Stephen Diorio - Revenue Operations

Finally, it's important to mention that we, the authors, have obviously colored this analysis with our own background and experience. Thankfully, that experience includes senior leadership and c-level roles at growth businesses and innovators like Oracle, SAP, Schneider Electric, United Rentals, Siemens, GE, and Citigroup. Ideally, this personal history helped us synthesize our research with a more practical perspective and amplified the solutions we outline with conviction of people who have been there. We've sat in the board rooms and management meetings trying to push growth agendas. We've made the hard decisions on where and how much capital to invest in different initiatives. And most importantly, we've lived with the consequences of those decisions.

Executives and managers today are using outdated twentieth-century tools to govern and manage twenty-first-century businesses. These archaic twentieth-century management tools were built around a functional structure that sought a balance between the responsiveness of a strong local presence and the efficiency of centralized, global-scale operations. Today's reality is different, and personalized offerings delivered with the efficiency of global scale are expected. We're fighting a different battle between fragmentation and alignment. To connect the dots and layer in the science of growth, data, insight, and knowledge must be shared throughout the organization to provide them the EQ, the IQ, and the bias for actions that deliver results.

That's what this book is all about: Revenue Operations, a bold system to steadily drive growth in the twenty-first century. We'll take you through three core sections. Part Idefines Revenue Operations and its impact. Part IIarticulates the key pillars that make up the management system and helps you decide which leadership model works best for you. Part IIIlays out the building blocks of the operating system for your business. Here we focus on improving the return on your technology, data, process, and team investments and on giving you a good sense of the priority capital investments you need to make. In Part IVwe bring it all together with the concept of Smart Actions and provide you tools to best implement Revenue Operations for your own company.

This book will help owners, CEOs, and the heads of the marketing, sales, and service functions – the growth leaders that we will refer to as “CXOs.” This work will also help revenue-centric employees on the front line take a more systemic approach to growing their business. Furthermore, the lessons and insights inside will help large enterprises and small companies looking to accelerate growth.

We sincerely hope you enjoy Revenue Operations .

Revenue growth – the increase in a company's sales over time – is the primary basis for creating business value. The more sustainable and scalable that growth is, the more valuable your business becomes. Despite this importance, the “science of growth” is not well understood. Most businesses approach growth as a disjointed, episodic activity.

Why? The core reason is that many business owners, CEOs, and leaders lack a practical and proven system for growing their business. Every other primary function in a business – from the procurement, manufacturing, and shipping of products to the management of financial and human resources – has an established system. Purchasing, manufacturing, HR, and finance leaders have spent decades standardizing and automating those systems. Despite that, few of the executives we spoke with could clearly describe any kind of connected approach, system, or model they use to generate the revenue and profit growth they forecast to their investors.

They gave us some pragmatic reasons for this. First, go-to-market processes have proven hard to manage, measure, and systematize because they are more “art” than science. Second, customers and markets change too often and too quickly to create stable, repeatable processes. Third, they lack the customer feedback data needed to anticipate customer needs, measure performance, and manage the channels, investments, and actions aimed at meeting those needs.

These arguments had some validity in the twentieth century. Not so today. A revolution in data analytics and the emergence of digital selling technology has given managers unprecedented visibility into and control over the full revenue cycle. Analytics improve measurement of customer engagement and account health. They also help to manage selling teams and predict sales pipeline performance.

Our conversations uncovered a more fundamental reason. Namely, growing a business is an interdisciplinary endeavor with many moving parts that don't reinforce one another:

It's challenging to create a “go-to-market” approach that has dozens of functions to manage and many more disciplines to master – particularly when 80% of CEOs lack direct operating experience in most of these disciplines.

It's hard to align customer-facing employees who work in segregated marketing, sales, and service organizations.

It's difficult to connect technologies that are deployed in silos of automation.

In other words, it's impossible to deliver a superior customer experience when your revenue cycle consists of disconnected processes, policies, procedures, and machines.

No established commercial model exists to get these different pieces of the growth equation working together. Business leaders lack a management framework for coordinating their growth teams, functions, and disciplines. They lack an operating system for managing their growth assets, technologies, data, and processes.

Until these fundamental issues are addressed, efforts to accelerate or sustain profitable growth will be defeated.

The solution to this problem is clear. A new system for growth is urgently needed. One that aligns revenue teams with the infrastructure, operations, and processes that support them across the entire revenue cycle. One that generates more growth from the expensive data, technology, and channel assets that are the foundation of modern selling.

Our goal in writing this book is to better define that system for growth. We call it Revenue Operations.

Revenue Operations represents a bold new commercial model for the twenty-first century. Its goal is to create sustainable and scalable business growth. As we define it, Revenue Operations comprises two components. First, the management system – our EQ – aligns the people in your revenue teams. Second, the operating system – our IQ – combines technology, processes, and data assets to generate more sustainable and scalable growth. Revenue Operations weaves these two together to grow revenues, profits, and firm value.

Throughout this book we strive to articulate what Revenue Operations is and to show you examples of how to make it work. This book will help every person who cares about growth – from the business owner to customer-facing employees on the front line – to take steps that can generate more consistent and scalable growth. Because everyone has a role in the growth equation.

The book will specifically help business owners, CEOs, and leaders of the marketing, sales, and service functions to better allocate growth resources, make more profitable growth investments, take intelligent risks, and create a common purpose across revenue teams. It provides operations leaders and performance improvement professionals a blueprint for knitting together the systems, processes, and operations that support revenue growth in ways that generate scalable and consistent growth. This work will also help customer-facing employees on the front line to better leverage the systems, information, and tools available to them and work together as one revenue team.