The software collects win/loss data and customer feedback and provides a holistic perspective on the quality of the purchasing experience.

Challenger research shows that the actual purchase experience is usually the determining factor in whether or not a sale is closed. Vendors have spent decades trying to perform this win-loss analysis, but struggle to obtain accurate measurements. This is because the information they enter into CRM systems is often biased, lacks context, or comes too late in the sale, resulting in avoidable loss, the company said.

summarized

According to Gartner’s Future of Sales Research, by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will take place in digital channels. Whether a buyer is showing intent on a website, viewing or sharing content, mentioning competitors in conversations, introducing new stakeholders, or canceling meetings, revenue teams are under increased pressure to capture the data and use the insights to drive their sales process. adjust in real time.

Activity-level data empowers sellers with when, where, and how they can create personalized, value-based experiences that accelerate pipeline speed, shift the deal trajectory, and guide modern buyers through confident purchasing decisions.

It’s up to e-commerce companies to deliver this massive change in purchasing and make sure they’re prepared to compete in the new sales battlefields of this decade.

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This post How RevOps science is driving data-driven success for sales promotion

was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/04/06/how-revops-science-brings-data-based-success-to-sales-enablement/”