It’s the beginning of a new decade, and what better time to think about some serious resolutions for this year and beyond. At the top of many revenue teams’ list? Better data hygiene.
And why not? Improved data hygiene opens the doors to insights that fuel effective sales execution and sales forecast accuracy.
So maybe your data hygiene goal sounds like this: Training reps to get better at entering data into CRM to improve your forecast spreadsheet rollup process and to build more reports from other business systems.
Sounds good right? Maybe not so much...because here’s the truth:
Reps shouldn’t be manually entering data into CRM, they should be spending their time selling and closing deals.
Managers shouldn’t be chasing down facts from reps, they should be spending their time coaching and running plays to shorten sales cycles.
Operations shouldn’t be manually rolling up spreadsheets, building custom ad-hoc reports and cobbling together data from disparate business systems they should be spending their time analyzing business risk and upside and building strategies to support revenue growth.
CRM wasn’t built for the modern revenue process and team. It doesn’t support data automation from all of your business systems (like email, calendar, marketing automation, etc.) so you’re not getting a full picture of your business, resulting in untrustworthy data.
Revenue Operations Solutions to the Rescue
Adding an AI-based Revenue Operations Solution to your CRM is the way modern sales teams improve their data hygiene, save time and replace your hodgepodge of untrustworthy spreadsheets and stale reports. With one unified system, revenue teams can align around the same numbers and predict revenue more effectively. Implementing a solid revenue operations framework can further improve revenue predictability and drive consistent results.
But how do you know which revenue operations solution is right for you? There are four critical components every revenue operations solution should have:
- Trustworthy Data and Automation
- Deeper Revenue Insights
- Consistent Execution
- Predictable Revenue
We’ll walk you through each one of those in this 4 part series.
Trustworthy Data & Automation
In order for your deal data to be trustworthy, it needs to be automated and in real-time so there is no question that your analysis is up-to-date and not relying on stale information. To ensure the data is real-time, your revenue operations solution shouldn’t rely on manual data entry. Instead, it should automatically capture all of your activity data across your business systems that support your buyer’s journey so there is no data missing. This includes data from your CRM, email, calendar, Marketo, Pardot, Outreach, Gong, Drift Highspot, and other business systems that contain deal data.
Why is trustworthy data and automation important in a RevOps Solution?
Without high data quality, you won’t have visibility and activity insights that allow you to spot risks and take action. Automation alleviates front office sales rep manual data entry into CRM giving them more time to sell and reduce back office operational costs onl spreadsheets and building custom ad-hoc report building.
For a revenue operations solution to provide accurate revenue predictability, it needs up-to-date data and rich data exhaust (i.e. a trail of all of your data activity) including history tracking for every single field in your CRM so that it can “teach” AI and machine learning models for better predictions about your business.
Trustworthy data and automation are critical to driving predictable results.
How to evaluate a RevOps Solution for trustworthy data and automation?
- Ask your vendor what activity data signals they support.
- Understand if there are any manual tagging or opt-in steps required for getting the data.
- Ask how much history is kept for each field in your CRM and what is required to configure that in order to get the complete history of your data.
- Also find out how easily can the system be configured when you change business strategies, reallocate territories, launch new products, or redefine your market segments.
- Make sure your integrations are out-of-the-box with smooth roll out and do not require setup from each user.
Key data and automation features to look for in a RevOps Solution
We’ve compiled a list of critical capabilities every revenue operations solution should include for data and automation.
- Real-time connection to CRM. Any RevOps solution should sync all updates with CRM in real-time so you have the most up-to-date, accurate information when assessing risk and opportunity.
- Direct integration with email and calendar. Ability to automatically capture sales-related email and calendar data from Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 or Gmail to avoid manual data entry and data errors.
- Out-of-the-box integrations. Ability to roll out integrations with no manual set-up required by the end-user so you aren’t wasting rep selling time with admin tasks.
- Integration with go-to-market systems. Ability to integrate with business systems including VOIP, sales acceleration, marketing automation, conversational intelligence, and sales enablement platforms so you’re getting a 360-degree picture of your deal movement.
- Time series data snapshotting. Ability to automatically track the history of every field in CRM in order to teach machine learning models for accurate predictability.
- Automated activity logging. Ability to automatically create activity records in CRM for customer engagements captured directly from email/calendar so you’re able to spot risk and upside based on positive or negative deal activity across systems.
- Capture new contacts from sales activity. Ability to automatically extract contacts from emails and meeting invites and sync them to CRM if a matching contact does not already exist so GTM teams have access to the entire buyer group without constantly reminding sales to input contact data.
- Automated opportunity contact role association. Ability to automatically associate new and existing contacts with deals as opportunity contact roles to eliminate time wasted and data errors with associating contacts.
- Contact enrichment. Ability to integrate with existing contact enrichment tools to save time filling in additional details like job title, company name, employee count, etc...
- Lead conversion. Ability to detect engagement with someone that matches an existing lead record and automatically converts it to a contact.
- Scale support. Ability to support large and complex datasets so your system is scaling as your business grows.
Modernizing your revenue process shouldn’t be hard. With a revenue operations solution and solid revenue operations framework, you can drastically transform the way you drive revenue growth and retention for your business.
To uncover more must-have capabilities to select the right AI-based RevOps solution for your business download our ebook “How to Choose a Revenue Operations Solution for Your CRM” and supercharge your revenue process today.