It comes as little surprise that revenue growth is a high priority for 78% of respondents in Forrester’s Priorities Survey, 2023, of 4,816 business and technology professionals. Responsibility for the achievement of revenue goals lies with organizations’ growth engines, and all eyes are on revenue operations to keep the gears turning smoothly. At the same time as top-line expectations remain undiminished, the resources available internally can come under pressure, especially in a challenging economic climate. This results in revenue operations leaders being called on to “do more with less,” requiring robust and creative responses in the face of unrelenting demand to support the business.
Overcoming Revenue Operations Constraints
Here are some approaches to tackling this challenge, delivering for stakeholders across the revenue ecosystem despite constraints:
- Establish the situation. Audit data, tech, and processes to develop a clear “as-is” picture for these key aspects of the growth engine. This makes it possible for revenue operations leaders to identify and prioritize enhancements to improve and monitor performance. Look for unnecessary data, redundant technology, and onerous processes that can be eliminated, improving efficiency and saving money.
- Determine boundaries. Revenue operations leaders must establish a clear scope of activities and encapsulate them in a revenue operations charter. This is a set of organizing principles designed to ensure alignment across the revenue ecosystem and maximize performance. At the same time, build a roadmap of future developments in relevant delivery areas to make clear what stakeholders should expect. This will make it easier to resist being pulled into initiatives that are not part of its core mission.
- Create a will/will not log. Building on the charter and roadmap outlining its own activities, revenue operations must lead the creation of a will do/will not do log for the wider revenue ecosystem that similarly specifies key activities to be completed and, crucially, those that are out of scope. This enables the entire organization to remain focused on agreed goals while avoiding distractions.
- Prioritize activities. In conjunction with these measures, maintain a rigorous approach to prioritization and ensure all initiatives proceed only with suitable rationale and senior approval. Use the charter, roadmap, and log as mechanisms to defend against whims, fads, and the loudest person in the room, all of which can result in a false sense of urgency. While flexibility and agility are important, changes in priority should be made thoughtfully and not as the result of a knee-jerk reaction.
- Look for process enhancements. A key role for revenue operations is to improve efficiency across the growth engine, boosting effectiveness and productivity. This can be achieved through measures including introducing clear workflows, handoffs, and service-level agreements. Adopt a robust intake process in conjunction with a suitable work management tool to handle requests, assignments, and tracking across the organization.
Delivering Peak Output
Revenue operations leaders need to take responsibility for robustly defending and orchestrating both their own resources as well as those of the wider revenue ecosystem. While unifying resources, processes and workflows, technologies, and data and insights, revenue operations must orient toward delivering customer value and ultimately achieving commercial impact. This ensures that the growth engine is always operating at peak output to the benefit of the entire organization.
Learn more about how revenue operations drives better customer experience and growth as well as ways to examine your revenue operations capabilities. Forrester clients can book a guidance session to discuss how to tune up your growth engine.
