Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series:  RevOps is a Path To PE Liquidity

By Joanna Ridgway, SVP Global Sales, Cien.ai

A Tough Year for PE

Despite the recent Fed funds rates cut, the last couple of years have been tough for Private Equity. When PE firms are starved for exits, and LPs are clamoring for cash, how do operating partners extract the most value from Portcos? By growing them faster, specifically expanding sales efficiently. A recent study from Bain*, found that over 50% of the value creation over the last 10 years came from Revenue Growth. Dedicated internal RevOps resources have emerged as an invaluable component of a sound portfolio management strategy, and an essential resource to drive data-driven strategies and higher exit values.

“Revenue growth accounted for 53% of the value-creation drivers for global buyouts”
Global Private Equity Report 2024, Bain & Co

How Does RevOps Analytics Help PE Firms Grow PortCos?

Identifying friction points and missed opportunities in the sales process is key. Consequently, leading PE firms are establishing internal RevOps experts or turning to transformation consultants that focus on pipeline analysis, sales and marketing alignment and individual rep performance. Unfortunately, data is hard to collect, sitting in different systems, and is always messy and incomplete. Benefiting from this data minefield is a persistent and impenetrable challenge. Practitioners spend an inordinate amount of time getting to the root of the problem. Data must be cleaned and standardized in order to derive useful insights so actionable strategies can be implemented. But how can this happen more efficiently? And what needs to be cleaned in the data to understand the friction points in the sales process?

What Does Success Look Like?

Fortunately, there are now solutions to those problems. CRM systems can be synced with data warehouses. AI models developed and deployed by Cien.ai clean and standardize data on multiple categories: Completeness, Activity Capture Level, Consistency, Duplication. This allows RevOps partners to immediately understand key insights about the company’s go to market motion, and opportunities to immediately pivot to capture additional revenue or manage sales resources more stringently to drive efficiencies. Consequently, valuation is improved and those companies are more attractive target for buyers and more likely to generate a higher exit multiple.

RevOps combined with data optimization is a key competitive advantage for PE firms willing and ready to deploy it. Instead of a cost center, the RevOps team becomes the engine driving exit values.

About the Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series

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


* https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2024/bain_report_global-private-equity-report-2024.pdf