B2B Expert Roundup: What is the Link Between RevOps and Client Experience?

Revenue operations, or RevOps for short, cannot happen without focusing on improving the client experience. This is because the client is the one who brings in revenue to your business to begin with. Without revenue, there is no need for an operations team to focus on improving it.

The connection between RevOps and the client experience starts in your company's "flywheel." At HubSpot, instead of thinking of our business as a funnel, with leads coming in at the top and clients falling out at the bottom, we think of our business as a flywheel, which is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum we gain when we align our entire organization around delivering a remarkable client experience. This flywheel is based on the inbound methodology. Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust.

Here is how this approach to how inbound business ideally works: First, your company attracts prospects through helpful content and other online resources. Then, your frontline employees engage those prospects and turn them into clients. Your clients are then so delighted by the experience you provided them that they go tell their friends and colleagues about it and that positive word-of-mouth then attracts more prospects for you to engage with and delight.

Churn. Upsells. Cross-sells. If there is a way to generate more revenue, RevOps uses data intelligence & technology to find gaps and improve the client experience (CX) therefore increasing the attainable revenue from that team. Happy clients bring growth through many channels; their accounts, loyalty, and expansion, as well as organically by sharing great products with other practitioners.

Revenue operations is about looking for these opportunities throughout the buyer's journey and using integrated systems and metrics to drive visibility 360º to stakeholders.

The link between revenue operations and client experience is treating everyone with whom you interact like a valued client. It ensures high-quality engagement at a fundamental level and translates to everyone whom it touches. Celebrating an Ops team is critical. Recognizing their contribution to the company's success places an increased value on client success throughout the organization.

Often, CX is viewed as something that is related to external persons; the reality is that clients are both the people who pay you for your product and the people that you pay to build and run your organization. Revenue operations focus on providing solutions for internal and external entities.

What we typically find is that if a process is inefficient or completely unnecessary to achieve the end goal; it is essentially a waste of time and energy.

Through automation, optimized UI/UX, and consolidated processes we are able to improve the experience of our employees. Better employee experience means happier employees. Happier employees are more motivated to care about the work they do and this leads to a better product, more involved sales teams, and ultimately a better client experience when they interact with your organization.

26% of clients will stop doing business with a company after a bad experience. Among other things, RevOps leverages data to improve campaign performance, streamline client touchpoints, optimize experience with cohesive messaging and transactions, and leverage feedback loops to inform product and process decisions. The result is ideally a better experience for the client which reduces churn and yields a higher client lifetime value (CLTV).

RevOps executes and iterates on the go-to-market (GTM) motion – who is central to any GTM motion? Clients. So, in that way, RevOps is client experience. Client insights should power marketing messaging which should support sales channel selection and execution. As organizations expand into new markets, the same process applies. RevOps, fundamentally, exists to help organizations educate and empower best-fit clients.

RevOps is, essentially, the alignment of all the internal elements of the GTM value-chain in order for the business to deliver the best value to the external value-chain of partners and clients.

It is not difficult to have good Sales, Marketing, CS, and CX teams. But, if they are not all aligned and managed to a common set of goals, as set by and measured by a unified RevOps team, all you have are excellent Silos and probably a poor client experience.

RevOps is the complete client experience. It touches all departments through the clients’ lifecycle by providing the strategic business integrations of Marketing, Sales, and Service Departments together. By allowing these teams to communicate without silos, day-to-day processes can be left in the respective departments to be improved and iterated on.

In doing so, the RevOps team can effectively help to increase the net revenue retention rate (NRR) and the client lifecycle.

It is without a doubt that the core of any successful business, no matter the industry, is an exemplary client experience infrastructure and evolving strategy to meet changing trends. RevOps simply represents the next stage for ensuring that CX meets current client expectations and needs and that the entire organization is aligned to meet those needs.

The relationship between RevOps and client experience is crystal clear and symbiotic. After all, without clients there can be no revenue, and similarly, without the data insights from RevOps, client experience strategies are unlikely to reach their full potential.

If you are looking to enhance your CX, start with your team. Each team member should be aligned with the same goals to not only ensure that clients receive a consistently high quality and seamless experience but to also solidify teamwork.

It is important that your team is satisfied and feels motivated. Meet regularly to field their opinions and help them feel understood and unified as a team. Any internal friction or hindrance that can be reduced, will translate to a client journey map with better flow.

I use this analogy often – having a solid foundation allows you to build more easily, efficiently, and effectively. Without a solid foundation, the more you add to it, the higher the risk for major issues to arise. RevOps is the foundation of client experience – it focuses on sourcing new clients, and optimizes the handoff from Sales to Implementation, and once again from Implementation to Success.

Throughout the client sourcing and onboarding process, it is the responsibility of the RevOps team to enable communication, data, and processes as effectively and efficiently as possible. The client experience begins with the marketing and sales teams and ends, ideally, only when one of the companies involved in the relationship goes out of business. Revenue Operations helps to build the foundational processes for all the departments involved with obtaining a client and ensuring a long, happy relationship with them.

RevOps creates a listening platform that empowers and enables leaders and organizations to observe, learn, adapt, and pivot with their clients. It is the architecture necessary to be flexible and responsive.

This is where data can provide a true and accurate narrative around your present, not just your past. It is not uncommon for prevailing narratives among executive teams to stand in contrast to each other as well as the objective data once measured. You need to resolve that dissonance. Otherwise, you risk making decisions without all the information.

Data is not someone else’s job. It is yours. That means every leader, manager, and supervisor has a responsibility to use data to co-create and collaborate in real-time through interdisciplinary and interdependent teams to continue to bring value-creating products and solutions to market that expand reach and engagement. This is foundational for pivoting into high performance amid an unstable environment.

Ensuring that your client experience is top-notch and thoughtful is key to building value behind your revenue operations plan. Anyone who has worked in marketing and revenue operations has had that experience where a client doesn't understand the value of your services and is very skeptical of the value you provide. Leveraging a thoroughly planned revenue operations plan that prioritizes the client's challenges, goals, and insights is a great counter to the negativity of unsure client team members.

Maintaining an open line of communication with your clients and asking the right questions will help ensure you are on the pulse of your client's needs to achieve their goals and insights to understand their challenges. You will find that both of these aspects greatly impact the client experience and your ability to create the perfect revenue operations plan for your clients.

There is a direct correlation to how revenue operations managers can optimize the experience of our clients and it can either be perceived as negative or as a net positive. Ultimately, it comes down to how new initiatives and opportunities are presented to your clients. When approaching RevOps, it is vital to take the business's goals and think of the journey or experience that you are taking your client through. If you only cater to the owner's perspective, you will fail to realize the gaps or areas of opportunity that your clients are actually seeking you out for.

Our best advice is to sit down with some of your top clients, and ask them why they work with you, what attracted them to you, and what the deciding factor was when they selected you as their top choice. If you hone in on those areas, not only will you see your RevOps team have a paved path to success, but you will find that your clients will appreciate you and value their experience with you.

There are two types of links from my perspective. An external one that monitors client journey and an internal one for internal processes. The external makes sure that potential clients and existing clients are provided with the best journey through the buying and upselling process in terms of communication, education, and implementation.

The internal one is a feedback loop on the internal processes from Marketing, Product, and post-sales teams (client success, implementation engineers, support, etc.) to make sure that everything runs seamlessly. These two links play a crucial role in making the whole company align on the best possible client experience.

Clients, in the eyes of Revenue Operations Managers, are the same as the internal teams that they serve such as Sales, Marketing, Success, and senior leadership teams, to whom they provide data visibility and pipeline analysis.

The responsibility of revenue operations is to look at the big picture and do what is best for the company as a whole. Streamline internal processes, improve the usability of existing systems, and keep client-facing departments aligned to ensure that hand-offs between teams are as seamless as possible.

One of the core purposes of a RevOps function should be to help an organization attract, engage and delight, both new and existing clients, through the implementation of business strategies and sophisticated process automations that improve engagement; enabling marketing, sales, and client success teams to achieve scale, while continually improving client experience.

Therefore "CX" needs to be ever-present in the minds of RevOps professionals.

In order for revenue operations teams to successfully drive revenue growth, teams must be focused on the client experience. RevOps is intended to operate as a holistic-thinking, growth loop model that takes into account not only the acquisition of new clients but the retention of those clients as well. If RevOps teams put the client at the core of operational decisions, the revenue will follow.

Where isn't a link between RevOps and CX? RevOps has always had direct consequences on your CX. It starts with the first client touchpoints in Marketing Ops, then over the complete buyer journey in Sales Ops, ending with long-time satisfaction and retention rate management in Client Service Ops.

Your CX chain is always as strong as the weakest chain link. If you have great marketing ops and constantly produce relevant MQLs, but your Sales Ops team does not push the leads to the corresponding sales rep and they do not manage the follow-up, no value is created.

What is more profitable than improving the client experience? We are in a subscription economy where it is all about land, retain, and expand.

Clients that have a good experience renew and grow, simple as that. In RevOps, if you can improve the CX by reducing friction pre-sale, help reps do better discovery to smooth out rough edges during onboarding, and utilize data to identify churn risks proactively so account teams can engage the right clients at the right time, then this should be a priority.

RevOps is all about making sure all departments are aligned, i.e. marketing with sales, and both with client success & service\support.

With a defined and smooth data flow process between the departments, each department knows how to give the best client experience, based on the information they share with the other departments.

With this, clients feel that they are communicating with a well-aligned company, that they are in good hands, and that they are being seen along the whole process.

The client experience should inform every step of your revenue plan, period.

When you are constantly in the weeds trying to solve data and process issues alone, it is easy to lose sight of what's happening on the client’s side of things. Your clients are your most vital - and scarcest - resource.

Too often, we focus on current and short-term earnings that seem to have little to no effect on long-term business plans. Cross-sell and expansion often get oversold as the cure-all for a fall in revenue. But they are not a short-term solution and can prove catastrophic for your revenue in the long term.

Hitting your client base with frequent messaging (i.e. email incentives and offers, outbound motions) and incentives that do not resonate drives up your cost, sometimes making client marketing more expensive than acquisition.

What do clients care about? – Good responses to their situation delivered quickly. How does an organization deliver these consistently? – A frictionless flow of information between individuals and a clear definition and process for responding. Simple, right? – Never. For client-facing teams, RevOps is make-or-break.

There are so many systems today that contain information and so many teams and stakeholders trying to coordinate with one another that without a guiding mind (or team of minds) conducting the orchestra, it devolves into pure chaos. Show me consistently delighted clients and I will show you successful revenue operations happening behind the scene.

Especially in SaaS, the client experience and strategy should be informed largely by RevOps. RevOps is responsible for setting the client experience off right by providing a smooth transition post-sale and then ensuring annual recurring revenue (ARR) is retained and expanded. Recurring revenue needs to be closely looked after, especially as companies grow and begin to outperform new revenue. Your first clients are also likely the easiest to attain with the lowest client acquisition cost (CAC).

Losing them due to poor onboarding is a big mistake because the cost to replace them is much higher. If you are in an industry with a limited market or a highly connected market, you should not delay putting resources into client success.

I believe that the hand-offs throughout an entire process are the most pivotal for a successful client experience. When there is a break in the synergy, it is not only noticeable, but a cause for concern and confusion for the client. All it takes for a client to second-guess their decision is that split second.

The best client experiences are easy and do not require much work or effort on their part. The RevOps team should help to drive these seamless hand-off processes throughout each department all the way to the end of the cycle and back to the beginning again to ensure retention and ultimately drive revenue.

Revenue operations is about aligning the revenue-driving teams in the client journey i.e. marketing, sales, client success, and client service. Marketing drives brand awareness, brand equity and nurtures prospects. Sales manage the prospect relationship, whether it is inbound or outbound, through their outreach. Client success and Client service look after the post-sale relationship with the client.

Interactions with these teams have a direct correlation with the client's experience. Imagine if the sales team asks about the prospect conversation that was already collected by marketing, that would be a very annoying experience for the prospect.

The sales team should tailor their responses based on information they already know about the prospect, to create a much more personalized and thought-out experience with the brand. These teams need to be aligned with goals and the client journey. It is a vicious cycle and everyone has a role to play to keep this RevOps wheel spinning.