Excerpt from Chapter 3: RevOps Principle #1: People
Customers and prospects are people
While the work of RevOps is often agreed upon as bringing together and improving the work along the entire customer journey…the customers themselves can often be forgotten as people and not just data to collect and use. Even in business-to-business (B2B) companies, you’re selling to individuals or groups of people at the company, not to a heartless entity, not to a numbered ‘account.’ We’re starting this chapter with the customer or prospect, the customer experience.
“How are customers important in RevOps?” was not a research question, so related answers to other interview questions are discussed here.
Jonny Fianu’s pillars of RevOps include customers and prospects, the people in the pipeline.
Rosalyn Santa Elena’s definition and discussion of what is RevOps also talks about the customer journey and experience. She discussed supporting the end-to-end revenue journey, top-of-funnel prospecting potential leads all the way through to when a prospect becomes a customer, then renewing, expanding, upselling, and continuing to drive value for a customer.
Dana Therrien’s story about beginning RevOps said, “The overall intent is to ensure a seamless customer experience as they make their journey through these organizations that once operated fairly independently of one another.”
In her definition of what is RevOps, Maggie Butler of HubSpot spoke about acting as a researcher and finding the human stories, the common stories that matter to RevOps people despite differences in roles. She found a commonality was focusing on the customer experience is what is really going to matter and also be the most important factor for determining success in RevOps.
Maggie said, “From a HubSpot perspective, what we really want to focus on is for the good of the customer and for the customer experience…it is really so that you can internally run friction-free so that you can provide a friction-free customer experience. We believe everything that we do internally, the way that we're organized, the way that we run our approach, and our business. You can see that in the customer experience; you can feel that as a customer. You can feel when things work really well together. When your services person knows what's happening in the sales cycle with you, or the marketer knows that you've recently opened that email and that you make some of those connections … all of a sudden, when you start to think about how those processes manifest into the journey that your customers are having day-to-day, and what that actually feels and looks like, that's where the real power is because you're able to very easily see what changes or where to really focus on and your internal strategy that will make the biggest impact on customer experience. So, RevOps is unifying the operations of those go-to-market teams to create this beautiful runway for everyone to run on, for the good of the customer experience.”
In the determining success question of the interview, Maggie said, “If you're implementing revenue operations for the good of the customer experience, for the good of the growth of your company, then tracking the customer experience, the feedback and what your customers are thinking, that's just number one."
Another (currently anonymous) expert said, “The current involvement we have with RevOps is really trying to democratize all the complexities of a RevOps function in a RevOps capability in a company by just delivering the things that they need to do, so that they can do the humanization and the personalization to their end customer to create a great experience and hopefully have a great revenue alignment and a revenue outcome… one of the the fundamental underpinnings of why RevOps is needed, is because in order to run a durable revenue business, you actually need to know every aspect of every customer interaction, every payment they've made, every product that they own. You really need to know the entire customer journey.”
