Introducing The Revenue Ops Vendor Landscape

0
417

Share on LinkedIn

Revenue Ops builds a foundation for go-to-market to unleash the full potential of their key activities. This hyper cross-functional model also cements ops teams as key revenue drivers & stakeholders. In this previous post, I go into detail about the “The Rise of Revenue Ops” and how businesses can leverage the Revenue Ops framework to drive scalable growth.

However, leveraging a definitive framework isn’t enough. As organizations have learned throughout the past decade, the technology surrounding key go-to-market (GTM) teams is instrumental in establishing success (or lack thereof).

Revenue Operations are strategic and marketers need to engage with that mindset. Evaluate marketing technology through a strategic lens, not tactical. That means only using tools that align with the overall business strategy and goals.

Brian Hansford, VP, Client Services and Marketing Technology Practice, Heinz Marketing

The Revenue Ops Vendor Landscape

Given the vast nature of most technology segments, businesses increasingly turn to a landscape that can communicate the breadth of solutions available, and more importantly, help them navigate it. We’ve seen this time and time again with LUMAscapes, analyst marketplaces like SiriusDecisions, and arguably the most commonly referred to ‘supergraphic’ by Chiefmartec.

Ops is no different. Technology plays a huge role in how business is conducted today and operations are the gatekeepers for go-to-market technologies. But given the broad nature of both marketing and sales functions, it’s important for ops to have an intimate understanding of what technologies and service providers are available in the market, how they can help support revenue initiatives, and what these solutions are capable of.

To help in this endeavor and to narrow the list of tools available to them, we created this Revenue Ops Landscape. Given the comprehensiveness of other landscapes (some that were mentioned earlier), only a sampling of the key players are included in this landscape and sorted based on the pillars in the Revenue Ops framework.

Note: Many companies listed in this landscape offer a wide range of solutions and services. However, to help communicate how each technology can help ops teams, we categorized them based on how they best serve the Revenue Ops model.

Revenue Ops Vendor Landscape

Build the right tech stack, not the biggest

Most organizations have an existing tech stack, often times comprised of multiple technologies that are deeply embedded, or wildly disjointed, into workflows. According to a 2016 report by Ascend2, a staggering 60% of marketing technology systems remain only marginally integrated or not integrated at all.

Ascend2-Tech-Stack-Not-Integrated

But given the integrated nature of technology in businesses, ops teams need to be highly selective about any new software or solutions – often times this can make or break most GTM teams. This means evaluating technology based on how well it fits in with existing workflows, how it integrates into the current stack, and how to deploy it across key stakeholders.

Note: Ops teams need to give priority to core go-to-market technologies like CRM, marketing automation, and customer databases which directly factor into revenue generating efforts.

As you think about implementing new solutions into your own tech stack and begin evaluating them, here are 4 criteria to keep in mind from our friends at Heinz Marketing:

  1. Strategic Impact: How will a new tool improve overall marketing & sales operations? Is the technology a must-have, or nice-to-have? What is the operational plan to go-live?
  2. Integration: Don’t invest in tools that only operate in silos.
  3. Data Management: Integrated tools must support the overall data flow across departments. Analytics and performance measurement is nearly impossible without strong data management.
  4. People: Who will use and manage new tools? How will they learn the new tool?

Revenue Ops offers leading businesses an opportunity to reinvent the way they think about underlying functions which ultimately drive their go-to-market engine. Technology is one of the cornerstones of the operations role and plays a key role in this endeavor.

Focus on the overall strategy & objectives, adopt a holistic approach, and ensure that your GTM engine benefits from each new solution. At the end of the day, your tech stack should help drive customer engagement and revenue generation efforts – not hinder it.

To learn more about Revenue Ops, download our eBook The Rise of Revenue Ops: Why Marketing & Sales Operations Make Growth Possible

Republished with author's permission from original post.

John Hurley
Modern marketing leader defining a new category of enterprise technology. Startup mentor, former founder, and life-long marketer. Joined Radius founding team 6+ years ago.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here