Over the last few years, the term “revenue operations” (often referred to ask RevOps) has come up more and more in conversations. RevOps is how Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success operate across the full funnel to drive growth. It’s the strategic integration of those departments to provide operational efficiency.
But what role does RevOps play in ABM? I asked Jason Reichl, CEO of Go Nimbly, this question. Go Nimbly is the revenue operations company that enables SaaS companies to achieve their business goals. Jason explains how RevOps and ABM go hand in hand.
TRANSCRIPT:
Brandon:
Hey, everyone, Brandon Redlinger here, director of growth at Engagio, and I am stoked today to be talking to Jason Reichl, the CEO at Go Nimbly, welcome Jason.
Jason:
Hey, thank you, thank you very much. It’s good to be here.
Brandon:
What role does revenue operations play in ABM?
Jason:
That’s a great question. So, ABM is one of the, what I always say about ABM when I’m talking to customers about it, and especially a lot of customers bring Go Nimbly on as a partner right when they’re starting to make that ABM transformation, is that ABM is truly one of the first cross-departmental, really what I call RevOps initiatives, which, in order to be successful to the degree that you can be, you really need to have those teams be unified into your, your marketing, sales, and customer success team are unified into a revenue team, and the operational team is behind them, supporting it because ABM relies on a unified operational back end, there’s gonna be friction between the GTM team and ops team if they’re not completely aligned.
And so, refocusing everyone on the revenue is kind of a way of making sure that ABM really sticks and that everyone is supporting and building on top of it. So, I’ve found that we can really get the results that ABM promises by having a team like Go Nimbly involved. But really, if you don’t have Go Nimbly involved, ’cause a lotta organizations are not the right fit for us, ultimately what you need to be focused on is having a team that is using the same metrics as what your revenue team is using. And if you can align those two things, then you have a better chance of ABM really playing out the way that you want it to.
Brandon:
Perfect, alright, so, you go into a company, sales has their metrics, marketing has theirs, maybe even success has theirs, right? How do you start to decide on what those metrics should be that everyone should share?
Jason:
Yeah, so, we basically use two metric frameworks. One, which I mentioned before, which is called 3VC, that’s refocusing the entire organization on let’s look at the pipeline; let’s look at those four levers; value, volume, velocity, and conversion; let’s look at those and see if they’re changing over time; and let’s compare those to industry standards, right?
And so that we know how we’re doing against other people and also, hey, we seem to have a problem here around value, what can we do to change that? Or we have a conversion problem. And then both the revenue team, being all unified, and the operations team are tackling that problem together, so that’s kind of a cross-pollination meeting that we have, where we are coming to the table and trying to fix problems holistically across the entire revenue team. But then, also, on top of that, we still use standard SaaS metrics that other SaaS companies would use to measure growth and how you’re doing as an organization. It just doesn’t have to do with your effectiveness, right?
Usually, I think that most SaaS metrics have more to do with your product than your internal operations, right? How much can a customer success team really bring down churn? They can only prevent churn, but if the product is not there, then you’re gonna see your churn numbers go up, right? But being able to identify very early on that you have a churn problem is kind of what the role of operations can play in kind of this [ABM] model.