Why Your Business Needs a Revenue Operations Audit

Optimizing revenue operations is no longer a nice “to have”—it’s become crucial for sustained growth and competitiveness.  But where to start? And what kind of things can a revenue operations audit unearth that makes it worth the time or financial investment? In this article, we’ll explore why a RevOps audit is critical to business success.

What Is a RevOps Audit, and Why Do You Need One?

A revenue operations audit assesses your company’s revenue processes across sales, marketing, and service with the goal of uncovering operational inefficiencies and opportunities for revenue growth.

RevOps audits provide a bird’s-eye view of all of the revenue-generating and revenue-impacting activities and processes across your organization. They can also make it easy to see gaps and opportunities within your organization. Any RevOps audit is, in large part, a way for you to improve marketing, sales, and service alignment to fuel your revenue-driving functions.

Common Challenges and Pitfalls

Although revenue operations may be a recent term that became popular in the past few years, the problems that stem from inefficient and poorly documented revenue operations are nothing new. Here are some common challenges that a revenue operations audit can help you identify and solve:

Poor Handoff Between Marketing, Sales, and Service 

If you’ve worked in any cross-functional organization, you’ve probably heard of—or witnessed firsthand—the trope of poor collaboration and messy handoffs between revenue-generating departments. Marketing thinks they’re passing off great leads, but sales disagrees. Sales thinks they’ve sold a fantastic project that can solve prospects’ issues, but service lacks the knowledge or understanding of the project to deliver success. 

Without the right technology and processes that pass information to important stakeholders—and clear expectations from each department—you are setting your business up for poor alignment between these departments. A revenue operations audit can help you identify and address common pitfalls that occur during department handoffs.

Poor Data Visibility 

Are your systems connected and giving you accurate data in one place? Without a central system into which you can port all of your data, you’ll be making decisions in the dark. An important benefit of a revenue operations audit is that it can help you identify the most critical information and data you need to know to make business decisions—and ensure that your technology stack gives you easy access to that data and information.

Inefficient or Cumbersome Technology 

Everyone has worked a job where they ask themselves, “Why do we use this buggy software?” 

Without regular revenue operations audits, it becomes too easy to lose track of all of the technology your company is paying for and how employees are utilizing the software. Besides, software is being constantly updated. Here are a few examples of questions you can ask to find technology bloat:

• Does the software we pay for overlap? When you bought software five years ago, the product suite may have been more narrow than it is now. An audit can help you identify if you’re paying for multiple products where there might be a more inclusive solution for the pain point that technology solved previously.

• How are your employees utilizing the technology you have? If a software is poorly maintained—or no longer solving the pain point that you originally bought it to solve—your employees may have found shortcuts, started using other free software, or stopped using the software altogether. Getting data from your employees or from the software itself about utilization is critical for understanding how a software platform is contributing (or not contributing) to your business operations.

• Has the technology kept up with its competitors? You might have purchased the most cutting-edge option originally, but has it kept up? Is the software’s reputation still strong? Are employees no longer able to make the best business decisions because they are using outdated or inefficient software?

Outdated or Poorly Optimized Processes

The day-to-day reality of your processes shapes the employee experience, and in turn, your customer experience. If you have an open and communicative culture, you may already be aware of operational inefficiencies, but a regular audit is a good way to gauge just how much of your employees’ time is being eaten up by inefficient processes. Especially with AI entering the business world in a major way, have your processes kept up with the most efficient way to do things?

How a Revenue Operations Audit Can Help

Taking a hard look at the revenue-generating departments in your business helps you identify ways you can streamline and improve not only the amount of revenue your company can generate but also your employee experience. Here are a few of the ways a RevOps audit can benefit your business:

• Improved efficiency: Your employees will have more time to spend on revenue-generating activities rather than fighting against difficult-to-use software or duplicating work thanks to inefficient processes.
• Enhanced customer experience: Your customers feel the difference when your teams are aligned. What’s more, happy employees who feel productive and aren’t frustrated by internal time wasters will provide better service to your customers.
• Increased revenue generation: This one is a no-brainer. The more efficient your team can be, the more time is freed up to generate revenue for your business.
• Data-driven decision-making: One of the primary issues with poor revenue operations is that many of your processes—and, thereby, data—are siloed. A more transparent process and seamlessly interconnected systems allow you to make better decisions backed by data.
• Streamlined technology stack: Scrutinizing your software and ensuring you can see the ROI and the benefits of each of your technologies and software platforms are critical to ensuring that you are extracting the most value from your day-to-day activities. 
• Scalability and growth: If you fail to create scalable and efficient small-scale processes, you will hinder your long-term growth. A revenue operations audit can prepare your company for scalability.

Selecting the Right Partner for the Audit

You can DIY a revenue operations audit, but an outside perspective offers a few extra benefits. Choosing a partner that has done an audit of this kind a few times—particularly if they have done it with other clients in your industry—will save you time you might otherwise spend second-guessing the data you are seeing. The right partner can also help you establish benchmarks and give you a sense of how much room you have to grow.

An important consideration when choosing any partner for this kind of audit is to evaluate whether it has experts across all revenue-driving departments. A partner that is biased to marketing, sales, or service respectively will give you the most insight into that particular department—but may miss critical insights into your overall business.

Ready to dive into a revenue operations audit with a partner that combines knowledge of the full customer lifecycle with the technical expertise to implement solutions? Reach out to SmartBug Media to rev up your RevOps.