Solving the challenge of RevOps alignment: breaking down silos

Working in silos is one of the biggest issues when solving the challenge of RevOps alignment. Silos always lead to total chaos for your RevOps team, especially when your company begins to scale. Obviously, chaos can lead to a lot of conflict, both internally and between your organization and its customers.

For example, let’s say you’re a demand generation leader and you’re tasked with creating a campaign targeting the “white space”—different business units within specific customer accounts.

• What does this process look like? You’ll first need data that separates your current active customers from prospective ones within each account. You’ll also need to connect with the right salesperson.
• Does your organization have dedicated account managers or will you need to work directly with a customer success manager? Once you understand that process, you need to ensure the contacts route correctly.
• How do you know which region the business unit is in, and how can you be sure you’re following data compliance rules?
• How will you ensure a smooth hand-off?
• How will you handle communications with the customer?
• Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, how will you measure the effectiveness of the campaign?

If you answered any of these questions with “I don’t know” or aren’t completely confident about your data, you need to take a holistic approach—with total RevOps alignment across the board.

Include key stakeholders in the challenge of RevOps alignment

No one single contributor can take on the challenge of RevOps alignment alone. It takes a collaborative team to break down silos and see the vision to move the process along.

Let’s take the example from above. The demand generation manager asks if sales and customer success leaders can create this segment. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to do it. The data doesn’t fully exist in the CRM. So, what happens next?

There are a couple of scenarios that demand gen managers might face.

1. The other leaders understand what the demand generation manager needs, but they have neither the bandwidth nor resources to help.
2. Everyone comes together and figures out what needs to happen to make this process easier in the future.

The first scenario is the most common one for larger organizations. Sales ops, marketing ops, and customer success ops are busy dealing with day-to-day tasks, and usually also have to put out the fires that come along. A change in infrastructure takes about two to three months to map out. and another one to two months to take it live.

The second scenario is ideal, so it’s fertile ground to plant the seed of a holistic RevOps team. The teams will take inventory of the current processes, data, and technology needed to get the ball rolling and work collaboratively to figure out how they can get teams to help each other. This both helps make a more cohesive team and gives the customer a seamless experience. With teamwork, prospects and customers alike can be routed to the correct team member for smooth interactions.

Why executives should get on board and encourage teams to align

It’s great when the teams are on the same page and are working more synergistically toward the same goals. But what happens when executives have different priorities for their teams? It discourages teams from taking a creative approach in the future. And that’s why to break down silos the culture shift needs to come from the top-down.

What does this mean for the bottom line? Well, a couple of things happen here: first, you get employees who are happier with their job and excited to collaborate with other team members while also fueling their career growth. As we all know, employee turnover leads to a loss of time, resources, and–most importantly–lost revenue. Some studies estimate that employee turnover costs organizations 100-150% of an employee’s annual salary, per employee who leaves the company, for technical positions.

The second is an indirect impact on customer retention and satisfaction. Think about it: we all know how confusing, and frankly frustrating, it is for your customers when they’re assigned to new sales reps or customer success managers because of internal conflicts. That frustration obviously growsy if the account data isn’t properly captured when the customer is handed over to the next person.. A RevOps team that’s aligned on one shared purpose and goal leads to happier employees, less turnover, and better customer retention and satisfaction.

What if you make the shift, but your teams are still siloed?

It all sounds great in theory, but many teams still work in silos even though they’re technically part of a centralized RevOps team. In our recent RevOps Live! webinar, 43% of participants responded that they’re still siloed even after this kind of shift. What happened? It’s possible you missed one (or more) of these blind spots that can prevent a successful transition:

• Team alignment. If you’re working to make the pivot to a holistic RevOps team, you need to understand what it means for other key stakeholders. Once you have this information in hand, call a meeting to discuss how these collaborative methods can positively impact the organization as a whole.
• Disconnected processes. It’s a problem between people and technology. Perhaps the product usage data isn’t connected to your CRM, or the data from a virtual event only says that someone attended, but you can’t see the engagement that happened during the event to help craft sales follow-ups. Your tech stack needs to be connected and communicating, and so do the people managing the processes.
• Executive approval. If you’re an executive, it’s often hard to step away from the status quo. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a term that comes to mind. If the organization has been on an upward trajectory for this long, why change tactics now? The challenge here is to make a business case for this change and explain how it’ll positively affect the bottom line. How can it foster exponential growth?
• Messy or incomplete data. There’s a chance you’ll find many fields that serve similar, if not the same, purposes, which means you’ll start seeing things like duplicate leads and routing rules that don’t work. . These issues are overwhelming and can discourage RevOps teams. Automating the processes to fix this data is key for scaling.

Watch Breaking down silos: why a holistic approach to RevOps is key to revenue growth on-demand for more tips, tricks, and supporting resources to help you make the RevOps alignment shift.

P.S. The poll results will update in real-time if you participate on-demand. Select “Diagram of organizational shift” under the Table of Contents to participate in this poll.

To learn more about how to make the shift, watch “How to master the RevOps approach.”

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