What is revenue operations?

Posted on March 22, 2023March 17, 2023

You may think revenue operations (RevOps) sounds like just another buzzword. But it’s actually given a name to a function that’s been needed in the data-driven B2B world for a LONG time.

Because for the B2B businesses that have a RevOps team, recent reports show they’ve benefited from a 100-200% increase in digital marketing ROI, a 10-20% increase in sales productivity and a 71% improvement in stock performance.

So, if RevOps is the new secret ingredient for consistent revenue growth and efficiency—you’re right to want to know how your business can implement its own RevOps function. In this case, you’ve come to the right place!

In this guide, we’ll give you an in-depth overview of revenue operations and why it’s become an increasingly important focus for B2B companies of all sizes and industries. Specifically, we’ll be discussing topics and questions like:

What is revenue operations? And how is it different from other operations teams?
What exactly do RevOps teams do? What are their goals, metrics and core responsibilities?
Signs your organization would benefit from a RevOps team.
Should you build a RevOps team by recruiting new talent or reassigning responsibilities among existing employees?
How to build a comprehensive revenue operations strategy.
Resources for learning more about RevOps through online certification programs, podcasts and professional communities.

A lot to cover? Absolutely. But if your business wants a smooth transition to revenue operations, this guide will be a valuable companion. So, get comfortable, and let’s begin!

What is revenue operations (RevOps)?

Revenue operations is a team or function within your organization that focuses on optimizing revenue growth by aligning the goals and strategies of sales, marketing and customer success teams.

Leveraging data and technology, revenue operations teams create and implement roadmaps to enable those go-to-market teams to work collaboratively toward achieving predictable revenue from new and existing customers.

What do RevOps teams do?

RevOps teams are responsible for analyzing the customer experience and identifying gaps that cause existing customers to churn and potential new customers (aka leads) to fall through the cracks.

RevOps then works with go-to-market teams to systematically address those gaps, eliminate redundancies in revenue-generating processes and align revenue goals across all stages of the customer journey.

As they work towards those goals, some specific task and RevOps best practices include:

Identifying the core characteristics of a company’s ideal customer profile (ICP) for better targeting and lead generation
Communicating with stakeholders across the organization to ensure alignment of revenue strategies and goals
Leveraging key data points to improve revenue forecasting, including measuring revenue performance metrics such as conversion rates and customer lifetime value
Developing strategies to increase revenue through upsells and cross-sells, including optimizing pricing models and empowering customer success teams to contribute to revenue growth
Providing revenue insights and analysis to support strategic decision-making across all go-to-market teams
Analyzing customer data and revenue trends to identify areas of opportunity and risk, such as churn and lost revenue
Developing a lean and efficient tech stack so that all teams have consistent, reliable access to the same revenue data and performance metrics

How is revenue operations different from sales operations?

At its core, RevOps focuses on driving revenue growth through data-driven processes and activities. These activities include managing pipelines, optimizing revenue generation strategies based on real-time data insights and tracking revenue performance metrics.

In contrast, sales operations (Sales Ops) teams typically focus more on the operational aspects of selling, such as lead management, pipeline development and customer relationship management.

That being said, RevOps teams should work closely with Sales Ops teams to ensure that sales teams are effectively using revenue data from marketing and customer success teams to inform the prioritization of accounts and lead generation strategies.

How is revenue operations different from marketing operations?

Marketing Operations (MOps) teams focus primarily on marketing activities such as lead generation, demand generation, content creation and developing deep insights into a company’s ideal buyer.

RevOps teams support MOps by developing strategies to optimize the effectiveness of those marketing activities and bring revenue generation to the forefront of marketing strategies. For example, the RevOps team might work with MOps to develop a lead-scoring framework, which helps the marketing team prioritize leads based on revenue potential.

How is revenue operations different from business operations?

Business operations is another team that helps to drive revenue generation in a company. But its focus is more on the day-to-day tasks and processes needed to keep an organization running smoothly.

For example, business operations teams may manage budgets and expenses, improve internal communication and optimize revenue generation through marketing campaigns. On the other hand, RevOps teams are specifically focused on revenue generation, leveraging data and analytics to identify growth opportunities and optimize revenue performance.

Key RevOps metrics

How do RevOps teams measure the success of their efforts? By tracking the metrics related to revenue generation, revenue retention and growth. Those metrics include:

Customer lifetime value (CLV): The revenue your business can expect to generate from each customer over the entire time they remain subscribed to your product. By tracking CLV, RevOps teams can identify which customers are most profitable and focus their efforts on nurturing these relationships.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The cost associated with acquiring new customers for your business. By tracking CAC, RevOps teams can determine how much revenue your business needs to generate from each new customer to break even.
Sales pipeline velocity: The speed at which sales teams are closing deals. By tracking this metric, RevOps teams can determine how quickly new revenue is generated from your sales pipeline and identify potential areas for improvement.
Customer churn rate: The percentage of customers who leave your business after a given time period. By tracking churn, RevOps teams can identify trends and work to improve revenue generation by focusing on retaining existing customers.
Revenue retention: The total revenue generated by a business over a given time period, compared to revenue from the same period in the previous year. RevOps teams use this metric to track and identify areas where revenue growth may have slowed or stopped.
Recurring revenue: The monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue (ARR) generated by a business from subscriptions, memberships or similar long-term revenue streams. RevOps teams use this metric to focus on customers likely to be long-term, loyal revenue sources.
Renewals, upsells and cross-sells: The revenue-generating activities businesses pursue to increase the revenue generated from existing customers. By tracking revenue generation from renewals, upsells and cross-sells, RevOps teams can identify ways to optimize the customer experience and areas where additional revenue growth may be possible.
Net promoter score (NPS): The percentage of customers who recommend a business’s product or service to a friend or colleague. This metric can help RevOps teams identify and address customer pain points to increase revenue and customer satisfaction.
Sales funnel conversion rate: The percentage of revenue generation opportunities that result in closed deals. This metric can provide RevOps teams with valuable insights into how well their sales pipeline is performing.
Sales forecasting accuracy: The degree to which a company can accurately predict how much revenue it will generate in the future. This metric can help RevOps teams identify areas where revenue generation may lag and inform go-to-marketing teams of revenue growth opportunities they might otherwise miss.
Sales cycle time: The time it takes for the sales team to close a deal. This metric can provide RevOps teams with valuable information about how efficiently deals are progressing through the sales cycle and whether the leads entering the sales pipeline are actually a good fit for the business.
Average deal size: The average value of deals closed by the sales team. This metric can help revenue operations teams determine the revenue potential of new opportunities and identify opportunities to increase revenue by targeting higher-value deals.
Revenue: The total revenue generated by the sales team. This metric can help RevOps teams assess revenue performance, identify areas for growth and set revenue targets and goals.

Essential tech stack for RevOps teams

There are hundreds of B2B software platforms and tools on the market today, each with a range of features that promise to revolutionize how your business generates revenue.

But one of the goals of a RevOps team is to evaluate the tools available and simplify to only those that are truly essential to eliminate silos and get all revenue-generating teams working together seamlessly.

So, which ones are actually essential? Here are our recommendations:

Customer relationship management (CRM) system: A CRM helps your revenue operations team keep track of all customer interactions and data, including deals won or lost, revenue earned and support tickets.
Project management software: Project management software helps keep revenue operations teams organized and on track. It can also help manage revenue-generating projects, such as marketing campaigns or product launches.
Data analytics tool: A data analytics tool helps RevOps teams monitor revenue performance metrics, identify trends and opportunities, and make data-driven decisions.
Marketing automation software: Marketing automation software helps you create and manage automated campaigns based on customer data.
Sales Development Platform: A Sales Development Platform streamlines the process of identifying new market segments, targeting accounts with a high propensity to engage, reducing churn and driving predictable revenue growth.

Your tech stack may include additional tools and software, depending on your organization. But the tools we’ve listed here will give you a solid foundation to build on.

Signs your organization is ready to transition to RevOps

Sold on the benefits of RevOps but still not sure it’s the right next step for your organization? Here are some signs that indicate your organization is ready for a transition to RevOps:

Sales, marketing and customer success teams that are not aligned or working effectively together to minimize revenue leakage and optimize revenue opportunities
Inconsistent revenue reporting across teams and business units, making it difficult for stakeholders to understand key revenue metrics
Silos of revenue-related data and dispersed revenue performance information across multiple platforms and tools
A lack of clearly defined revenue processes and revenue-focused roles within the organization

Sound familiar? If so, you’ve taken the first step in addressing these problems. Next, you’ll need a strategic approach to building a revenue operations team with the skills, experience and mindset to drive revenue performance in an increasingly competitive business landscape.

How to build a high-performing RevOps team from scratch

Should you recruit new talent to join your revenue operations team? Or should you transfer existing employees from other roles within the company? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to these questions.

That being said, you’ll typically want to build a RevOps team of existing employees if you already have the talent in-house that you can effectively reassign or cross-train for RevOps roles. This approach is a great way to tap into the expertise already available within your organization, while minimizing disruption to your business.

However, if you need new talent, you’ll need to consider recruiting to fill new RevOps roles or outsourcing. Outsourcing can be a great option if you’re looking to add specialized skills or expertise to your revenue operations function or if you’re looking to scale your revenue operations team rapidly.

RevOps team structure

Ideally, the team will have a leader responsible for overseeing and implementing revenue generation strategies and communicating with the heads of go-to-market teams and the company CEO. Generally, the person in this role will hold a title like Head of Revenue Operations or Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). The team members under the leader will work to execute revenue generation strategies, analyze revenue data and metrics, and provide insights on revenue performance.

Keys skills needed for all RevOps team members

Regardless of how you build your RevOps team, there are a few essential skills and attributes that you should look for in your candidates.

For example, RevOps professionals must have strong analytical and critical thinking skills and the ability to interpret data and use it to inform strategies. In addition, members of your RevOps teams need excellent communication skills to effectively collaborate with other departments in your organization and external stakeholders.

For more information on developing the ideal RevOps team structure, including sample job descriptions for roles like VP of RevOps, check out how to build a high-performing RevOps team.

How to develop a comprehensive revenue operations strategy

Without a strategy, revenue operations teams may struggle to tap into their full potential. To create a robust revenue operations plan, we recommend doing the following activities:

Use data to better understand the customer journey and your ICP

One of the most critical components of a revenue operations strategy is understanding your customers and their buying journey. This requires gathering data about customer behavior and preferences, which you can use to create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized product offerings.

To better understand your ICP, we recommend using exegraphic data that looks at commonalities in the behavior your best customers display when they’re ready to buy. For example, you might review the data to see what type of challenges these businesses typically face when making a purchasing decision or what kind of sales and marketing messages resonate with them most.

With this information, you can create a revenue operations strategy that aligns with your ideal customer’s needs and preferences, helping you reach potential buyers more effectively and generate revenue more efficiently.

Identify roadblocks causing churn and preventing conversions

While revenue operations teams can help businesses unlock revenue potential, it’s essential to identify roadblocks that may negatively impact revenue generation. Some common roadblocks that may be causing churn and preventing conversions include:

Poor lead quality
Ineffective targeting of key customer segments
Unclear pricing strategies
Limited understanding of customer needs and pain points

Optimize and integrate the tech stack for revenue-generating teams

How many tools and platforms are go-to-market teams currently using to support revenue generation efforts? Can you optimize the tech stack so everyone can access the essential tools for the job and that these tools integrate seamlessly?

Sometimes, you can reduce churn and improve conversions by optimizing your tech stack for revenue-generating teams. For example, if all teams begin using the same data warehouse for product and revenue analytics, they can easily share insights to understand customer needs and pain points better.

Additionally, by integrating your marketing automation software with your CRM, you can ensure that every team has access to the essential data and that these tools are working in tandem to drive revenue growth.

Work with heads of go-to-market teams to improve effectiveness of strategies

Next, the head of your RevOps team will need to work with go-to-market teams to align on strategies, data and goals. These teams will play a key role in helping you to optimize revenue by providing valuable insights into your target audience, identifying revenue-driving marketing campaigns and tracking ways to prevent revenue leakage.

These teams will also need help from RevOps to ensure that revenue-generating activities are well-aligned with revenue goals and to provide them with the tools and resources they need for success.

Create a system of regular tracking and measurement of essential metrics

Your RevOps team will regularly track and measure revenue-related metrics, such as customer lifetime value and churn. Your RevOps team can achieve this by establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) for each revenue-generating activity and implementing systems that provide the necessary data for measuring progress.

Ideally, your organization will view revenue operations as an ongoing, iterative process. This means that RevOps teams should continuously evaluate the performance of revenue-generating activities and make any necessary adjustments.

Foster open communication and feedback to continuously optimize strategies

Speak to any RevOps professional, and they’ll tell you that revenue operations isn’t just about optimizing revenue generation—it’s also about getting the organization to work more holistically and improve collaboration for maximum efficiency.

This can be accomplished through frequent communication and feedback between revenue-generating teams where each team considers questions like:

How does our work contribute to other teams’ revenue strategies and targets?
Is there any data, tool or process that could help our team’s revenue generation efforts work more efficiently?
What roadblocks or bottlenecks are we encountering that could be prevented at earlier stages of the customer journey?

By establishing clear goals and expectations, creating feedback loops to monitor performance and encouraging open communication, RevOps teams can maximize revenue growth across the organization.

Resources to learn more about RevOps

RevOps is still a relatively new concept in the business world. Still, there are several resources available to help you learn more! Here are some additional resources to dive deeper into RevOps:

Revenue operations training and certification courses

Revenue operations podcasts

Revenue operations online communities

Final thoughts

Whether you’re looking to implement RevOps for the first time or are looking to improve your existing revenue operations strategy, we hope this guide has helped.

Specifically, we hope it’s helped you better understand revenue operations, the benefits it can bring to your business and how to start building a comprehensive strategy to maximize revenue growth.

Want to get the most out of your RevOps strategy? Start by using exegraphic data to develop a deep understanding of your ICP to ensure you’re prioritizing the accounts with the highest propensity to engage with your business.

The navigational power of RevOps, with Rosalyn Santa Elena

Posted on March 15, 2023March 13, 2023

RevOps has long existed as an organizational function—predating the term RevOps itself—yet so many teams struggle to integrate a dedicated RevOps team. Should it slot alongside (or above, or below) Sales and Marketing? How does this work?

Rosalyn Santa Elena, founder and Chief Revenue Operations Officer at The RevOps Collective, believes it’s a matter of misplaced focus. Where people report and who owns which team is much less critical than getting all the revenue teams in an organization to function in alignment.

“I always think about everybody in their own boat rowing towards their goals, and everything’s running efficiently,” she says. “You’re meeting constantly. You’re collaborating. You’re partnering. Everything you do, you’re doing from that end-to-end lens.”

Structurally, that alignment can take many forms. But rather than siloing RevOps from its brethren, creating a funnel where RevOps and Marketing and Sales folks report into a single organization is where Rosalyn identifies the greatest benefit.

“Think about getting everybody into the same boat,” she says, “and then rowing together.”

Rosalyn is a long-time go-to-market and revenue operations practitioner who elevates, empowers and enables organizations with her RevOps expertise. In this interview, she offers actionable perspectives on how a focused RevOps team can make measurable operational improvements for a revenue organization, even on the choppiest economic seas.

RevOps eases operations

Once everyone is in the same boat, RevOps provides the navigation. Current market conditions have created a storm that, frankly, is proving brutal for many businesses. RevOps can’t get rid of the storm—but it can bring calm to the storm for the other rowers in the boat.

Rosalyn identifies three areas where RevOps smooths operations for the organization:

Efficiency—helping the teams do the things they need to do in the most seamless way possible. “RevOps does that by setting proper expectations,” Rosalyn says. “We set guidelines through clear rules of engagement, clear processes, so that everybody understands what they’re responsible for, what their role is and how that plays out in the customer journey.” Driving efficiency especially eases poor handoffs between teams, which are a common pain point in revenue organizations.
Optimization—doing better with less. Lean into what’s working—the things that are going to produce the best results—and back away from the things that aren’t working right, or that are too slow or costly. “In this type of market, you want to focus your time, money, resources, people on the things that are going to give you the best outcomes fastest,” Rosalyn says. And that applies to everything from focusing on target accounts to investing in your tech stack. You want the most ROI, across the board.
Analysis—bubbling up insights about what’s working, and what isn’t. In other words: figuring out why things are optimal and efficient. “We’re always testing,” Rosalyn says. “We’re doing a lot of what-if scenario planning to understand where the business needs to focus. Where do we want to go? And maybe even more importantly, where do we not want to go?”

RevOps identifies the best targets

As if getting everyone’s boat through the storm isn’t enough, RevOps also helps the organization make sure it’s navigating to the right X’s on the right maps: aka, the best possible target accounts.

“Even with an ICP, a lot of companies say they sell to B2B SaaS. Okay, are they going to target 50,000 customers? Probably not,” Rosalyn says. “There’s a lot of opportunity for companies to really focus in on the best accounts and the best customers for them.”

Too many companies don’t try to filter out those best prospects until they’re already in the funnel. They know what really matters, yet they continue to spend time and money on accounts that aren’t the best fit for their products.

Rosalyn likes to ask C-suite executives about who they sell to—and who they should be selling to. Who has the biggest pain that their solution solves? A lot of times, those leaders require some coaching and some digging to get to who really is buying their product—both which companies, and which people within those companies.

Particularly in the current challenging market, this type of assessment can actually uncover opportunities that you haven’t even considered. New market segments, for sure—and also opportunities within your own revenue processes.

“I’ve been talking to a lot of folks about win/loss,” Rosalyn says. “Why do their customers leave? There’s so much learning there that a lot of organizations forget to tap into. They want to improve the high-level win/loss metric instead of really understanding all the incremental improvements that they can make.”

RevOps drives incremental improvement

Speaking of incremental improvements: RevOps drives its impacts in large part by redirecting and focusing resources. Making the case with the right metrics eases buy-in at all levels and ensures that RevOps really is navigating that boat through the waves.

There is certainly no shortage of quality data out there, so Rosalyn highlights three KPIs that make the difference for RevOps teams, especially in tough economic times.

Focus on conversion rate over leads and meetings. “You want to progress prospects through the deal cycle,” she says. “We talk about how many leads we got and how many meetings we booked. But how many of those turned into actual deals? How much revenue?” There are then different metrics within conversion to show how RevOps can incrementally improve stages within the funnel. Even one or two percent improvement in conversion can mean a lot of revenue dollars.
Focus on net dollar retention in addition to net new acquisition. You want to keep your customer base happy to protect the revenue that you have, as well as looking for chances to expand within that install base. Even when customers are contracting, they’re still looking for new revenue opportunities. “Companies tend to spend a lot of money on net-new acquisition instead of really looking for that white space within their existing customer base,” Rosalyn says.
Double down on predictable revenue. RevOps teams need to understand their forecasts and test if they are truly accurate. “Now, every deal counts, every dollar counts even more than before,” Rosalyn says. So lock down that predictable revenue by making incremental improvements to shorten the time-to-close and mitigate the risk of delays. Inevitably, revenue is going to slow down—and anything RevOps can do to keep deals moving forward is going to make a difference.

Final thoughts: RevOps communicates solutions, not problems

All the impact that a focused RevOps team can have on an organization ultimately comes down to how well that team can communicate. Think again about the rowers in the boat: without an effective coxswain, the team rows out of sync and can drift off course.

“If I can only have one skill to be really good at, I want it to be communication,” Rosalyn says. “It’s not just about writing or speaking well. It’s about the ability to drive consensus while bringing everybody along.”

Communicating internally is actually quite like a sales cycle. You have to identify the problem, understand the problem, come prepared with a solution and demonstrate its value. Because truly focused RevOps leadership is not about pointing out problems—it’s about recommending better ways forward.

“Always come with a call to action,” Rosalyn says. “The more you do that, the more you become a thought partner, a business partner. And then you start to elevate your team.”

What chatbots teach revenue teams about using AI

Posted on March 2, 2023February 27, 2023

AI has reached a tipping point in accessibility and proficiency, and Sales and Marketing teams are suddenly engaging with AI in new ways—many for the first time.

They’re using ChatGPT, for instance, to write their B2B prospecting emails, personalization and all. It takes a human five minutes or thirty or an hour to do some prospect research on LinkedIn before they can even get started. AI? It can do it all almost instantaneously. Or can it?

Not all AI tools are created equal. They’re not all trained to do the same thing. A chatbot like ChatGPT might write a heck of an email, but the accuracy of that email, especially when it comes to personalization, may not be as dialed in. As fascinating (and remarkable) as ChatGPT is, it also can’t build you an accurate target account list.

There are, however, AI tools that Sales, Marketing and RevOps teams can (and should) use to run faster and generate quality revenue. The key is to make certain you’re using the right tools to produce accurate and powerful results.

With the lessons learned from AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard, here is our Rev primer for revenue teams that require up-to-date and spot-on results from the leading edge of AI.

AI sources what is available—and it needs quality data

AI can improve lead generation efficiency and speed. So revenue teams absolutely can implement it—just not indiscriminately.

Not all AI is up to the task for what revenue teams need. It can get the details wrong. It did so, infamously and publicly, when Google Bard provided incorrect information about the James Webb Space Telescope.

It’s true that generative AI’s ability to create smooth, coherent, plausible text is impressive. Afterall, that’s what it was trained to do: generate realistic-sounding answers, not necessarily accurate ones. The details can be off. In Sales and Marketing, those details matter.

Teaching a robot to love

Here’s an illustrative thought experiment: Pretend that (like a shocking amount of people) you tasked an AI chatbot with writing a love poem for your partner. Could you pass it off as your own?

If you and your partner just met, maybe you could. But if you know each other well, you can’t get away with cold-calling AI to write a love poem. Straight-up, it won’t sound like you.

But it might, if you adjust the parameters: Give the AI chatbot all the love poems you’ve written over the years, then ask it to write a poem in that style. You just might pull it off, because the AI has greater access to relevant data.

Data quantity matters too

This is part of why Google Bard dropped the ball on the James Webb Space Telescope data: it’s a very recent news phenomenon, so there simply isn’t much information for the AI chatbot to source its knowledge from. It wrote an answer without sufficient context. If the question had been about the Hubble, Bard’s odds of nailing the answer would have improved dramatically. But, again, its model is designed to pick the most likely words and phrases, not what’s true.

To move the needle on your GTM functions, your AI-driven systems need to be used for what they were trained to do and have access to enough data. Otherwise they will point you in the wrong direction, or just come off sounding… well, off.

Revenue teams require up-to-date data

More data doesn’t just give your AI a better knowledge base to draw from; it improves the AI’s performance—more so than more processing elements. It’s a lot like how a bigger brain doesn’t make a person smarter so much as more experience does.

Historical bias causes revenue issues

Yet AI runs into the historical bias problem referenced above with the telescopes: history often overwhelms recent info in AI processing. This is a problem for revenue teams that rely on immediate, relevant data to make decisions both accurately and fast. The lack of data created about today or yesterday can’t stop you from taking action now.

That’s one thing that limits generative AI models like ChatGPT. Put to work for a Sales team, it would miss some timely events and milestones about your target accounts to draft accurate email copy. And if you asked ChatGPT to build you a target account list? Well, it might do a reasonable job of finding a few good targets given enough context about what you’re selling. But generating an accurate list of hundreds or thousands of companies is a fundamentally different task—and absolutely requires specific, up-to-date information. Data that’s even a few months behinds will leave you in the middle of another James Webb Space Telescope situation.

LLMs improve accuracy

So, if you’re looking to AI to build your target account list you need to look beyond the hype of generative AI and start looking at AI that’s using large language models (LLM) in ways that leverage up-to-date information that’s most relevant to B2B targeting. That’s how you’ll get outputs that have a high level of accuracy in the details.

LLMs are the deep-learning algorithms that identify relevant data and synthesize it into useful form. Despite the name, they’re not just used for language processing applications like chatbots—they’re used in many other cases, like building aiCPs, or AI-driven customer profiles, that help revenue teams identify the exegraphics behind their best customers and find other accounts that share those traits and fit their ideal customer profile.

Short version? AI that uses an LLM can make sense of data scraped from the web, including up-to-date information about what’s happening with millions of companies, then analyze it to understand how those companies are executing their mission. It can compare this to how your current best customers are running their business, in order to provide real-time insights into the accounts that you should be targeting.

It’s a sorting problem for revenue teams

The headline-grabbing generative AI used by chatbots relies on, essentially, solving search problems. They are a natural extension of what Google does today, where you ask a question and expect even just one good result.

In B2B, targeting is a different search problem: you want AI not to find you just one result, but to find all the results and then stack rank them in terms of how good a fit they are for what you’re trying to sell. Oh, without missing any, and without diluting the results with poor-quality targets.

In short, revenue teams require AI capable of solving sorting problems in addition to search problems.

To solve those problems accurately requires the right data, normalized in a way that an automated process can digest it. And it has to be up to date. These are significant challenges for LLMs. And LLMs are neither cheap nor easy to create; a company is not going to rebuild LLMs every day to account for new data.

This is why not all AI is created equal, and revenue teams in particular have to be selective in what will create not only fast content, but the right content. The best-fitting AI tools can identify the right information and assess relevant context around the organizations you should be selling to.

Final thoughts: Presentation matters

Let’s face it: the accuracy of AI chatbots is kind of a novelty. It’s fun to see what responses we get, but we’re all too used to finding the right answers on Google to be wowed by, essentially, an impressive search function.

We’re much more moved by the ability of AI to respond like a human in real time—faster than any person could—and sometimes even better. The ability to synthesize information, to comb those billions of data sources and come up with answers that come across more eloquently than any of us ever sounded in a job interview (or a prospecting email), is why revenue teams are so intrigued by technology like ChatGPT.

Presentation matters. No one would let AI write prospecting emails if it talked like a robot. But in the end, substance matters more than presentation. AI saves revenue teams time and resources, no doubt. But relying on the best-fit AI, AI that produces accurate results on B2B prospects, will be the real differentiator for revenue teams in this new landscape.

Layering exegraphics and intent data to up your game (and your returns)

Posted on February 28, 2023February 27, 2023

RevOps teams are justifiably driven to incorporate intent data in their prioritization strategies. Which makes perfect sense: in the world of demand gen and cold outreach, a prospect who has voluntarily expressed interest in a solution your company offers is way more likely to buy than someone who hasn’t. Intent data offers much better predictive capabilities than standard firmographic filters (like industry, headcount, location or revenue).

Intent data is powerful. There’s no doubt about it. However, it may not be giving you the full spread of information you need to maximize your conversions. For example, intent data can overemphasize “window shoppers,” lookie-loos who are only checking things out because they cost little to nothing.

Sure, a prospect downloaded a white paper or attended a webinar in exchange for a live email address, but those actions could be lightweight indicators of actual readiness. Typically, 66% or more of prospects on a normal, unfiltered intent list are such window shoppers—not the hot prospects you’re most likely to land a meeting with.

But when you pair intent data with exegraphics? Now, you’re unlocking the real potential of both data sets to optimize your sales pipeline.

How exegraphics differ from intent

Exegraphics and intent data offer essentially a macro- and a micro-view of a potential customer. Intent signals reflect individual actions that indicate some amount of willingness to engage with your company’s offerings. Exegraphics are demand signals: they reveal the inner workings of companies and how they execute their mission.

An exegraphic is essentially any characteristic you would want to know about a company—even if that information is not readily accessible. The B2C giants have been in on this concept for years with psychographics that extend well beyond demographics: the large data attractors (think Amazon or Google) can predict what you’ll want to buy, as an individual consumer, before you know it yourself. Exegraphics offer similar insights for the B2B world.

AI-driven exegraphics look at companies two ways: one is a focus on a company’s position in its industry and the value it offers to its market. The other focuses on the functions of people within the company, and how those functions are built, sized and prioritized. Rather than create static data points, exegraphics also account for trends and change over time.

Here’s one way to think of it: Intent data reflects small-sample-size data points where a prospect has engaged with your company in some lightweight way. Going after those prospects on that data point alone is like fishing based on where you see a ripple on the water. You know at least one fish is swimming there, and if it’s hungry, it might bite.

Exegraphic data, on the other hand, goes deeper than surface-level interactions to understand broader behaviors and patterns. In the fishing metaphor, you’d have a working knowledge of where schools of fish travel in the lake during different seasons and times of day. You’d know what they like to eat and when they’re most active. You’re not chasing ripples; you’re casting a lure where you know it’s most likely to land a hungry fish.

Combining forces to focus your sales strategy

Now you could argue that the best way to fish is both to understand the deeper behavioral patterns, and to look for the ripples that signal a live one. We agree.

Every prospect can potentially exhibit both intent signals and demand signals, as in this case:

If you’ve already implemented an intent data provider’s system to capture the potential desires of individual prospects, great: keep using it. Alongside that, Rev can identify the exegraphics that your best customers share. We use millions of behavioral data points from thousands of companies to understand what characteristics underlie your best-fit prospects’ needs and create an aiCP (an AI-supported ideal customer profile) to build you a prospect pipeline from the companies with the top “Rev Scores.”

Layering your existing intent data atop the aiCP offers even clearer direction for your sales and marketing strategies, combining the fish’s behavior with the ripples atop the water.

This matrix describes four primary scenarios for combining exegraphics and intent data:

Next wave: high Rev Score + low intent score

These target companies demonstrate the right heavyweight behaviors to match your aiCP. They act like your current best customers on the inside, and for those reasons they are highly likely to have a need for your product or service—even if they don’t know it yet, or haven’t acted on it yet.

Your strategy: Nurture these next-wave prospects.

These companies are ripe for a higher-volume nurture campaign. They may not be fully aware of a looming pain point, or that your company offers solutions for it. So, start creating those relationships. At the same time, you can monitor these prospects for intent signals—any way they are responding to your nurture campaign or seeking more information, which could bump them into the “hot prospects” category below.

Window shoppers: low Rev Score + high intent score

We mentioned window shoppers above. These prospects are often false positives. They demonstrate interest or curiosity, but the underlying exegraphics reveal they may not be a likely best fit because they don’t share many similarities with your best or ideal customers.

Your strategy: Delegate and deprioritize.

These prospects’ high-intent scores come at a low cost to them (often nothing more than offering an email address). The good thing is, interacting with them can remain a low-cost proposition for you, too. Don’t ignore them, but don’t expend time and resources on them, either. You can route them to automated marketing campaigns until they demonstrate a more serious interest.

Non-prospects: low Rev Score + low intent score

Odds are, your product isn’t useful to everyone out there. These companies have not shown significant interest in your product, and their exegraphics don’t demonstrate much likelihood that they ever will.

Your strategy: Simply ignore them.

Sometimes, you might want to think non-prospects are an untapped market. Most often, they’re not worth your time. The ROI on marketing to these companies would be minuscule, and odds are they’d be unsatisfied customers anyway. Unless these companies start to demonstrate some interest or radically evolve closer to your ideal customer, just don’t even bother.

Hot prospects: high Rev Score + high intent score

These are the golden-ticket prospects. The holy grails. The unicorns. Not only do they look and act like your ideal customers, but they’re also demonstrating a readiness to engage and buy. Do we really need to explain why you should call these companies right now?

Your strategy: Go for it! Route them to your sales team for immediate action.

Final thought: Exegraphics and intent data are more powerful together

Of course we believe that exegraphics are the most powerful tool for any RevOps leader. We know of no more comprehensive way to understand what makes your best customers tick, and to identify your true ideal customer profile.

Yet there is no denying that intent data augments the precision and strength of exegraphics. With exegraphics alone, absent intent data, your sales team knows they might have to spend time selling the idea before selling the product. But knowing which prospects function much like your existing success cases and which ones are already looking at the solutions your team offers?

Well, we can’t promise the trout will jump right in your boat. That’s no fun. But with exegraphics and intent data playing together, your sales team can focus its efforts on the greatest likelihoods of landing satisfied customers.

Ready for a free list of target accounts that have the exegraphics you care about most? Contact us.

Using RevOps to drive growth at scale, with HubSpot’s Sid Kumar

Posted on February 22, 2023February 15, 2023

Yes, RevOps is all about optimizing revenue—but Sid Kumar understands that RevOps reaches that goal best when it views its function in other terms.

“RevOps is the realization that go-to-market functions that cut across the customer journey need to be working holistically and collaboratively across the customer journey,” he says.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Sid, HubSpot’s SVP of RevOps, has been working within the function nearly since the beginning. A decade ago, he got into RevOps at CA Technologies as it was trying to pivot from enterprise to SMB and mid-market—without a go-to-market-model.

Yet he helped build out a global digital sales organization by focusing not on revenue per se, but on the customer journey. What is the customer journey? Where do we intersperse digital and human touch points? How do we make them both enriching for the customer and part of an efficient and high-scale model?

After this first iteration of RevOps, Sid joined AWS. There, he worked to build out and scale the cloud sales centers and go-to-market model, and led the field sales operations organization.

Now with HubSpot Sid leads RevOps for functional go-to-market teams, aligning marketing, sales and customer success across the customer journey.

“RevOps is the connective tissue,” Sid says.

During a virtual event with Rev, Sid discussed ways to understand and build the RevOps function for scaling organizations (and those on the verge of scaling). His insights into a holistic, collaborative role for RevOps alongside its partner functions focus on driving sustained, effective, long-term growth for revenue teams.

Wherever you’re starting from—invest in data

Data is, essentially, the food for an organization’s operations. Sales, marketing, success: they all thrive on data. RevOps is at least as data-hungry as any of its partners. “Productivity for the RevOps org and the broader org is underpinned by your investments in data and systems,” Sid says.

Yet he finds that critical decisions about data often get made later rather than earlier in an organization’s maturity.

“Even if they are going to evolve, some of these decisions are better made early on so you can start building a platform that can continue to scale and grow,” he says.

So wherever an organization is on its growth journey when it chooses to implement (or ramp up) RevOps, investing in quality, scalable data systems is essential. Think about what your data architecture is, how you’re going to store it, what your warehouse strategy looks like, what your go-to-market hierarchies are.

These are high-impact, if still high-difficulty, investments.

“The smarter and more intelligent you can be about which customers you’re going after and in what priority you’re going after them, you can drive a lot of that automation through systems,” Sid says.

“It goes back to rep productivity and customer experience. Data and systems together, when optimized, can really move the needle on rep productivity, keep them in front of customers and partners, and deliver that seamless customer experience so customers don’t experience all the internal handoffs.”

Think of RevOps as a business partnership—not a back-end function

Effective data helps achieve repeatability in your systems; RevOps evaluates how to scale it. Without RevOps, silos can form during growth because each team increasingly has to take care of its own responsibilities—which is why Sid views RevOps as essentially a go-to-market COO, coordinating between teams.

“It’s a business partnership, instead of a back-office function that’s providing reporting,” he says. “RevOps is going to help your GM, your heads of sales and marketing and customer success, to see around corners and play devil’s advocate.”

For the leaders of those teams, this relationship will mean giving up certain controls (or at least feeling that way). Which is why so much of implementing RevOps is establishing mutual understanding and trust.

“You’re not always going to be on the same page,” Sid says. “But if there’s an understanding that you’re all in a partnership to help each other succeed, and you have your company’s and your customer’s best interests in mind, then that partnership tends to blossom.”

For all the functions, this relationship can become a tell me what I’m not thinking of asset. RevOps will naturally come at issues from a data-driven perspective, and the relationship can couple that quantitative assessment with what’s happening experientially on the ground with customers, partners and other stakeholders.

RevOps requires its own heartbeat—distinct from other functions

In such a partnership, RevOps needs the autonomy to make decisions from that collaborative place—not just to help the other teams make their decisions. One of the pits companies fall into is thinking that RevOps is a glorified extension of the other function—taking a sales function, say, giving it a RevOps crown, and pretending that RevOps will expand and advance the sales function.

A true RevOps function has that separation of ownership from its peers in the organization. “If you’re a truly co-operating partner with your business partner, it’s two in a box,” Sid says. “Versus a relationship of here’s what I need, please get it to me.”

In other words, RevOps needs to own the responsibility for the entire customer journey—uncoupling its decisions from what’s best for sales or marketing alone to account for the bigger picture. Allowing for that can be tough! But it’s necessary for fully leveraging the potential for a RevOps team.

And some tension is expected—even helpful. “There should be this healthy constructive tension,” Sid says, “so that you’re getting the best outcome for your customers as the ultimate objective, solved for the company holistically.”

The customer journey drives alignment—find your North Stars

There’s a reason companies traditionally have distinct sales, marketing and customer success teams: owning the entire customer journey is a lot. The concept of an overarching RevOps function is still pretty nascent, and it’s easy to get caught up in trying to accomplish everything at once.

So Sid recommends going straight for alignment, which all the functions can appreciate with or without RevOps.

“I find the way to do that is getting clear on what your company’s customer journey looks like,” he says. “What are the stages? What are the North Stars along the way? What defines success at every one of those stages?”

It’s less important that each function understands its own stages, stars and successes—and more important for the functions to understand how each other looks at the business. Are all the functions together delivering the experience to the customer that they intend to provide?

“Having that mutual understanding of how each function operates, and how the other functions can help each other, opens up a different level of dialogue,” Sid says. “You start thinking about it more horizontally than in functions. There’s always going to be the level of functional depth that’s only relevant to marketing or sales, but identifying that common layer that binds all these groups together? That’s how you row the boat in the same direction.”

Final thoughts: RevOps is a long road—so start with immediate gains

Because RevOps done well interacts so comprehensively with the entire customer journey, it also requires time to bear fruit. It’s not a function that, once implemented, can crank out results in mere weeks. Some areas, like data systems, are most definitely longer-term investments than others.

Sid holds that organizations should be able to notice and measure RevOps’ impact in six-month increments, and that starting with the most pressing pain points will lead to the greatest transformations in the first six months.

“In six months you can really ideate what the biggest pain points are, and collaborate on a V1 solution,” Sid says. “This is typically a thorny area of the business that hasn’t been tackled before. From there you continue iterating on that and getting smarter over time.”

On that process side, there’s usually plenty of low-hanging fruit to get started with. On the people side, clarification of swim lanes—roles and responsibilities—is usually an effective place to begin. There, Sid sees that RevOps can make significant difference in a much shorter time, while simultaneously making those longer-term investments in data systems and the like.

The key, though, is identifying those main pain points particular to your organization. “What are the two to three big rocks that the company is struggling with?” Sid asks. “Go after one of those. You start to develop trust and credibility, and you pick up another rock when you have the bandwidth. It will snowball on itself.”

27 RevOps best practices for driving revenue growth

Posted on February 15, 2023February 13, 2023

Do you remember? Before Revenue Operations (RevOps) became an emerging function in the B2B world, things could get… confusing.

Marketing, sales, finance and customer success operated in silos; each using their own databases with their own set of metrics, chasing their own goals and then wondering why their numbers didn’t align at the end of the quarter.

It’s no wonder why a recent report from the Boston Consulting Group found that companies with a RevOps team experienced a 100-200% increase in ROI on digital marketing initiatives and a 10-20% increase in sales productivity!

Of course, building a revenue operations team is only the first step. The real key to accessing the benefits of RevOps is in the execution—and that means knowing and implementing best practices.

In this blog post, we’re going to give you an overview of 27 RevOps best practices that can help drive growth for B2B companies. But first, let’s start with a quick definition of RevOps and the core goals that each of those practices supports.

RevOps definition and goals

RevOps is the savior for B2B companies struggling with siloed departments and disjointed revenue-driving efforts. It brings together all the functions that touch revenue—marketing, sales, customer success and finance—and aligns them towards a shared goal: driving revenue growth.

But RevOps isn’t just about bringing departments together. The goals of RevOps teams also include the following:

Improving processes and systems to remove inefficiencies that lead to missed revenue opportunities
Determining key metrics and tracking the effectiveness of strategies in reaching revenue goals
Implementing strategies to increase the flow of high-quality leads and improve conversion rates
Working closely with the marketing and sales teams to align messaging, target the right accounts and drive pipeline growth
Analyzing data and customer insights to improve customer retention rates and lifetime value
Leveraging and efficiently implementing an efficient tech stack that improves all revenue-generating processes, eliminates redundant work and maximizes ROI

With these goals in mind, let’s now look at the specific practices your RevOps team can follow to achieve them.

27 revenue operations best practices for driving revenue growth

27 practices might be a lot to remember. So, rather than trying to implement everything at once, see this list as a handy reference to come back to as your company’s RevOps journey unfolds.

Best practices for aligning GTM teams to drive growth

Conduct regular check-ins with GTM teams to ensure that no silos exist within the organization and all teams are working towards achieving the same targets. Address any roadblocks that may be hindering progress.
Implement the use of a unified platform (e.g., CRM, marketing automation platform or data warehouse) for data tracking and analysis so that all teams can easily access the same key performance indicators and data points.
Focus on building strong relationships with all teams involved in the revenue process, including sales, marketing, customer success, product, finance and executive leadership. These relationships will help you drive alignment and buy-in for your RevOps strategies.

Best practices for setting realistic and achievable revenue goals

Define success metrics and align them with overall company objectives. Key metrics include customer lifetime value, customer churn, sales pipeline velocity and customer acquisition cost. Communicate to each team how they contribute to these metrics and how they can improve them.
Set revenue targets based on data and analysis, not just gut feelings or guesses. Use historical performance data to inform sales forecasting. For example, look at revenue growth over time, sales cycle length and average deal size.
Break down revenue goals into specific targets for each team and individual, including specific activities and metrics. This helps ensure alignment and accountability toward the overall revenue goal.
Continuously analyze data to track progress towards revenue goals and make adjustments as market conditions change or the company strategy shifts. This will ensure that the RevOps goals stay aligned with the overall business strategy and goals.

Best practices for improving processes and systems to eliminate inefficiencies

Adopt automation software to streamline processes, improve data accuracy, and drive efficiency in your revenue operations. For example, implementing a data management platform can help ensure consistency and accuracy in your revenue data.
Stay organized with clear documentation of processes, roles and responsibilities for the GTM teams. This will ensure smooth handoffs between teams, improve communication and encourage collaboration.
Align sales and marketing processes to avoid duplication of efforts and ensure a cohesive end-to-end customer experience. For example, you may need to align qualification criteria for marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
Routinely review and adjust processes in response to changes in the market and within your organization.

Best practices to increase flow and conversion of high-quality leads

Study the exegraphics of your best customers to learn what characteristics your ideal customers display when showing signs of being ready to buy. If you’re unfamiliar with exegraphics, check out this article for a quick crash course.
Use exegraphics to refine your ideal customer profile (ICP) to prevent pursuing accounts unlikely to convert and stop missing out on high-fit accounts that you hadn’t previously considered. Rev’s Sales Development Platform uses AI technology to automate this process and optimize lead targeting.
Implement a lead scoring system to prioritize leads based on their fit and purchase readiness. For example, Rev’s platform gives each of your leads a “Rev Score” to help you prioritize and focus your marketing and sales efforts.
Ensure sales and marketing teams are aligned and working towards common goals, so that leads get effectively passed from one team to the other. The process should include clear handoff points and communication channels to ensure leads aren’t lost in the transition.

Best practices for sales pipeline growth and management

Use data to optimize and refine your sales process continually. Look at key metrics such as conversion rates, average deal size, and time-to-close to identify any bottlenecks or areas for improvement in your sales process.
Build and maintain a robust CRM system, ensuring that all relevant data is accurately captured and easily accessible to sales teams. You’ll also want to ensure you have processes for regular cleansing and updating of your CRM data.
Regularly review and update your ideal customer profile to ensure your messaging and sales efforts target the right prospects. Use the exegraphic data on your best customers to inform and update your messaging and targeting.
Allocate resources to ensure that the sales team is adequately equipped and focused on high-priority opportunities. This includes creating a robust sales enablement program, regularly analyzing pipeline and performance data, and adjusting the team’s account assignments as needed.
Implement strategies for increasing the average revenue per customer through upselling, cross-selling and developing more effective pricing strategies. You might also consider expanding into new market segments or introducing additional product offerings.

Best practices for improving customer retention

Develop a thorough understanding of the customer journey and identify touchpoints where the customer success team can improve customer experience and satisfaction.
Leverage customer success and support teams to gather insights on how customers use your product and what pain points they experience. Use what you learn to inform product development and help your sales team effectively demonstrate the value and ROI of your solution during the sales process.
Implement a customer success strategy, including streamlining communication channels for support inquiries and feedback, automating onboarding processes, and proactively reaching out to check in on customers.
Create processes for regularly collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Use that information to inform product optimizations and drive retention efforts.

Best practices for optimizing the RevOps tech stack

Continuously assess and evaluate current technology tools and identify gaps in functionality or areas for improvement. When possible, prioritize integrating and consolidating tools for maximum efficiency.
Ensure data integrity by regularly auditing data sources and implementing processes for data hygiene, including data enrichment and de-duplication.
Stay up-to-date on the latest technology innovations and developments in the RevOps space. Consider implementing new solutions as appropriate.

Final thoughts

RevOps is a relatively new field, but its combination of data analysis, cross-functional collaboration and strategic planning can have a significant impact on driving revenue growth for B2B companies. By implementing these best practices, RevOps professionals can effectively lead their teams to success.

Want to give your RevOps team an advantage in identifying high-quality leads and closing more deals? Let Rev’s AI-powered platform show you the companies you should target next!

Coffee & RevOps with ChatGPT

Posted on February 1, 2023February 8, 2023

All the ground we break here at Rev is AI-centric. Our AI-driven Sales Development Platform develops aiCPs (AI-driven customer profiles) that are living, evolving models that account for changes within your target audience. It’s all built on traits that we call exegraphics, assessed at speeds incomprehensible to humans, to empower RevOps and other revenue teams to find their best prospects and retain their best customers.

For all that we rely on AI, what does AI know about what we do? Does it understand RevOps? Can it explain back to us what an exegraphic is? Most importantly, can it tell a good joke?

ChatGPT is all the rage in AI circles right now, and we decided to take it for a spin. We sat down with ChatGPT for a good old-fashioned Q&A interview about what we do here at Rev. Only one of us had coffee. Let’s see just how helpful, engaging, and knowledgeable this AI chatbot is when grilled about revenue teams and the RevOps function.

(This interview, like most human interviews, has been edited for brevity. But every word is preserved precisely how ChatGPT offered it. Rev’s additional commentary is presented in italics. Like this.)

Rev: Thanks for agreeing to chat with us. How are you doing today?

ChatGPT: I am just a computer program, so I do not have the ability to feel or express emotions. But I am always ready to assist you with any question or information you need.

Rev: Great. Then let’s jump in. We want to see where you stand. What is the most important revenue team in an organization?

ChatGPT: All revenue-generating teams are important and their success is interdependent. A well-aligned RevOps function that coordinates and optimizes the efforts of these teams is crucial for achieving the company’s revenue goals.

Rev: Very diplomatic of you. Since you brought it up, how would you describe the RevOps function to someone new to the space?

ChatGPT: Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a cross-functional approach to aligning sales, marketing and customer success teams in order to optimize revenue growth. It involves the use of data and technology to streamline processes and improve communication and collaboration among teams. The goal of RevOps is to create a seamless experience for customers and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of revenue-generating activities.

Rev: Nice! But what does RevOps provide that standalone sales, marketing and customer success can’t do alone?

ChatGPT: RevOps provides a holistic view of the customer journey and revenue generation process, allowing for better coordination and alignment of sales, marketing and customer success efforts. With a RevOps approach, teams can work together to identify and address bottlenecks in the sales pipeline, improve lead generation and qualification, and increase customer retention. Additionally, RevOps allows for the use of data and technology to automate and optimize processes, providing teams with real-time insights and enabling them to make data-driven decisions.

In contrast, standalone sales, marketing and customer success teams may have limited visibility into the activities and performance of other teams, leading to siloed efforts and a lack of coordination. Without a RevOps approach, teams may also lack the necessary data and technology to optimize their efforts and make data-driven decisions.

Rev: It almost sounds too good to be true. What is the drawback to implementing a RevOps function, if any?

ChatGPT: Implementing a RevOps function can be a significant undertaking, and there are a few potential drawbacks to consider.

One potential drawback is the cost and resources required to set up and maintain a RevOps function. This can include the cost of hiring additional staff, as well as the cost of any technology or software needed to support the function.

Another potential drawback is the potential for resistance to change from existing sales, marketing and customer success teams. These teams may be comfortable with their current processes and may not see the need for a RevOps function. Additionally, there may be internal politics or turf wars between teams that can make it difficult to implement a RevOps approach.

Finally, it may take time for a RevOps function to show measurable results, which can make it difficult to justify the investment to stakeholders.

That being said, with the right approach and leadership, these drawbacks can be overcome and the benefits of a RevOps function can greatly outweigh any negative aspects.

(In a recent Rev event, Sid Kumar, HubSpot’s SVP of RevOps, discussed the patience needed for achieving measurable results, and how RevOps is best measured in six-month increments. He recommends starting with your organization’s main pain points for more immediate gains. “What are the two to three big rocks that the company is struggling with?” Sid asks. “Go after one of those. You start to develop trust and credibility, and you pick up another rock when you have the bandwidth. It will snowball on itself.”)

Rev: We are really interested in how AI can help propel the RevOps function forward. What do you see for AI’s potential in revenue teams?

ChatGPT: AI has the potential to greatly enhance the capabilities of revenue teams and propel the RevOps function forward in several ways:

Predictive analytics: AI-powered predictive analytics can be used to analyze customer data and identify patterns and trends, allowing teams to better understand customer needs and preferences, and to predict future customer behavior. This can help teams to optimize their sales and marketing efforts and to target their efforts more effectively.
Lead scoring: AI can be used to analyze customer data and score leads based on their likelihood of converting to a sale, allowing teams to prioritize their efforts and focus on the most promising leads.
Automation: AI can be used to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as data entry and analysis, freeing up revenue teams to focus on more strategic activities.
Personalization: AI can be used to personalize communication and offers to customers based on their behavior and preferences, resulting in more effective engagement and conversion.
Real-time insights: AI-powered dashboards and reporting can provide real-time insights into the performance of revenue-generating activities, allowing teams to quickly identify and address any issues.

Overall, AI can greatly enhance the capabilities of revenue teams and help to optimize the revenue generation process, making it more efficient, effective and data-driven.

(ChatGPT’s first and second points—on predictive analysis and lead scoring—are most in line with how we here at Rev use AI-driven exegraphics and customer profiles to help teams identify prospects that behave, inside and out, like their current best customers. Our models also incorporate real-time changes in a company’s operations, helping revenue teams better predict their prospects’ needs and act on them.)

Rev: What insight do you have for folks who might be afraid of incorporating AI into their RevOps team? Or who might just be reluctant to try?

ChatGPT: It’s understandable that some people may be hesitant to incorporate AI into their RevOps team, as with any new technology there can be a fear of the unknown or concern about job displacement. However, it’s important to remember that AI is not meant to replace human workers, but rather to augment and enhance their capabilities. Here are a few tips to help ease concerns about incorporating AI into a RevOps team:

Start small: It’s important not to try to do too much too soon. Start with a small, specific use case for AI and build from there as you become more comfortable with the technology.
Educate yourself and your team: Make sure that you and your team have a good understanding of what AI is and what it can do, as well as any potential limitations.
Address concerns about job displacement: Make sure to communicate that AI is being implemented to augment and enhance the capabilities of human workers, not to replace them.
Identify clear benefits: Clearly communicate how AI will improve the performance of the revenue team and the return on investment.
Work with experts: It’s important to work with experts in AI, whether internal or external, to ensure that the implementation is successful.

It’s also worth noting that by not incorporating AI, it puts the company at risk of being left behind by competitors. AI is becoming an increasingly important tool for businesses and it can give a competitive advantage.

Rev: Have you ever heard of the exegraphics that the company Rev uses?

ChatGPT: I am not aware of a specific exegraphics used by the company Rev. The approach a company like Rev would take to develop their exegraphics model would depend on their specific business needs and the data they are working with. It’s possible that the company Rev has developed their own proprietary exegraphic model, but I do not have information on that specific case.

(We recommend that ChatGPT read our primer on Rev’s exegraphics. In fairness, ChatGPT discloses that it doesn’t know much of world events since 2021, which clearly accounts for why we have not hit its radar—until now.)

Rev: What do you see in the future for the RevOps function?

ChatGPT: The future of the RevOps function is likely to see continued growth and evolution as businesses look for ways to optimize their revenue-generating activities. Here are a few potential developments in the RevOps function in the future:

Increased use of AI and machine learning.
Greater emphasis on customer experience.
Increased use of data and analytics.
Greater collaboration and alignment across teams.
Cloud-based RevOps Platform.

Overall, the RevOps function is likely to continue to grow in importance as businesses look for ways to optimize their revenue-generating activities and gain a competitive edge.

Rev: As a final question for now, what’s your favorite joke that a RevOps team would find funny?

ChatGPT: Here’s a joke that I think a RevOps team might find funny: Why did the marketer quit? He realized he was just spinning his wheels.

Rev: Thanks, ChatGPT!

ChatGPT: You’re welcome! I’m glad I could help. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

Stay informed of critical events among your best prospects, with EV lenses

Posted on January 26, 2023January 26, 2023

Reaching out to a prime prospect at a critical moment in their company’s journey—and before the competition does—could be the difference between a closed-won and closed-lost. You know that, and we know that. So, we decided to give you the first-move advantage.

Our groundbreaking AI-driven Sales Development Platform just got even more powerful for RevOps and sales development teams. We’re stoked to announce EV lenses, a new category of exegraphic data that is event based. EV lenses identify critical events among your top accounts and best prospects—in real time.

Now, the moment that meaningful event happens within your customer base and your target accounts, your revenue team will receive triggered notifications. This heightened level of visibility equips your team to take relevant and timely action, while your target companies’ needs are at their most immediate.

With EV lenses, you’ll know when a target account experiences a major event:

Mergers and acquisitions
Funding rounds
Office expansion
Closing offices
Hiring sprees for particular functions
Layoffs in particular functions
And more

Exegraphics have always been able to identify trends in your target accounts over time. (Check out this article to learn how exegraphics work.) In short, they are pieces of information or characteristics that convey how a company executes its mission. They’re deeper signals for identifying accounts that fit your product and are ready to hear your pitch. With the availability of EV lenses, you can now catch a prospect’s attention at a moment when your prospect could use your help the most—or when you simply want to tailor an outreach message that feels timely and relevant.

But, that’s not all. We also just launched a new notification capability that flags any shifts in exegraphic status among your target audience. So, if a target account went from “early adopter” to “late adopter”—you’d be the first to know. It’s all about equipping your revenue teams with critical updates, right when they matter most.

Want to see it in action? Contact us to schedule a demo.

How to find new customers and increase sales

Posted on January 11, 2023January 18, 2023

You’re not alone. When most B2B companies set out to find new customers and increase sales, they rely on an outdated ideal customer profile, use one-size-fits-all marketing tactics and hope for the best.

But what if there was a better way? What if you could focus your marketing efforts and target potential customers with the highest likelihood of buying from you?

Well, you’d have found a more predictable way to increase sales without wasting time and resources on unqualified leads. And that’s what we’re going to show you how to do in this blog post!

Whether you’re a RevOps leader, marketing professional or sales development leader, you’ll walk away with actionable tips on how to find new customers and increase sales. For each tip, we also share an additional resource that dives deeper into the specific tactic to help you learn how to implement it in your business.

But, before we can get to those tactics, we want to help you correct that first mistake. Because, unfortunately, it’s one that many companies make without even realizing it…

How to fix the biggest mistake companies make when attempting to find new customers and increase sales

Most companies make the mistake of trying to find new customers without understanding who their ideal customer is. This misguided approach leads them to cast a wide net and waste valuable time and resources chasing after prospects who are not a good fit for their business.

How do you avoid this? By creating a dynamic ideal customer profile (ICP) that doesn’t just look at demographics or firmographics but also data that shows the behaviors companies display when they are ready to buy. Here’s a three-step strategy to help you do that:

Step 1 – Study the behaviors of your best customers

Most companies also don’t take the time to research and understand the behavior patterns of their best customers. But by studying your current successful clients, you can identify potential new targets with similar characteristics and behaviors.

What type of characteristics and behaviors should you look for? Anything that influences how your best customers make buying decisions.

For example, do your best customers usually come to you when they’ve restructured their team or hired a new CEO? How big are the teams that end up using your product? Are those teams made up of early adopters?

At Rev, we refer to this type of information as a company’s exegraphics—data points that give insight into how the company executes its mission. We’ve found that this type of data is much more reliable than demographic or firmographic data when predicting how likely a business will buy a B2B solution or software.

How do you find exegraphic data? You can find this information by doing things like talking to your current clients, researching their website and social media presence, and reading their job descriptions to identify what they look for in employees. The only problem is that this type of research can be tedious and time-consuming, making it nearly impossible to scale quickly enough to be worth the effort.

To speed things up, you can use Rev’s Sales Development Platform, which uses AI to find and analyze the exegraphics of your best customers. This technology allows you to quickly refine your ideal customer profile so you can increase your sales pipeline with high-fit target accounts.

Step 2 – Refine your ideal customer profile

Once you’ve identified the characteristics of your best customers, the next step is to use that information to update your ideal customer profile. Ideally, you’ll go from having an ICP that only tells you things like company size, annual revenue and geographic location to something much more comprehensive and reflective of how the ideal company operates.

For example, once you start using exegraphic data, the change in your ICP might look like this:

Old ICP using demographics and firmographics

Fortune 100
Mid- to large-size manufacturing companies in the Midwest with annual revenues between $20-50 million
Employee base of 70k-100k

New ICP using exegraphics

Companies that have recently expanded their accounting teams
Decision makers who prioritize efficiency and ROI
Prior experience using financial software like Quickbooks
Strong focus on data-driven decision making

Another critical component of refining your ideal customer profile is regularly updating it as your industry and the behaviors of your best customers evolve.

Step 3 – Tailor your messaging to appeal to your ideal customer profile

Once you understand your ideal customer’s exegraphics, use that information to tailor your communication with potential clients. This can help attract their attention and make it clear how your product or service can benefit them specifically.

Going back to the example above, perhaps you’d go from positioning your product as the perfect solution for mid-size manufacturing companies to communicating how your product helps companies with large data-driven accounting teams that need to prioritize efficiency and ROI.

See how that second type of messaging might better capture the attention of your ideal customer and convince them that your product is worth learning more about? This is the power of having a more comprehensive understanding of your ideal customer. It’s also the secret to getting the most out of the tactics below!

15 B2B marketing tactics to find new customers and increase sales

Now that you’ve refined your ICP and messaging, let’s dive into some specific tactics for generating leads and increasing sales from new customers.

#1 Invest in inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is one of those strategies that may take time to see results, but it’s worth it in the long run. Research shows that leads generated from inbound marketing cost 61% less on average than leads from outbound marketing.

But what exactly is inbound marketing? Good question! Inbound marketing is about creating valuable content and experiences tailored to your ideal customer. This could be anything from blog articles, downloadable guides, webinars or any helpful piece of content or tool.

By providing potential customers with value, you’ll position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. In turn, potential customers will become more likely to trust you as a solution to their problems.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

24 inbound marketing strategies you need to start using today

#2 Guest post on industry blogs

No matter your industry, there are likely websites and blogs that cater to your target audience. Guest posting, or writing a blog post for another website in exchange for a link back to your site, can introduce you to a whole new group of potential customers.

It’s important to do your research and find guest posting opportunities on reputable sites with high domain authority. Once you’ve found your target sites, ensure your pitch offers value to the site’s readers and highlights how your expertise can benefit their audience. If you’re unsure how to find guest posting opportunities, check out the helpful guide below from Backlinko!

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

Guest blogging: The definitive guide

#3 Cold outreach high-fit targets

Many sales teams still rely on cold calling and emailing to try and get new customers. But how successful is this tactic really? Depends on how you choose which account to contact.

Instead of blindly reaching out to any target, prioritize teh targets that have already shown interest in your product or service—or that are a “fit” for your product/service and show signs of high-propensity to engage. If you use Rev to find target accounts, each will have a “Rev Score”—a number from 0-5—that reflects which businesses show the most signs of being ready to buy.

Another way to warm up cold calls and emails is through referrals from your current customer base. Customer referrals not only improve your chances of success but also strengthen relationships with your existing customers.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

Why your cold outreach sucks (and what to do about it)

#4 Incentivize referrals from current customers

Speaking of referrals, remember to ask for them and, if possible, offer an incentive. This not only brings in more potential sales but also shows your existing customers how much you value their loyalty. Plus, word-of-mouth referrals tend to carry a lot of weight in the decision-making process for many buyers.

Some valuable incentives for B2B buyers include offering a discount on their next purchase or a free upgrade to their current product or service. Again, make sure to tailor your offering based on what would be most valuable to them. For example, a SaaS company might offer a complimentary month of service for every successful referral.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

The 7 best incentives for B2B referral programs

#5 Generate leads on LinkedIn

If you’re not already using LinkedIn to generate leads, you’re missing out! LinkedIn is a powerhouse for B2B lead generation and networking, especially in industries like tech, finance and consulting.

To start, ensure your company’s executives have profiles that showcase their expertise, use targeted keywords in their headlines and summaries, join relevant groups, and actively engage with others on the platform by commenting on their posts and messaging potential leads.

Posting content on LinkedIn can also be a great way to attract new customers, particularly when the content showcases expertise and thought leadership relevant to your industry. Ideally, this type of content would come from the personal profiles of executives or senior-level employees. But it can also come from your company profile as well.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

How to generate leads on LinkedIn, according to LinkedIn’s VP of Marketing

#6 Join or create Facebook groups

Depending on what you offer, Facebook groups can be a great place to network with potential customers. To find groups relevant to your business, search for industry keywords or related interests on Facebook and request to join. Once you’re a member, engage with the community by sharing valuable content, starting discussions and reaching out directly to members who could benefit from your offering.

If you find that the existing groups fail to meet your needs, consider starting your own group. This strategy would allow you to handpick members and create a space specifically for networking and finding new customers.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

10 ways a Facebook Group can increase lead generation

#7 Participate in Reddit groups

When used strategically, Reddit can be a gold mine for finding and engaging with potential customers. The Q&A platform makes it easy to find and engage with potential customers as users openly ask questions to find solutions to their problems, air their grievances about failed solutions and provide advice to fellow Redditors.

For lead generation, you can start by joining Subreddits related to your industry or offering. Then, you’ll want to become an active member of the community and build authority on the topic by providing valuable insights and solutions.

Once you’re comfortable with the platform, consider hosting an AMA (ask me anything) to introduce yourself and your business to the Subreddit members and answer any questions they may have about the problem your business solves or your offering. Doing so not only positions you as a thought leader but also allows potential customers to get to know you and your business on a more personal level.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

Complete guide to using Reddit marketing for B2B SaaS businesses

#8 Target your ideal customers with paid ads

Consumers get bombarded with a constant stream of advertising. So, sometimes, traditional paid advertising can get lost in the noise. But, done strategically and with targeting, paid advertising can be highly effective in finding new customers.

When creating your ads, focus on highlighting the specific pain points your product or service solves and how it can provide value to the consumer. One way to approach this is by basing the messaging of your targeted ads on your ideal customer profile and then targeting those specific segments. This strategy ensures that your ad is being seen by the right people, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

7 ways to build a better paid advertising strategy

#9 Improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO)

If your ideal customer can’t find your website, you could lose them as a potential new customer. And that’s because showing up on the first page of search engine results is an essential component of any lead generation or customer acquisition strategy.

According to Google, there are over 200 factors that go into SEO and how well a website ranks in search engine results. But you don’t need to address everything at once to see results. To start, make sure your website uses relevant keywords, is mobile-friendly, loads quickly and has high-quality content that appeals to your ideal customer.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

6 SEO tactics for maximum customer acquisition

#10 Incentivize new sign-ups

Consumers occasionally need a little push to try something new, especially when it comes to signing up for a new product or service. That’s why offering incentives, such as a discount or free trial, can be a great way to attract new customers. Just make sure the incentive aligns with your target audience and their needs.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

5 tried-and-true ways to drive more sign-ups to your SaaS website

#11 Win back lost customers

Sometimes customers stop using your product or service, whether it’s due to a better offer from a competitor or just simply forgetting about you altogether. Don’t give up on them though! Reach out to these lost customers with personalized messaging and offers to win them back.

For example, you might create an email campaign that offers a discount to customers who haven’t purchased from you in the past six months or offer a free trial for a new feature. You’d be surprised how many customers are willing to come back if you make an effort to reach out to them.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

Winning back lost customers: 5 tips for success

#12 Pitch your business for media coverage

Media coverage can bring in new customers and increase sales by expanding your reach and establishing credibility. So, why not pitch your business to podcasts, radio shows and other media outlets as a guest expert?

If you’re not where to start, look into HARO (Help a Reporter Out), where journalists and reporters constantly look for expert sources to include in their stories. Another option would be to start a company podcast that covers industry news and topics and invites guests to share their ideas.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

How to get media coverage for your business in 2022 (w/ expert tips)

#13 Attend and network at industry events

While it may be a high investment in terms of cost and time, the networking opportunities at industry events and conferences are unparalleled. At these events, you can connect with other professionals who may become your next clients or be able to refer business to you.

Local events can also provide valuable networking opportunities. For example, a local Meetup group that aligns with your target audience can also be an excellent opportunity to make connections that lead to more business.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

What is B2B Event marketing and why is it important?

#14 Establish cross-industry partnerships and collaborations

Sometimes, businesses in a different industry may have a similar target audience to yours. Consider how you can partner with a non-competitive, complementary business to co-market and co-sell to each other’s customer bases.

For example, if you sell HR software, consider partnering with a payroll company to host an event for HR professionals. This type of partnership allows you to reach new potential clients and adds value for existing customers.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

The ultimate guide to B2B partner marketing in 2022

#15 Set up an affiliate program

Never underestimate the power of a word-of-mouth referral. Affiliate programs incentivize others to refer your product or service, giving them a commission for every successful sale.

These programs can also be a great way to expand into new market segments and drive sales from a trusted source, as they can help you tap into networks your business may not have access to. Affiliate programs can also increase customer loyalty by incentivizing existing customers to promote your business to their network.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

How to start a B2B affiliate marketing program: 10 strategies you can’t afford to miss

5 tips to increase sales from your existing customers

It would be a mistake to only focus on acquiring new customers to increase sales. Research shows it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer. Existing customers are also 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new customers.

Here are five tactics you can use:

#1 Develop a customer loyalty program

Customer loyalty programs incentivize repeat purchases and encourage customers to spend more with your business. Loyalty programs also have the added benefit of collecting important customer data and providing valuable insights into your customers’ purchasing habits.

For example, you might learn that a particular group of customers always purchase your product during a certain time of year or after they receive a specific promotion. This type of data can help inform how you target and market to customers in the future.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

B2B loyalty programs: A comprehensive guide (2022)

#2 Offer upsells and cross-sells

Upselling is offering a higher priced or upgraded version of a product the customer is already interested in while cross-selling is offering a related product or service. Both strategies can help increase the average transaction size and boost sales from current customers.

No one likes to get bombarded with sales pitches, so make sure you’re offering these additional products or services in a natural, non-pushy way. For example, if you’re a B2B software company, you can offer training or implementation services as a cross-sell. (And if you need help identifying which customers to cross-sell to, check out this article.)

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

Cross-selling and upselling: The ultimate guide

#3 Create product bundle deals

Bundles are also an excellent option for cross-selling related products or services. For example, a data storage company could offer storage hardware, installation services and data backup plans as a bundle package.

Creating these bundles not only allows you to increase the average transaction size but also provide additional value to your customer by offering a complete solution. Without any extra effort, customers can easily purchase all the products or services they need in one go.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

Product bundling 101: Guide, strategies and examples

#4 Give personalized discounts and promotions

Personalized discounts and promotions show your customers that you value them as individual accounts and are willing to go the extra mile for their business. You can even personalize the deal using the information you learned while refining your ICP.

For example, let’s say you’re a SaaS company offering HR software solutions. You might consider offering a personalized discount to your customers with large teams that have used your product for over a year, as they could benefit greatly from upgrading to your premium package.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

The best practices for B2B promotions & discounts

#5 Keep in touch with customers

It’s important to keep in touch with your current customers, even after they’ve made a purchase. You can do this through email marketing campaigns, personalized phone calls, thank you notes and maintaining an active presence on social media.

Why do this? Because consistent communication helps maintain your relationship with existing customers and keeps your brand top of mind for future purchases or referrals. Think about it. If customers regularly see your brand in their inbox or social media feeds, they’re more likely to recommend you to a colleague when the opportunity arises.

Resource to help you learn more about this tactic:

10 B2B email marketing tips that will increase your sales in 2022

Final thoughts

Don’t make the mistake most businesses make when attempting to find new customers and increase sales! Take time to truly understand your ideal customer and how to serve them effectively before diving into marketing and sales strategies.

For the most efficient way to do this, consider using Rev’s Sales Development Platform to take advantage of AI technology that finds the exegraphics that define the behaviors of the companies most likely to be interested in buying from your business.

Want to see how it works for yourself? Contact our team, and we’ll schedule your free ICP audit.

RevOps guide to expanding into new markets and targeting new customers

Posted on December 7, 2022February 13, 2023

Expanding into new markets can be an exciting and risky decision. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity to increase revenue and expand your customer base. But, on the other hand, it’s also a huge investment of time and money that doesn’t always pay off.

So, if you’ve decided to expand into new markets, you’ll want to approach this decision with caution. And that means you need a strategy that allows you to confidently decide which markets to expand into and which businesses within that market are most likely to be a good fit.

How do you form that kind of strategy? How do you successfully identify new market segments that your business has the highest chance of converting?

The key ingredient is exegraphic data.

If you’re unfamiliar with that term, you won’t be by the time you finish reading this guide. Because we’ll be showing the benefits of exegraphic data as we share a step-by-step market expansion strategy for B2B companies.

But, first, let’s start by discussing what benefits you can expect if you successfully execute your market expansion strategy!

Why should a business expand into new markets?

Of course, one of the main reasons to expand into new markets is to increase your revenue. If you can successfully reach new customers, you’ll see a significant boost in your bottom line.

But increased revenue is only one side of the story. Here are some of the other top benefits of expanding into new markets:

Grow your customer base. If you’re selling products or services that are only targeting a specific group of people in your current market, expanding will give you access to new groups of potential customers.
Satisfy growing customer needs. Your customers’ needs are constantly changing. Expanding into a new market can help you guide customer trends rather than simply trying to follow them.
Keep up with competitors. If you don’t expand your business, you risk falling behind your competitors. If they are expanding into new markets and you’re not, they’ll have a leg up on you in terms of market share.
Gain a competitive advantage. When you enter a new market before any competitors, you can establish yourself as the go-to brand in that market before anyone else has a chance.
Diversification. If your business only serves one customer segment, you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket. But, if you expand, you’re diversifying your risk, giving your business a better chance at long-term success.
New talent. When you expand into new markets, you’ll also have the opportunity to bring in new talent. These new employees can help refresh your company and give you a new perspective on your products and services.

Market expansion strategy: How to find and target the right prospects in new markets

To successfully expand your business into new markets, you can’t just go out and start selling your product or service. You need to understand the nuances of that particular market and know how you will compete with other businesses already there. You also need to know whether a particular market is actually worth your time.

To help guide you through the process, here’s a market expansion strategy framework you can use.

Step 1: Build your ICP using reliable data

First, you need to develop an ideal customer profile (ICP) for your target market. This will help you understand who your target customers are, what they’re looking for and how to best reach them.

But here’s the thing: most ICPs are shallow. Despite it being one of the most valuable parts of your market expansion strategy, most businesses develop their ICP using firmographic characteristics that don’t tell you much.

And that’s a huge mistake!

Why? Because firmographic data isn’t reliable for such a high-risk investment as entering a new market. It only shows you things like company location, size, industry and annual revenue. And while that information can be useful, it doesn’t tell you anything about the factors influencing a company’s buying decisions.

This is where exegraphic data can give you a huge advantage as you expand into new markets.

Use exegraphics to build a reliable ICP

Exegraphics give you data on how companies operate and behave. For example, with exegraphic data, you can find out which companies are early adopters of cloud technology or which companies are in the process of expanding their data engineering teams.

How do you find exegraphic data? By scraping company information that can only be found on company websites, social media platforms and similar sources. Of course, your company can manually collect this type of data. It’s just extremely tedious and time-consuming.

With Rev’s Sales Development Platform, you can use AI technology to speed that data collection process up. And because the AI is constantly searching for new information, Rev allows you to build a living model of your ICP—what we call an aiCP—that evolves as the behavior of your ideal customer changes over time.

Having an aiCP means your market expansion strategy also evolves based on real-time data. And this is a huge advantage in the initial stages of market expansion when many companies get scared and divest too quickly.

Step 2: Understand the TAM/SAM for each potential new market

Oftentimes, companies also rely on firmographics to find the total addressable market (TAM) and the serviceable available market (SAM) in a new market segment. Typically, these companies use some database and say, “find me all of the companies in this vertical, this size, with this annual revenue…” And, then, they make a leap and decide whichever companies fit those parameters is their TAM.

But it’s not.

Just because a company falls into those basic parameters doesn’t mean they’re ready or likely to buy from you. You don’t have enough information to make that assumption. So, what can you do instead?

By using Rev, you can add some scientific rigor to finding your TAM. With exegraphics, we help you find the companies in the new market that are already exhibiting behaviors similar to the best customers you already have.

Sometimes, you might find that the TAM/SAM for a new market is too small. And that’s great! Because you can use that information to pivot before investing too many resources.

If, however, you find that a new market looks like it’s worth pursuing, you’ll have the data to continue building your market expansion strategy with confidence.

Step 3: Study the competition

Next, you should take a close look at the competition. The goal here isn’t to copy their strategies or even go after the exact same prospects. The goal is to figure out what your competitors do well, what can be improved and what you can do differently to stand out to your target audience.

As you look at the competition, consider the following:

What do your competitors offer?
What’s their share of this market?
What is the quality of their products or services?
What are their strengths and weaknesses?
How are they marketing their products or services?
Are there any gaps in their marketing?
Does their marketing strategy appeal to your ICP?
What’s their pricing structure?
Do you have the resources to compete?

Step 4: Rank each potential new market for your business

Next, you’ll use your research to prioritize which potential markets offer the most opportunity for your business. Here are some factors to consider when ranking potential new markets:

Does the market have enough potential customers?
Is the market growing or shrinking?
What’s the level of competition in the market?
What’s the overall risk level of entering the market?
What are the estimated costs of entering the market?

You can use these criteria to create a scoring system and rank potential markets from most to least attractive.

Step 5: Define new market success criteria

Before you begin any outreach, you first need to establish what success looks like in your new market. This will help you set measurable goals and objectives, and track progress over time.

Some success criteria to consider include:

Revenue goals. How much revenue do you want to generate from the new market?
Market share. What percentage of the market do you want to capture?
Customer acquisition costs. How much are you willing to spend to acquire each new customer?

Step 6: Create a target list of accounts in the top-ranked new market

Your list is your strategy. So, once you’ve identified your top new market, you want to start with a high-quality target account list. Remember: you don’t need to guess which accounts to target. Use exegraphic data to your advantage.

Rev’s AI technology uses that data to create a comprehensive list of all of the companies that show signs of being a good fit for your company’s product or service–even if those companies are outside of the industries you’d normally target.

That way, you don’t waste time and resources pursuing companies that aren’t likely to buy from you. It also means you’ll find new opportunities for deals with companies you might have otherwise never considered.

With Rev, you’d also get to see a Rev Score—i.e. how likely a company is to be a good fit—for each of the accounts on your list. This insight helps you prioritize accounts and increase your probability of early success as you begin testing the new market.

Step 7: Create a SWAT team to test initial messaging and engagement

By starting with a SWAT team, you can get a sense of whether there is genuine interest from potential customers in the new market. In other words, you can further minimize the risks associated with expanding into new markets!

Plus, you can start small. Your SWAT team only needs 2-3 employees who are company specialists in sales, marketing, product and customer success. The goals of this team will be to:

Validate the new market before investing additional resources
Develop early messaging and some marketing collateral
Test various engagement strategies
Collect data to fine-tune outreach efforts
Create a set of processes that your marketing and sales teams can eventually follow (if you decide to pursue the new market)

Step 8: Measure early results and iterate

After a few months of testing, your SWAT team should have a pretty good idea of what’s working and what’s not. At this point, you can start to think about putting more resources toward your market expansion efforts.

But before you do, analyze the data and consider the following questions:

Does the market show signs of promise?
Are companies responding to your messaging?
Are there any areas where you can improve your approach?
What is the quality of leads coming out of the market?
How many deals were you able to close?
What types of deals did you close?
Was the quality of deals in line with your expectations?

If you’re happy with the results of your market expansion efforts thus far, then it’s time to start thinking about the best fit market.

Step 9: Select the best new market fit

Now that you’ve done a bit of testing, it’s time to decide which new market is the best fit for your business. Which market showed the most promise in terms of potential customers and sales?

Start by evaluating your metrics with questions like:

Which market had the highest number of new customers or the greatest increase in sales?
Which market had the most engaged customers or the highest website traffic?
Which market feels like the best strategic fit for your business?
Which market represents the greatest opportunity for growth?

Once you’ve decided on a market, it’s time to start developing a marketing and sales plan to target the rest of the accounts on your list.

Step 10: Develop a marketing and sales plan

Now you’re ready to strategically create a marketing and sales plan that targets your ICP in a way that’s unique from your competitors. This plan should include a mix of online and offline channels. Some channels you may consider include:

Paid advertising (e.g. Google AdWords, Facebook ads)
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Content marketing (e.g. blog posts, eBooks, infographics)
Social media marketing (e.g. posts, influencer outreach, paid social media ads)
Public relations (PR)

Once you’ve identified your channels, you need to create content that resonates with your target market at every stage of the customer journey and develop a strategy for promotion and distribution.

Exegraphic data also comes in handy here. Because instead of creating a marketing plan to appeal to a static profile, you can use exegraphics to inform your strategy with insights, such as:

Whether a company’s director is an early adopter of new technology
Which departments within a company are currently shrinking or expanding
Where and how a company communicates its value to the public
How many people work on a company’s data engineering team
What are the core functions of newly-hired customer service reps

By knowing this information, you can personalize your marketing message and offer to each company, increasing your chances of success.

Final thoughts

Expanding into new markets can be a stressful endeavor if you’re relying on outdated methods for developing your ICP, target account list and outreach strategy.

But by using Rev to collect exegraphic data on your best customers and build a dynamic aICP, you can minimize the risks involved and ensure the market is worth pursuing before fully investing your resources.

Want to see how it works for yourself? Get a free ICP audit to find your next best customers—before you even enter the market!