Revenue Operations often feels like a plate spinning act; you need to keep everything working smoothly and make improvements at the same time – while incurring as little cost as possible.

To help prioritise, these case studies illustrate the potential impact incremental improvements can have on the bottom line.

There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip”

Improve Lead Follow Up

Improving Lead Follow Up is often a low hanging fruit for RevOps:

  • Many improvements come from internal process and systems changes, so they don’t require a lot of stakeholder buy-in or change management
  • They rarely costs a lot to implement
  • Marketing is supportive because their budget goes further
  • Lead improvements usually make Sales happy

Note that many organisations that have grown quickly lack two fundamental components for success

  1. a common language (tight definitions of MQL, SQL, Opportunity Stages etc)
  2. a shared Dashboard that accurately monitors performance in real (or near-real) time.
ARR progression at varying SQL conversion rates
Customer Acquisition Costs at varying SQL conversion rates

Improve Lead Targeting

Related to improved lead follow up, this focuses on lead quality. For some it can mean a transition to Account-Based Marketing (ABM) or Persona-Based Marketing to target your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and/or specific personas/roles within your target organisations, for younger Companies it might be about getting the basics right; preventing lead duplication, discounting leads from territories you do not cover and having a closed loop with Sales that incorporates their feedback on rejected leads.

Switching to ABM can reduce ACV in the short term, but increases overall ARR
CAC increases initially before falling significantly

Note that this is a bigger exercise than improving lead follow up. It takes longer and requires much larger stakeholder agreement up front. Implementation is also more complex, particularly when using separate systems for Marketing and CRM.

Prioritise Customer Retention

It is hard to overstate how important customer retention is to a SaaS (or PaaS) business. No other single parameter has a greater effect on growth rate or efficiency that customer retention.

Because the effects of retention are cumulative, the earlier it is prioritised the greater the return.

Invest early in Customer Success, make Retention a core KPI and think carefully about how incentive plans across the business reward successful adoption.