LeanData and Sales Hacker Unveil Inaugural Survey: The State of Revenue Operations

SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 31, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LeanData, the leader in Lead-to-Account Matching, Routing, and Marketing Attribution solutions, along with Sales Hacker, the leading resource for sales innovation, acceleration, and the future of sales, announced today the launch of their joint research study, The State of Revenue Operations: A Survey of B2B Sales and Marketing Professionals. Nearly 1,000 B2B sales and marketing professionals and decision-makers shared their perspectives on the ever-growing trend of Revenue Operations.

Revenue is the lifeblood of companies, which means it is natural for companies to obsess over finding new strategies to accelerate growth continually. Over the years, enterprises tested and tried a plethora of approaches in hopes of finding a silver bullet for generating revenue, including the rise of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) position. The role of the CRO, which focuses solely on leading strategies around revenue generation, continues to be adopted by enterprises. Now, conversations around the concept of revenue ops intensify as B2B enterprises compete for customers and dollars. As the adoption rate for CROs continues to grow, the probability of revenue operations becoming a staple business strategy among B2B organizations becomes increasingly likely. The question on B2B sales and marketing professionals' minds is, will revenue operations crack the code to efficient and predictable go-to-market (GTM) execution and revenue generation?

"Today's B2B organizations are under constant pressure to continuously innovate on their GTM strategies to scale revenue and grow market share. In order to be successful, I firmly believe that Operations, through its management of data and processes, must have a seat at the executive leadership table," said Evan Liang, Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, LeanData. "The goal of revenue ops is to unify and increase revenue generation through the use of data and technology in order to create a seamless revenue engine. That is the promise of revenue operations, but the question remains, is this the right business strategy to elevate sales, marketing, and customers operations to its proper place within revenue generation teams?"

Nearly 1,000 sales, marketing professionals, and executives provided their insights on how their respective companies perceive, adopt and implement a revenue operations model:

    --  Defining Revenue Operations: Today, there is not a single definition of
        revenue operations that B2B sales and marketing professionals can
        unanimously agree on. Typically, revenue ops encompass various
        departments within an enterprise. According to the State of Revenue
        Operations survey, over 45% of respondents consider revenue operations
        to be a unified coalition between sales, marketing, and customer success
        teams. Furthermore, nearly 25% of respondents would add operations teams
        to the group.
    --  Building a Revenue Operations Team:  Despite the growing number of
        conversations, the majority of B2B organizations are not rushing to
        adopt revenue ops. In fact, nearly 60% of respondents said their
        companies do not have a revenue operations team.  For many B2B
        enterprises, there are numerous challenges to create a revenue ops team,
        including a lack of institutional knowledge on how to build a revenue
        operations team (approximately 32%), and failure to create the right
        team structure (almost 21%). Despite the challenges, the survey
        uncovered a small but growing group of B2B enterprises who have or
        creating their own revenue ops teams. An estimated 21% of respondents
        said their respective companies had built a revenue ops team, while over
        15% said their companies were in the process of building revenue ops
        teams.
    --  The Catalyst for Change to Revenue Operations Model: For many B2B
        organizations, there are specific reasons to shift to a revenue ops
        model, in fact over 50% of survey respondents said that there are many
        specific business reasons for implementing the revenue ops strategy into
        their organization. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) was named as one of
        the business strategies that has encouraged companies to apply a revenue
        ops model. "The advent of ABM (which involves marketing and sales
        working closely together) and the increasing importance of net retention
        (which requires close coordination between sales, marketing, and
        customer success) has made a true revenue ops function critical to
        success", said Andrew Mowat, Vice President, Growth Operations, Culture
        Amp. Furthermore, nearly 20% of respondents believe that the complexity
        of data and technology stacks is a primary reason for embracing the
        revenue operations model.
    --  Who Owns the Revenue Metrics and KPIs: A significant point of contention
        in conversations around revenue operations is which team is responsible
        for owning the revenue metrics and KPIs. According to the survey, there
        is a wide range of opinions on the topic: 45% of respondents believed
        that sales, marketing, and customer success should share the
        responsibility of owning revenue metrics and KPIs. LeanData's Chief
        Marketing Officer, Karen Steele offers the following perspective, "to
        drive revenue more efficiently and to optimize internal processes,
        businesses are seeking dedicated revenue ops teams that own their
        respective revenue ops KPIs. It's not just a siloed sales or marketing
        exercise anymore. Driving revenue is a hybrid responsibility." On the
        other hand, over 30% of respondents said that operations should be the
        owner of revenue metrics and KPIs versus sales (nearly 24%) and
        marketing teams (11.6%).

"Revenue Operations is more than a trend, it is a movement of B2B organizations eliminating the silos between sales, marketing, and operations teams to drive growth," said Max Altschuler, Chief Executive Officer, Sales Hacker. "Although the trend is still in its infancy, we see high-growth companies experiment, even implement a revenue operations model and are starting to experience the benefits. Over the next several years, we can expect to see revenue ops become a critical business strategy for B2B enterprises."

For the full report, please click here.

About LeanData

LeanData is the leader in Lead-to-Account Matching, Routing, and Marketing Attribution solutions. We stand at the center of your CRM, connecting data to the right people. By aligning marketing and sales with accurate matching, routing, and accurate attribution, sales reps only get the leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities they need to work on, so they can close more deals and drive more revenue, faster.

LeanData is helping over 360 customers, including Marketo, Adobe, and Glassdoor, reduce complexity and frustration while accelerating revenue.

Visit leandatainc.com for more information.

About Sales Hacker

Sales Hacker is the world's top destination for all things sales innovation and sales acceleration. We provide you with educational and actionable content that you can leverage in your sales process immediately.

We provide world-class thought-leadership, webinars, conferences, worldwide meetups, online courses, sales training & digital partnerships.

Visit saleshacker.com for more information.

Media Contact
Margo Mendez-Penate
LeanData
margo@leandatainc.com

Supporting Quotes

    --  "The insights-driven decision making required by modern marketing and
        sales is a threat to organizations with insufficient operations talent
        and resources. If operations activity stopped moving forward, the
        go-to-market wheel would stop turning," said Allison Snow, Senior
        Analyst, Forrester.
    --  "The main goal of revenue operations is to break down the operations
        silos. The revenue operations team is the central hub of information for
        the entire organization," said Joe Gelata, Vice President, Business
        Operations, Axonify.
    --  "I view revenue operations as a natural evolution where organizations
        are seeing value in merging various operation teams while leaving the
        day-to-day structures of marketing, sales, and customer success teams
        intact," said Dheer Gupta, Director of Revenue Operations and Strategy,
        HappyCo.
    --  "We think of revenue operations as encompassing the strategy, execution,
        optimization of all systems, processes, people, and tactics related to
        generating cash for the business," said Greg Poirier, President,
        CloudKettle. "Essentially, it's the overall machine that helps improve
        the performance of sales, marketing and perhaps most importantly for
        SaaS companies, customer success."
    --  "The biggest pitfalls for organizations that shift to a revenue
        operations model is to mistake correlation with causation," said Jacco
        vanderKooij, Founder, Winning By Design. "Sales historically has been
        filled with leaders who contributed growth based on a correlation. As a
        result, many have scaled the business prematurely or too late."
    --  "Revenue operations is about treating sales as a science," said
        Dominique Levin, Managing Partner, Winning By Design. "Sales strategists
        instrument the sales process and sales team, use benchmark data, dig
        deep for the root cause of any gaps, and then work cross-functionally to
        implement processes, coaching, organizational design, compensation
        plans, and sales technologies to drive growth."
    --  "As much as we've discussed revenue operations, the consensus just isn't
        there yet," said Maile Johnson, Senior Director, Demand Generation
        Marketing, LeanData. "Most people know what it is, but it's possible the
        value is not well defined. This survey shows that that's a widespread
        problem. Businesses should be aware that they're not alone in their
        difficulties, or successes, with revenue operations."
    --  "The necessity to break down silos is a major catalyst for the emergence
        of revenue operations as a function," says Gaetano DiNardi, Vice
        President, Marketing, Sales Hacker. "The majority of respondents said
        the revenue operations team should own KPIs and metrics that hold sales
        and marketing accountable, which is a remarkable shift in the way modern
        organizations are thinking about measurement."
    --  "Revenue operations roles were created from the need to manage a shared
        responsibility, driving growth and ROI," said Brian Skipper, Head of
        Sales Operations, LeanData. "Revenue Operations is still being defined
        to help drive corporate accountability and results. This strategy will
        help bring departments closer together guiding all teams to overall
        company revenue goals."

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SOURCE LeanData