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Practical RevOps Analysis: Analytics Resources for RevOps Professionals

By Rob Kall, CEO & Co-Founder, Cien.ai

What is the Difference Between Sales Ops and RevOps?

If you ask 10 RevOps professionals, you will most likely get slightly different answers from each.

What is RevOps? Only the Hottest thing Since [🍞] !!!

Isn’t it funny how the business world is full of catchphrases and jargon that tend to shift every few years? We are all about wrapping up our Digital Transformation, and now moving on to Intelligent Automation, etc. Heck, I even remember when it was cool to say, “We’re in the middle of a Client-Server Migration.”. That should tell you something about the # of gray hairs I have…

So, we can all agree that revenue is very important, and just like there are TechOps, DevOps, and other operational metrics and automation disciplines for your business functions, it would be good to have the same rigor for your revenue engine. Sounds pretty obvious, I know, but it is a big deal, and at Cien.ai we have worked with this problem for the last 5 years (before it was even called RevOps, mind you).

What is the Difference Between Sales Ops and RevOps? 

Great question. If you ask 10 RevOps professionals, you will most likely get slightly different answers from each. For me, it comes down to that, in modern B2B  sales organizations, revenue is no longer driven exclusively by the sales team. There are also lead gen, account targeting, support, and in some cases, product-led growth (PLG uses a limited free version of the product to drive inbound demand).

This is important because Account Management may in many organizations be responsible for more of the revenue than the Account Executives. Therefore, it makes sense to adopt a holistic approach to the revenue engine and measure & automate in all areas in order for revenue growth to accelerate.

What is so Hard about RevOps?

Two things are significantly different from other “[X]Ops” categories:

1. The purpose of RevOps is to understand and improve the revenue processes in a company. But that is completely dependent on seller and buyer behavior. Those are much harder to measure, predict, and automate than things like code releases or billing processes. People are unpredictable…

2.  The data that you have at your disposal in RevOps, primarily your CRM, marketing automation, invoicing, and customer support case data is usually not standardized. Especially on the CRM side, the data is notoriously bad. After working with hundreds of revenue leaders, we’ve never come across a single one that said:

“Our data is perfect!“.

What is the Point of the Practical RevOps Series?

Cien.ai is a data analytics company using a lot of AI to automate RevOps analytics and workflows, and then make clean and useful data available in our API and apps so you can drive positive change in your Revenue Organization (notice that I did not say Sales Organization).  During the development of our platform, we have seen so many companies that we initially were unable to analyze effectively, due to some peculiarity of how they do things in their CRM or overall poor data quality. We’ve developed processes to enhance and standardize this data, so it is possible to get useful insights from it. We want to share some of those best practices, engage with the RevOps community, and get more questions and ideas, on what challenges you are currently experiencing.

And if you find yourself short on time, we’re of course happy to help you, using our TrueAI platform.

Current Article List:

About the Cien.ai Practical RevOps Analytics Series:

This article is part of our Practical RevOps Analytics Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the business details of how to improve the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Growth Essentials Analytics Series”.