An Overview: Revenue Process

Take a moment and think of one daily activity and all of the decision points, people and processes involved in making that thing happen; from making a cold-brew to surviving the toddler bedtime routine (quite a few “detour” paths in that one). You have clearly defined processes that allow you to be successful, and your company should too. 

Over the past couple of years there’s been a shift in companies bringing on a Revenue Operations function to own alignment and growth of revenue generating teams (marketing, sales and customer success). It’s critical that the RevOps function has a holistic understanding of the organization’s end to end revenue process(es). A great way to accomplish this is to map your process(es) in a single, central place that can be shared and 

What is it?

A revenue process is a system-agnostic flow mapping of the entire business process, from lead creation to recognized revenue and beyond. These process mappings take a holistic look at the infrastructure that’s either enabling teams to be agile or may be creating friction for customers or internal teams.

This can be a powerful tool to flag areas that optimized processes could improve. It also can help with technology or resourcing decisions, based on the processes uncovered and designed.
Who needs this?
Every business can benefit from investing in defining a revenue process. Here are specific use cases we see most often that effective revenue process can solve for:

• Have trouble showing ROI on marketing campaigning efforts, or pipeline forecasting
• Are standing up new technology affecting the sales cycle – such as new Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) or Customer Relationship Management platforms (CRMs)
• Are adding new product/service offerings to the portfolio or shifting the way(s) they go to market
• Are acquiring new companies and consolidating processes
• Lack clearly defined or documented processes between teams

Where do we start?

A blank canvas can be intimidating. The place to start is gaining a very solid understanding of what processes are currently in place.

Assess the Current State

Because the focus spans new names creation through recognized revenue – all teams should be represented in this discovery. Not only does this allow you to get different points of view, but this also helps with feeling heard / valued opinions and the start of tighter collaboration!

The goal of the assessment is to have a complete visual of the current revenue process(es) and gather design requirements across teams. A few tips:

Discovery structure should be thoughtfully considered. Example: If you want a BDR team to be 100% honest about lead quality and marketing-provided materials, you may want a call just with the SDRs, and a separate call with marketers.
There should be some calls that overlap teams; oftentimes teams are learning from each other and uncovering gaps together on these calls.

Although you may assess and design this process in-house, there is value in an objective outside party to provide honest feedback and subject matter expertise in design.

Future-State Revenue Process Design

Designing the future-state process is a highly-customized exercise and is enabled by the current-state findings on where you should spend time creating more processes. Below are some components likely to be addressed or incorporated in the design:

These designs should evolve over time with your business, to maximize revenue as the business grows. You also may find you need multiple models based on the way you operate and go to market.

Outside of the obvious value in having something like this on paper (for reference, on-boarding, etc.), you’ll also see immediate benefits in addressing some of those pains, impacts such as:

• Reducing manual work and increasing efficiencies
• Aligning teams to KPIs and enabling visibility into impact and tracking against KPIs
• Identifying where you could use additional headcount or technology
• Consolidating processes across LOBs/regions/etc that may be easier for the corporate team to support
• Identifying messaging and communication opportunities across different stages and touchpoints in the funnel
• Increasing velocity to closed-won deals

Just to name a few!

Interested in learning more? Let’s connect!