2023 RevOps Trends Shaping Sales Success

“Increasing productivity will be priority one for sales leaders in 2023. Again, doing more with less.”

Revenue Operations have been abuzz the past few years, so it’s not a new concept for organizations. But I do feel that the promise and opportunity of RevOps have changed. 

RevOps has been used synonymously with Sales Operations, seen as the “tech guys,” and hasn’t had a strategic seat at the table.

But the impact that real, successful revenue operations will have on businesses in 2023 is so much more than how we’ve previously categorized and utilized RevOps.

So my 2023 trends and predictions are slightly different from what I’ve done in the past. 

This year, I’m focusing in on the group and strategy that will have the most impact on sales in 2023; where they will drive success, and where they will get stuck in the same problems as last year.

• • Driving Success
    • Productivity – more with less is the name of the game in 2023.
    • Actionable Insights – we have enough data. We need to know what to do with it.
    • Churn – it’s been all about new business recently, and we’ve been sleeping on churn reduction.
  • Fail Points
    • Order takers versus strategic advisors – this creates Frankenstein operations.
    • Implementation versus adoption – implementing the shiny new toy with no plan for rollout is a waste of money and productivity.

Recap: 2023 Predictions: The Success & Failure of RevOps

The important bits

• • 0:37 – Three predictions from 2022. I’m usually a couple of years early on these, but I think I was pretty close for 2022.
  • 3:39 – The number one area RevOps will have to succeed in 2023 is productivity. More and more teams will be asked to grow revenue without growing headcount. The only way to do that is to increase your team’s productivity. 
  • 4:04 – Productivity does not mean more activities. It means offloading repetitive tasks, removing manual tasks, and being smarter.
  • 6:40 – Number two is actionable insights from data. We don’t need more data. Better to track less and provide more insights into what you do track.
  • 8:56 – You’re in trouble if your RevOps cannot provide actionable insights. You’ll be one of those organizations still tracking the average sales cycle. (Instead of average age by stage by rep.)
  • 10:23 – Number three is churn. We are sleeping on churn reduction and net growth from current customers.
  • 12:22 – Right now, every organization is running operations in a siloed fashion. 
  • 13:30 – The technology you’ve already invested in can probably get you 10-20% more sales if you start automating behind-the-scenes tasks and do a better job of providing data and insights into what’s working and not working.
  • 14:00 – RevOps is really leadership. It’s revenue leadership, strategy, operations, and enablement. It’s all of these things.
  • 15:20 – Number one way RevOps will fail in the next year if we keep treating Operations as order takers.
  • 17:35 – The second way teams will fail in 2023 is the over implementation of shiny new toys.
  • 18:52 – Sales tech companies like to tell us it’s so easy to get started. It only takes 10 minutes to hook into SFDC or Hubspot. And then we don’t give implementation and rollout the attention it needs.
  • 20:55 – A sales/revenue organization’s goal is to create power users, not sign contracts.

Three Areas for Success

2023 RevOps trends will improve three areas of your organization that will directly correlate to revenue. If you think the only way to increase revenue is to increase headcount, you will be in trouble. 

Productivity

The number one area RevOps will have to be successful in 2023 is increasing productivity. 

More and more teams will be asked to increase revenue without increasing headcount. The only way to do that is to increase your team’s productivity. 

Doing more with less, however, does not mean more activities. Productivity does not mean the only way to be successful is to do 800 activities and put that on the same amount of people you had in 2022. Productivity means being smarter with our activities in the same amount of time, eliminating as many manual tasks as possible, and offloading repetitive tasks. 

One of my 2022 predictions was getting 20-30% more out of technology, and this is definitely an area we need to work on in 2023.

Related Content: Top 2 Ways to Increase Revenue Without Increasing Headcount in 2023

Actionable Insights

The second area is actionable insights from data. We don’t need more data. You have all the data, although it may not be structured the way you want. But the real question is why you want to track it, and what will you do about it? 

For many organizations, it would be better to track fewer data points (in terms of your reporting) and provide more insights into what you do want to track.

We’re putting so much data and information in front of people, and we’re not actually giving them insights into what to do with it. Instead of just throwing it over the fence, RevOps will need to provide the data, compare it to what peers are doing or seeing, and then recommend what our org should do.

If your RevOps org can’t provide actionable insights, you will be one of those organizations still measuring old metrics with little value.

For example: average sales cycle. In reality, this is one of the most worthless sales metrics because if you drill down into average sales cycle by stage of opportunity, region, team, or individual, it’s literally all over the place. Instead, an actionable insight would be something like Rep X struggles with the demo phase and Rep Y struggles with the pilot phase. Now average age by stage by rep is an actionable, coachable insight.

Churn

The third area is churn. We’ve been sleeping on churn reduction and net growth in current customers in recent years and just focusing on new, new, new. 

RevOps will be a true strategic partner in an organization by looking at the revenue organization holistically instead of siloing Marketing, Sales, and CS operations. It should be all under one system, or fixing churn will be nearly impossible.

For example, if you want to determine the top reason customers churn in their first year, you may identify that it correlates to usage or lack of adoption in their first three months. Then you dig into why this lack of adoption occurs, and it turns out that there is another correlation between discounting at the end of the month and these are the customers that buy and don’t adopt. This means you have a sales discounting problem versus a CS problem. 

You could back this up even further by looking at sales churn. Why is there a considerable chunk of people dropping out middle-stage funnel? Then you find that these people booked a meeting but only ever attended one webinar. So maybe they booked a meeting out of curiosity but their not looking for a solution. So maybe webinars shouldn’t be marketing qualified leads anymore.

Hopefully, you’re getting the point that churn cannot be fixed by just looking at one area of the revenue org. It could be something downstream. 

In tomorrow’s world, we have to look at the entire revenue cycle.

Two Areas for Failure

Two fail points to watch out for in 2023 will prevent RevOps from doing the three things above.

Order Takers

So many companies are doing this, and we have to get out of the mindset of Revenue Operations as order takers. RevOps leaders are hired to diagnose and solve major organizational problems, but in reality, they become glorified project managers. 

They get hit by all sides – Marketing, Sales, and CS making requests – and RevOps isn’t given the authority to take a step back and create a strategic roadmap. They need to be able to go to these teams, intake priorities, and then decide what needs to be done and when.

Otherwise, teams waste so much time building what I like to call Frankenstein operations. It’s a little bit of this, a little bit of this, some quick wins, and it’s all slapped together. 

So, take a step back in 2023, go to your RevOps person, and say, hey, it’s your job to provide insights across the organization. Help us with a strategic roadmap for how we’re going to scale and ensure that we’re not building a Frankenstein but something cohesive.

Implementations

I’m really nervous about this one because it’s been going on for a while. The second area that will prevent RevOps and your organization from hitting targets is the over implementation of shiny new toys (aka sales and marketing tech). 

Sales tech companies like to tell us it’s so easy to get started. It only takes 10 minutes to hook into your Salesforce or Hubspot. Cool. It doesn’t mean your teams are going to use it.

Something I see quite a bit is organizations invest in technology and then expect the tech to just work. We overfocus on technical implementation and then forget about what real adoption takes. 

Implementation can be done in a snap, depending on the size of your organization, but adoption and power usage, that takes months.

Productivity was my number one 2023 RevOps trend and priority. If you want to see productivity gains from technology, you should focus on adoption first instead of implementing multiple tools and hoping the technology itself will fix the problem. Your reps can only handle so much change, and RevOps can’t stay on top of adoption metrics if they’re tasked with too many implementations.

Recap of 2023 RevOps Trends

Priority one is productivity.

You already have the tools. You’re just only using maybe 20% of the possibilities. Find what you can automate, what you can take off your reps’ plates, and the behind-the-scenes stuff that a human doesn’t need to be doing. How can you do more with less?

Priority two is actionable insights.

There is a theme here. You already have the data. You just need to know what to do with it. Most companies are tracking too many KPIs instead of providing insights into two or three that really matter.

Priority three is decreasing churn.

Think about every aspect of your organization and the impact on churn. Everything from the first conversation through churn.

Fail point one is blind order taking.

If your operations org is an order-taker organization, they don’t have a strategic roadmap that spans groups, business needs, and is focused in one direction. You’re not going to see the maximum output.

Fail point two is over-focus on implementations.

The tech isn’t going to work itself. Always implementing the next new thing and not focusing on adopting what’s already in your stack will not improve productivity. You’ll most likely drop the technology and go through the same vicious cycle.

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