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Customer experience has become one of the top priorities for organizations, especially as an increasing amount of business moves online. The consumers of today shop with one foot in-store and one foot online, but they expect the same experience across both. It’s a tall order but not an impossible one. However, creating a seamless, frictionless journey for your customers won’t be possible if your organization doesn’t have seamless, frictionless teams.
Adopting an internal Revenue Operations model (RevOps) helps unite your customer-facing teams, so they can focus on providing a singular, cohesive experience to consumers, no matter where or how they buy. The tenants of RevOps are simple: Unite all these teams under the shared goal of revenue through a combination of tools and processes that enable them to work together more effectively. These tools then bleed into improving aspects of the buyer experience.
Related: Customer Experience Will Determine the Success of Your Company
1. Shared data improves personalization and consistency
Employees need to work from the same data to reduce miscommunication and confusion. In a traditional business model, customer data is siloed across different departments. This means that no one can access a complete picture of a customer’s journey and only works with pieces. From a customer’s perspective, this can lead to repetitive or irrelevant interactions that don’t match up with what’s already happened in their buying journey, causing frustration.
RevOps addresses this issue by condensing all customer information into a shared, accessible source that updates in real-time. A team member can look up a customer and see every interaction they’ve had with the company, whether it’s email messaging from marketing, a demo call with sales or an onboarding question with customer success. It’s all there in one place. Not only does this united data reduce repetitive or nontargeted interactions, but it also provides insight into actions moving forward. It ensures the customer receives an experience that makes them feel more seen and heard.
2. Improved internal communications remove friction within the customer journey
Customers being labeled as leads too early or opportunities allowed to go cold are frequent complaints in the discourse between marketing and sales. While there is no way to accurately predict which customers will purchase and which won’t, a lot of the infighting results from different perspectives and approaches to the customer. How marketing qualifies a lead could be different than how sales defines them and vice versa.
With a RevOps model, teams have increased communication and work under clearly-defined processes. Implementing a RevOps model requires sales and marketing teams to sit down together, share unique perspectives and expertise and map the entire customer journey to agreed-upon terms. The result is that both groups are armed with the same metrics to qualify customers in different parts of the buyer journey, clear next steps on how to proceed and tools that prevent prospects from going cold.
Related: Aggregate Data to Grasp the Whole Customer Journey
3. Tools support collaboration and communication across the customer journey
United teams require connected tools to keep everyone in sync, which is where the tech stack comes in. One of the tenants of a RevOps model is to create a centralized source of data, also known as “a single source of truth.” This is the heart of the RevOps tech stack. By layering tools like data enrichment and business intelligence on top, businesses can maximize the value of their data to create deeper customer profiles, discover new revenue opportunities and derive further actionable insights.
Customer-facing teams must also evaluate their tech stacks with a RevOps lens, ensuring that all existing solutions support the tenants of connection, communication and collaboration. Integrations are a must; all tools must be able to connect with and pull data from the centralized data source. This requires implementing a common data model so all data can be read and utilized by all other solutions. Marketing and sales automation solutions that run on this shared data equip teams to structure their communications around the revamped customer journey, ensuring consistent communications with customers while enabling businesses to scale.
Related: Customer Experience: Making it a Priority for Revenue Growth
While what your customers see and hear during their buying journey is incredibly important, so are the operations behind the curtain that support that experience. If your teams can’t work together as customers move through the sales pipeline, your customer will notice apparent bumps in the road. In addition to investing in the front-end operations and tools of your experience, you must also make the necessary internal investments. Switching to a revenue operations model ensures your teams work as a united front and empowers them with the leadership, processes and tools to do so.