Every company wants to scale its business and grow its revenue. Inevitably, obstacles arise along the path that inhibit sales and revenue intelligence from growing as fast as expected. Usually, these obstacles revolve around a combination or misalignment of people, data and systems (or tools).
To overcome these obstacles companies, create revenue operations teams that try to unlock “revenue intelligence.” Let’s examine each of these obstacles to better understand how they inhibit revenue growth and what roles revenue operations and revenue software play in removing these obstacles.
People Obstacles
The most obvious obstacle that prevents companies from unlocking faster growth is a misalignment between Sales and Marketing. This misalignment is often centered at the leadership (the people) but can also come in the form of inconsistent process, bad data or unsynchronized priorities.
By focusing on the people, we can find resolution to the misalignment by better understanding the respective roles. Depending on the stage of the company, Sales and Marketing departments often have different goals and priorities (and different metrics). For example, early in a startup’s life Sales is flailing about trying to find a repeatable sales process. In many such cases, Sales isn’t aligned with anyone in the company except the Founders as they try to understand the selling motion.
On the other hand, Marketing is focused on lead generation – through almost any means necessary – but relying on the Sales department to sift and filter and qualify the leads. This phenomenon is not confined to early-stage startups but can continue well into scaling and later stages of companies – especially if they are growing organically with heavy inbound interest.
The resolution to Sales and Marketing alignment is to focus them on revenue outputs as the key metric. Marketing teams don’t like quotas but their impact should be completely driven and measured by their impact on sales (afterall, why else do they exist?). If lead quality is of greater concern, coupling the revenue metrics with accepted qualified leads (SQLs), conversions (SALs) or lead-stage advancement are ways to focus their priorities. Likewise, Sales needs to be measured, not only on revenue, but on the same lead metrics as Marketing. These same principles and metrics apply to the Opportunity stages as well.
Data Obstacles
The second big obstacle to sales and marketing alignment is data. Both parties expect the CRM to be the single source of truth when it comes to customer data – but reality often says otherwise. Truth be told, no one likes working and spending their day in the CRM, even if it’s the market leader Salesforce. Sales reps are notorious for skipping details or just not entering the appropriate data into the CRM because it’s just too time-consuming. Sales leaders turn a blind eye because they want their reps to spend more time talking to customers and selling – not entering data into the CRM. Inevitably, the customer data in the CRM is incomplete and untrustworthy.
The data issues that Marketing experiences is actually the OPPOSITE of what the Sales team experiences – Marketing has TOO MUCH data. Managing lead lists, suspects, prospects, new customers, existing customers, ABM campaigns, etc…the list continues. Marketers are dealing with TOO MUCH data and have a difficult time sifting through the data to make meaning from it.
The result is that Sales and Marketing end up with silo’ed data that is not shared between the two departments. Not only are their people and objectives misaligned – but their data and data requirements are misaligned.
An easy resolution to this data misalignment is to make sure that the sales reps are leveraging Salesforce to track user activity. But rather than relying on the sales reps to manually enter all of the customer and activity data, revenue operations leaders should look to automate activity capture in Salesforce. By cross-referencing and associating activity data with sales and marketing data – the lead and opportunity data will be enhanced. By enhancing this data, revenue operations professionals can easily see leads that have been neglected or opportunities that are likely to close because of activity.
By associating activity data with sales and marketing data, patterns and trends will begin to emerge that will inform the revenue operations teams and help them make data-driven decisions. Activity data will make meaning out the mountains of data that marketing teams manage and empower them to focus their efforts on the leads that need attention (or, on the leads that are progressing). By analyzing this data, revenue operations leaders can model what a “good opportunity” looks like and what the appropriate sales activity should be in order to progress the deal and eventually close it. Likewise, modeling out what a “win” looks like (as well as a “loss”) can inform both the sales and marketing leaders of what the right behaviors should be.
Being able to agree on the data and being able to trust the data that both sales and marketing are looking at will enable both departments to speak the same language when optimizing their teams. Data alignment is critical for scale.
System Obstacles
The third obstacle that prevents companies from achieving revenue intelligence are the tools and systems that they are using. It goes without saying the Salesforce is the most common system of record for most B2B sales organizations. The CRM system is the standard. The problem with Salesforce (and most other CRMs like Dynamics and Netsuite) is that they are cumbersome, slow and difficult to customize. While they all provide ways to customize their interfaces and back end databases – it requires significant resources to do it.
As the revenue operations teams mature throughout the company’s lifecycle – the tools and systems that they choose are critical to achieving data alignment and people alignment. The systems inform the data and determine whether or not the data is trustworthy. Sales and marketing teams independently try to solve these problems with their own set of tools and systems. Often times this is necessary since the functions are different but some tools are more critical than others when it comes to data.
A key element to system alignment is to agree on the tools that the sales team will use to capture activity data. Many companies use Salesforce to track user activity with addons and plugins that are installed on sales rep computers. This is a very clumsy way to solve a critical data problem. Plugins and browser extensions require sales rep installation or heavy IT involvement for large scale deployments. Browser revisions and updates further complicates the accuracy and viability of these tools – not to mention the gaping security holes that they create in the enterprise.
The best revenue intelligence tools are the ones that are seamless to the sales rep’s daily experience. Revenue intelligence tools for Salesforce should automatically capture user activity data in Salesforce without any sales rep intervention. There should not be any manual work required by the sales rep in order to capture user activity in Salesforce.
Revenue intelligence platforms like SalesDirector.ai provide ways for B2B sales organizations to automatically capture user activity in Salesforce without sales rep’s having to install any software and without having to manually do any work. The SalesDirector.ai revenue intelligence platform does all of the work for the sales reps and automatically captures email and calendar activity and associates it with the proper contacts and opportunities in the CRM. By automatically capturing the data, revenue operations leaders can rest assured that all of the data is being captured – not just some of the data when the sales rep feels like it.
By automating the data capture process, sales and marketing leaders can trust the data. By aligning and agreeing on the right tools and the right systems – scale and alignment can lead the company to further success.
The vision of revenue intelligence platforms is to bring insights and alignment to the entire revenue organization (both sales and marketing). For companies to mature well into the scale and IPO stages of their business – alignment across people, data and systems is critical. Identifying and breaking through the obstacles that prevent companies from achieving revenue intelligence require an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach to revenue operations. Methodically analyzing the people, the data and the systems early on in your company life cycle will benefit your revenue operations teams for years to come.
Cleark Roney is a content writer who is always looking for the next project to sink her teeth into. His favorite thing about writing is that it can be applied to any industry and He loves getting to combine creativity with knowledge of an industry. Cleark enjoys reading, hiking, traveling and watching movies in her spare time. Cleark Roney is a creative content writer who has been published on various platforms. He likes to write about topics related to every where he spent all his time and gained knowlegde.
