How to Integrate and Align Data to Maximize Revenue and Growth in Your Organization
February 10, 2021
As your company develops a strategy to meet its goals, it is worth taking a look internally to see if you are utilizing all opportunities to maximize your revenue. What does optimizing your revenue engine require? The business functions that support your entire customer journey—marketing, sales, and customer success—should all be aligned in their goals and processes. That’s where a revenue operations team can be valuable.
What Is Revenue Operations?
A revenue operations (RevOps) team is designed to reduce friction between departments and streamline operations. With minimal friction, your customers receive a high-quality experience from their initial action to renewal. With streamlined operations, you’ll identify opportunities to grow your customers’ lifetime value.
Ultimately, a revenue operations team works to bring together your sales, marketing, and customer-facing departments to collaborate and integrate. Often, the RevOps team leverages technology solutions and workflows to propel these teams forward.
Understanding the areas to optimize your revenue engine starts with ensuring your company is supported by sufficient technology, aligned processes, and actionable data. With a strong revenue operations team and strategy, your company will be able to identify additional sales opportunities, provide personalized marketing, and provide high-quality customer service. There are bottom-line benefits, too: Companies that implement a revenue operations team grow revenue 12-15 times faster and are 34 percent more profitable.
How to Maximize Revenue Growth with Integrated and Aligned Data
When it comes to technology integration and data alignment, your revenue operations team should break down the company’s goals, determine ways that data can help support those goals, and integrate your technology stack to make that data easily accessible for further action.
Take the following steps to leverage your company’s data to propel your business forward.
Agree on goals for organizational alignment.
Goal setting is critical to help set your revenue operations strategy. Setting a few measurable and attainable goals can get all of your teams on the same page. Your sales team, marketing team, and customer service team should all be set on a shared vision of where your company is going.
Set definitions for your key data points.
As your business grows and your customer base expands, take time to reevaluate your data definitions by asking questions like these:
- What qualifies a person as a lead?
- Do you have a definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL)?
- What constitutes when an MQL is ready to pass on to your sales team?
- Do you have all the common reasons for an unqualified lead?
- How about for a closed lost sale?
Setting one definition for each data point ensures each team works from the same understanding.
Choose one system of truth for all records.
Although your business may use multiple technology solutions to interact with your prospects and customers, all data should flow into one centralized system, and that system should act as the record of truth. For most businesses, that means housing data within your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and ensuring that your solutions can easily integrate and move data into that CRM.
Perform a data audit to understand where and how your data is entered.
How is the data in your CRM updated? Are your teams spending more time than necessary manually entering the data? Does your CRM have native integration capabilities with your other technology stack solutions? Once you’re able to list the various ways that data is put into your CRM, you’ll begin to find gaps in your data and tech stack, or disjointed components of the stack.
For example, within your CRM, are lead statuses presented as dropdown menu options or free text fields? The latter will make it difficult for your sales team to run reports on your prospects, which will affect your marketing team’s ability to segment and market to them. Or, if your company hosts its product videos on YouTube, can you get any additional data about video engagement that would help your sales and marketing team? If not, perhaps another video solution that can integrate directly with your CRM might be more valuable.
Work to integrate your technology to gather key insights.
It’s easy for your teams to act independently and purchase technology solutions that solve an immediate problem. But there are benefits to moving away from silos, and that includes your tech stack. When your technology plays well together, you can gather more data about prospects and customers, to learn more about and better serve them. You can use data to find potential upsell opportunities or use purchasing history to identify trends in your most loyal customers.
Share insights and create transparency of your data across departments.
When all teams are working from the same set and definition of data, your revenue engine can start to run smoothly, with less friction. Aligning your company’s performance metrics with your revenue engine ensures that your teams are tracking progress toward your company’s revenue goals.
Implementing data visualization and reporting, and making it accessible to everyone in your company, encourages a shared foundation in your company’s current state and where it stands to its future.
Use Data to Grow Your Business
With the data flowing seamlessly through your critical business system(s), your team can have more contextual conversations, resulting in more satisfied customers and a greater chance at growing lifetime customer value.
Your revenue operations team can take ownership of your company’s data strategy and tech stack solutions, to understand which solutions help maximize revenue growth or hinder it. Having a dedicated RevOps team can ultimately help your sales, marketing, and customer success move out of siloed operations and toward a streamlined strategy.
About the author
Heather Quitos was formerly an Inbound Marketing Senior Specialist at SmartBug Media. She is dedicated to crafting persona-driven campaigns with career experience in B2B and software sectors. She has an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin and received her master's in business administration from Marquette University. In her free time, you can find her trying new recipes in the kitchen. Read more articles by Heather Quitos.