RevOps is gaining a lot of traction lately and for good reason - we're unifying your internal operations and strategies to drive efficient and predictable business growth. This is especially important for Go-to-Market (GTM) teams who are executing the timely strategy crucial to establishing a foothold and scaling.
However, most companies struggle to dial up their GTM strategies that support RevOps, which in turn should support a powerful, internal Revenue Engine (RevEngine). At AK Ops, we define a RevEngine as the overall program of marketing and sales automation, campaigns, and insights that dictate how you deploy sales efforts to support the RevOps role of the organization.
That’s why I’m sharing the 3 components to an efficient outbound sales motion that actually works. Everyone wants the third component, while everyone talks about the second pillar—yet everyone skips the first! This is why AK Ops will always exist 😄
1: The Foundation
The foundational elements of every successful RevOps and GTM strategy are the least sexy and most commonly overlooked requirements. In our opinion, there are 4 non-negotiables to the foundation of your strategy.
Foundational requirements for a RevEngine.
Domain Health
A healthy domain is crucial to maximizing your email campaign results. With an unhealthy domain, your results will diminish over time, deliverability will be poor, and your email rates will suffer. Or worse, you won't hit inboxes at all and you'll see your own inboxes shut down and domains blacklisted. I have seen so many companies scrap content and positioning because of poor performance when in fact the fall has nothing to do with the copy or campaign at all. We take this part very seriously with a slew of tools to help us maintain strong health and performance. At AK Ops, our comprehensive Domain Health program covers:
- Inbox placement: Are we hitting the actual inbox, not spam or promo tab or worse, undeliverable?
- Sender reputation: Are the email behaviors of your sales reps so reckless they’ve tarnished their sender reputations? Are they deploying meaningful, personalized emails that respect the inboxes of your targets? Are the responses positive even when they’re uninterested?
- Domain reputation: Are we spraying and praying aggressively with poor email metrics? Have the volume patterns been erratic or have we regulated the weight of our outbound emails across multiple senders across multiple days without any risk of inboxes disconnecting?
- Inbox warm-ups: Have we slowly ramped up a new sender or a whole new domain? Do we take our time and launch engagers first and inflate the early performance with nurture touches to friendlies like customers? These strategies upfront make a BIG difference in the long-term success of prospecting.
Targeting
Every growth-stage company should have a solid understanding of their targeting, or total addressable market (TAM), which includes all personas from the industries served. Even better, they know their sales addressable market (SAM) - this is the “center of the fairway" of your TAM aka the best personas and industries served. At AK Ops, our Targeting approach includes:
- Validating Database: Does your CRM contain true, deliverable email addresses?
- Ideal Customer Profile Insights: Do you have reports that support who to target and why?
- Testing New Personas or Industries: Once we nail the conversions of our SAM, we can strategically deviate 10% of efforts into untapped territory to find new success paths.
- Segmentation Management: Can you slice your data in the database not only by targets but also by campaign eligibility? Every validated contact that matches your ICP should be in an active campaign or in a resting phase before starting the next one.
Inbox Management
Inbox Management is an often overlooked area… “Don’t you just book the meetings and delete the rest?” 🙄
However, maintaining an organized inbox is essential to running the powerful automation behind inboxes supporting outbound efforts. We leverage the power of HubSpot’s email plugin and our Inbox Standard Operating Procedures for maximum efficiency. Our SOP for Sales Development Inboxes includes:
- Booking Inbox Meetings: The most fun part!
- Interactive Replies: The pretty fun part!
- Nurture for Later Follow Ups: The kinda fun part!
- Dispositioning Bad Data (every single one): The absolutely not-fun part.
When reps neglect dispositioning the data, we see inboxes shut down in days and domains crash after a week. Yes, it is a tedious daily task, but the return is MASSIVE. This is why we (AK Ops) have brought this service in-house for our clients - to ensure it’s done and to protect the results of our partnerships!
Go-to-Market Daily (yes, daily) Management
The last component is the daily health monitoring of operational functions, campaigns performance, and funnel conversions. There should be a sole owner of all action items who is responsible for reading the data, executing pivots, and providing recommendations for weekly strategy meetings. Think of this person as the pilot operating the control panel of your HubSpot - if things are slipping, they’ll know the same day. If a campaign is converting 2x our typical campaigns, they’ll know. If we need to realign expectations with the sales reps, this person will see it in the data. We live and die by a dashboard that bubbles up the pulse of the RevEngine as a single source for the daily operators.
2: The Campaigns
Once you’ve covered the first pillar and its four components, it’s time to move onto your campaigns. These are the four essential campaigns that every healthy RevOps program needs.
The campaigns leveraged to generate and nurture the pipeline.
Demand Generation
The goal of demand generation campaigns should be to serve your prospects. We believe in the fundamental principle of serving, then selling. Nurture contacts with consultative content through marketing campaigns from marketing senders.
Lead Generation
After you’ve served your prospects, it’s time to sell to them. Lead generation should involve an ongoing deployment of methodical sales sequences from sales senders based on segmented targeting or marketing engagement asking for interest or a meeting. This requires daily monitoring and execution of GTM sales development pivots such as target personas, sales copy, cadence of touches, and more.
Whether you use HubSpot, Outreach or Salesloft, the timeliness of the sales touches is just as important as what your email says. Be intentional - and always provide value in your plain text emails.
Pipeline Nurture
The goal of pipeline nurture is to ensure coverage and conversion. You should intentionally build your pipeline to nurture opportunities from the reps like Closed Lost Retries, No Shows, Zombie Deal Wake-ups, Nurture for Laters, and Competitor Contract campaigns. Ensure nothing falls through the cracks and that all communication is relevant and timely.
These campaigns are nice to introduce a sales leader or a member of your CS team. This helps shake things up, build the importance they are to you, and encourage deeper collaboration to keep things moving or back on track!
Rep Enablement
Rep enablement should focus on optimizing your sales team. While your lead gen program targets the majority of your targets, prioritize your reps' time for hunting Tier 1 target accounts. These accounts require good stewardship with extensive personal touches. Engagement notifications from the demand gen campaigns will enable reps to stay relevant while they're penetrating larger opportunities.
Enabled reps are 10Xs happier than unsupported sales orgs. This isn’t proven data, just my personal experience supporting hundreds of sales reps in the last decade. Prioritizing rep enablement is a no brainer when you combine that (very) important ”happiness” observation with the 4x productivity and efficiencies with sales enablement fact. 🤯
3: The Outcome
A RevEngine that Supports RevOps
Everyone needs RevOps, sure, but the best organizations have a RevEngine that operates to deliver insights and produce pipeline that then support the company’s RevOps.
The functioning engine supports & aligns to the RevOps of the sales org.
RevEngine
This includes the automation, continuous campaigns, and actionable insights that support the company's sales and marketing goals. The math and data collected here directs the strategy and how the Go-to-Market team operates the demand and lead gen campaigns.
For our clients, this is the tangible goal of our partnership while we serve as the daily operator. Ultimately a strong sales-oriented, operationally-minded teammate will inherit the daily management of this internally-built program that will run within your tech stack forever.
RevOps
This includes the reporting, funnel management, and strategic direction of the company. RevOps is the source of truth for company health and where reporting, process, and leadership alignment collide, painting a full picture of strategies deployed based on funnel trends from all channels against revenue impact. This insight allows companies to strategically focus their sales efforts on what matters most.
Build an Internal RevEngine
Access the full scope infographic here.
Most partners don’t approach Rev Ops as thoroughly as my team does. For each and every of our clients, our goal is to build an internal RevEngine that will scale and grow with them forever and ever. But don't take our word for it!
- "AK Operations is a game-changing revenue operations company that consistently delivers on their data-driven promises. We work directly with Anna and her exceptional work ethic and expertise have led to outstanding results for our company. Looking back, our only regret is not discovering AK Operations sooner!” - Greg Waldstreicher, Founder & CEO of Botable
- “Over the last 7 weeks, the team at AK Operations has come onboard and I am thoroughly impressed. Tina was able to quickly ramp up and start delivering well-thought-out and strong content that creates demand for our reps. Shelby is a dynamo. She has been able to develop and implement a thoughtful and deliberate process which started yielding immediate results. She is constantly iterating with a focus on KPIs which, as a CRO, makes me feel like we are speaking the same language. Amy's vision and direction made me feel immediately comfortable as within minutes of meeting her, you know that she will both direct traffic and get in the trenches in order to hit OUR targets. In short, AK Operations does not feel like a vendor but an extension of BuildingLink.” -Brian Bressack, CRO of BuildingLink