The Right RevOps Architecture

The RevOps market is maturing and practitioners now realize that a mish-mash of point solutions connected to each other is unscalable and just too complex to manage. Many high-growth companies came to us with a lot of technical debt because they added more tools, more custom code, and more people to their RevOps architecture as they were growing. That strategy did not scale as fast as their business and they started losing opportunities.

That was not the right revenue operations architecture.

Openprise started in 2015 and was designed as a data platform with scale and flexibility in mind. RevOps functionality was built on top of this solid data processing and orchestration foundation. Its architecture maintains a balance between operational scalability and depth of RevOps specialization.

Every decision we make when we add functionality has this goal in mind: grow with our customers’ business through scalability and flexibility.

In contrast, sales and marketing automation suites focused on specialized features and encouraged the creation of an ecosystem of apps and point solutions that work on top of their resources. This approach may have helped in the short term, but, over time it created a  complex RevOps stack with many inter-dependencies and fragmented data.

Each point solution may or may not have the required data management functionality. Customers who want to fill the gaps in data management need to work with IT to integrate with multiple other CDM, iPaaS, and EDW platforms. That’s a lot of overhead and it ties RevOps projects to IT timeframes and processes.

Openprise is the common data and automation layer that eliminates the multiple point-to-point integrations between the tools in the execution layer and the systems of record.

It ingests data from any source and in any format, then cleanses it, standardizes it, maps it, infers it, and segments it – all based on your business logic. You can test different routing rules or models for attribution, visualizing the results side-by-side. When you are happy with the results, you can have Openprise push them to your CRM. This way you avoid overloading your CRM with processing that it wasn’t designed to do. This way  your CRM stays clean and becomes a system of record that can be used with confidence by sales and finance leaders to make decisions.

Openprise enables you to create custom objects and custom business logic without writing code. That’s right: no more Salesforce APEX code that leaves everybody scratching their heads ever since the original developer left. No need for Java code either. Our UI enables you to create tasks, jobs, and bots to do anything you need for marketing or sales automation. You can automate hundreds of processes and create apps and dashboards that make the results available to all end-users, whether they’re technical or not.

Our customers usually start with automating data quality processes, only to realize that Openprise can do so much more for them. We’re their strategic RevOps data automation platform and can be used for multiple scenarios. We partner with them to create a roadmap for cleaning up their technical debt and they see results very early on. AppFactory enables them to gain their independence from IT and shorten their projects’ timeline. The built-in recipes make it easy to kick-off any project by following best practices from our experts, freeing up the operations teams to focus on work that’s more important to the business instead of fixing daily issues and doing repetitive tasks.

Customer stories: crafting the right Revenue Operations architecture

Zendesk started with automating data standardization and list loading. They gained a 25% improvement in data cleansing efficiency and saved a six figure amount with the increased team productivity. The results were eye-opening and the team realized that they can take on even more strategic initiatives like account scoring and defining market prioritization. Now, the marketing operations team assigns account “industry” and “sub-industry” values, making it possible for sales teams to conduct market analysis and prioritization. Openprise provided the attributes the sales teams needed, as well as the ability to compare the original lookup tables with the industry values marketing operations had established. The result? Zendesk gained hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from improved targeting and conversion, and sales team efficiency grew by 25%.

“What stands out is the ability to run all these processes within Openprise, without needing to push data back into the system to see the results. The ability to move data in and out of Openprise—and manage that data within Openprise as a sandbox simulation—is really where the value of the platform lies.”

Roberto Fernández Madero, Manager of Marketing Operations.

Okta started with cleaning up duplicates in their Marketo database, eventually identifying and merging more than 300,000 lead duplicates. Eliminating the duplicates gave sales reps better visibility into contact activity and enabled them to create tailored follow-ups. It also extended the life of their Marketo database, which was stretched to the limits, and saved them $12,000 in licensing fees.

Next they automated list loading, which used to be a 24- to 48-hour process. Now it has been reduced to five to ten minutes, so sales reps can access leads quickly and improve their connect rate and the number of new opportunities from a campaign.

Since the Okta team had an automation infrastructure in place, it was time for a more strategic project: addressing privacy and compliance by streamlining field logic. By filtering data from 30 fields into a simplified set of five fields, marketing and sales teams can easily see who they can email or call.

Another strategic project was territory realignment. At the beginning of the company’s fiscal year, Okta assigns sales people new accounts, leads, and contacts to pursue. Before Openprise, the process of moving six million records to the right owners took weeks. Now they can run multiple scenarios and complete the process of reassigning territories over a weekend.

“I’d worked with Openprise at my previous company. So, when I got to Okta, rather than trying to integrate several point solutions, I knew the Openprise platform would grow with us, from automating data quality to orchestrating even more complex processes.”

Kat Nobles, Marketing Operations Manager

Conclusion

The RevOps stack is at a breaking point because of short-term decisions that created a complex and fragile architecture. Marketing leaders need to step in and drive their teams to rethink their strategy and adopt the right architecture for efficient growth. Practitioners need to provide the ROI of their RevOps choices to their leaders, to prove they are aligned with the efficient growth strategy.

In the end, you can restore your beloved Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce systems back to their former glory by offloading data-heavy operations to Openprise, a platform created specifically to take on exactly these kinds of workloads. You’ll see your marketing and sales platforms roar back to life as you migrate these processes off of them, either process-by-process or over time to minimize business impact.

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