Revenue orchestration is in response to the impending consolidation of the Ops stack. The 9,000 plus vendors in the market are either seeking an acquirer or acquiring functionality and install bases, says Christine Crandell, president at New Business Strategies, as she explores what’s next for RevOps, based on the latest discussions at OpsStars 2022.
“Demand is perishable, experience is King, and no buyer wants another vendor,†is how Evan Liang, CEO of LeanData, kicked off OpsStars Opens a new window 2022 conference.
 The conference introduced Revenue Orchestration as the connective tissue behind a company’s market momentum. Positioned as the next-gen RevOps, which Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec defines as the “umbrella ops function that connects the dots across marketing, sales, customer service, and financeâ€, Revenue Orchestration is Big Ops.
Why does this matter?
It’s not just semantics. “Revenue orchestration,†says Mike Ni, CMO of Openprise, “is an updated take on what companies have been trying to accomplish for years – an end-to-end experience for buyers and a unified funnel data view for sellers. The rise of revenue orchestration reflects the pain companies are experiencing from the increased channel, tools, and ops investments they have made in recent years that have only exposed system complexity, fragility, and lack of integration,†Ni continues.
Companies like LeanData, 6sense, Clearbit, Openprise, and Demandbase are building best-of-breed ecosystems to preserve and expand their position in the stack.
Contextual Data is Fuel for Orchestration
Data quality underpins every aspect of Revenue Orchestration, from delighting buyers to reducing sales friction and measuring ROI. Robin Spencer, COO of Clearbit, advocates that clean data drives “speed to lead.†Data shouldn’t be an afterthought but at the core of every customer acquisition and retention strategy. “Data must have a purpose; otherwise, it just results in [disconnected marketing campaigns, or in other words:] more spam,†Spencer said. Â
To achieve that, companies look beyond legacy cleanse vendors to those that enrich and help decipher signals. Spencer shared that Clearbit customers use the software to identify their ICPs and interpret whether they are ready to buy or just curious. “Data must have a purpose; otherwise, it just results in more spam,†Spencer sums up.
See More: 5 Steps To Clean Up Your Customer Data
Deliver Buyer Experiences the Way They Want Them
Arguably that is what teams have been doing, just not well. Most companies don’t know the buying teams’ journeys and contexts, nor do they have actionable data at their fingertips. Hence, many stubbornly hang on to believing they can craft journeys their buyers will follow. It doesn’t work that way.
The gap between the self-directed journey buyers go on is big compared to the one brand’s design for them. 6sense calls it the “dark funnel of invisible revenue moments.†Instead of leads, funnels, gated content, web forms, and traditional demand generation models, companies like 6sense and Clearbit focus on signals, intent data, deep account knowledge, and lots of AI for pattern detection.
They turn pipeline creation on its head in a good, innovative way. Having deep knowledge of ICP accounts, personas, and experience expectations, 6sense can respond differently to each persona and target account depending on where the company is in the buying cycle. How do they do that? Through first- and third-party data from 3.5 Billion websites and their 6QA application. Â
Each account is scored and automatically moved through journey stages when signal patterns change. With each stage change, so do language, tone, messaging, persona-based campaigns, and content. Knowing that buying teams share vendor content and communications, campaigns are persona-tailored and crossed-referenced to be unique yet complementary. The objective is to engage as many ICP accounts and personas to drive intent.Â
Accounts that meet 6QA thresholds are shared with sales – confident that each opportunity is in a real buying cycle. According to 6sense, the ROI is 4x sales opportunities and a 40 percent faster sales cycle. 6sense demonstrated what is possible today – reduced friction for customers, marketers, and sales.
Cross-functional Alignment Is a Table Stake
Sharing best practices to overcome the historical antagonism between sales and marketing was a common thread throughout the sessions. Pat Oldenburg, VP of Demand Generation for Motive, structured marketing as an overlay to the sales funnel. Lead hand-offs don’t happen; marketing has responsibilities in every sales stage. Several speakers shared that Marketing and Sales jointly conduct target account selection, and account scoring and have SLAs around time to action and time to response with automatic escalations.
See More: How to Build Marketing Teams of the Future
But the road to RevOps isn’t smooth. Erol Toker of TechCrunch and Truly.co, said RevOps is more than implementing technology. Company culture also needs to change. His advice is to “not focus on making sales teams happy, rather focus on the customer journey and experience†and “customer knowledge is the price of admission.â€
Toker champions the CEO owning RevOps, while Dana Therrian, CMO of Anaplan, believes it should be the COO. Dynasties are being torn down and replaced with a ‘one common truth’ data source owned by a neutral party that also owns metrics reporting.Â
The resulting transparency and visibility forces sales and marketing to build new capabilities to understand and operationalize demand signals. Revenue Orchestration is the technology that executes intelligent buyer engagement based on buying stage and experience expectations.
What wasn’t covered in-depth was Big Ops’s impact on talent. Niels Fogt, Senior Director of Growth Marketing at Tray.io, believes ops functions need an evolution. “If the goal is to deliver highly personalized experiences that delight, ops teams need to shift from risk mitigation to continuous experimentation and innovation across multiple touchpoints and organizational functions. It’s up to an organization’s leaders to make sure their ops teams are properly trained and staffed with technologists who can plan and manage these sophisticated journeys at the speed their organization is demanding. That almost certainly requires more people on your ops teams who have mastery connecting the rev stack versus deep expertise with a given monolithic platform like CRM or MAP.â€
OpsStars 2022 demonstrated the art of optimizing possibilities with revenue orchestration: cross-functionally aligning people, processes, and data to each target account’s journey and contextually enabling buying teams to achieve their objective – even if it’s not a sale today.
How do you see orchestration enabling success for the ops stack? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’d love to know!
Image Source: Shutterstock
MORE ON REVENUE ORCHESTRATION
- How to Drive More Revenue in the Fertile Middle Ground Between Lead-Based and Account-Based Marketing
- 3 Ways Buying Group Marketing Helps Revenue Growth
- Align Your Marketing and Sales Team Better With Revenue Marketing
- 3 Ways AI Will Change Revenue Technology
About Expert Contributors: The Expert Contributor program is designed to help kickstart meaningful conversations around the priorities and challenges most critical to C-level executives. The insights and perspectives will help CIOs tackle what’s most important to them. We are always looking for industry thinkers who can help set the narrative for our enterprise audience. To know more about this program, and submit your ideas, reach out to the Spiceworks News & Insights Editorial team at [email protected].