Revenue generation doesn't begin or end with the sales team. Syte's Head of Revenue Operations, Leore Spira, explains why revenue operations and enablement are key to growth.

Q. What leadership traits would you say are crucial for driving revenue enablement - particularly in today’s uncertain environment?

A. We need to consider our go-to-market strategy and understand how we can improve our services and become more efficient.

I think it's crucial to have a holistic process in place and have transparency and accurate data to understand the company's revenue growth and understand if you are building an efficient, scalable and productive revenue machine.

Think of Revenue Operations as a hybrid of sales, marketing, and online customer service. Combining all aspects of your marketing and sales team is now necessary to succeed as a SaaS company. Are your teams managing their processes and their day-to-day tasks as they should? Are they providing the data to improve processes and better understand their customer? We need to make sure that every stakeholder is responsible for the information required to move forward to the next milestone.

Q. How do you ensure consistent team performance that ensures success amongst those key teams that are involved in driving revenue: sales, leadership, marketing, customer success, and enablement?

A. Communication is the key to optimize performance, align talented individuals and provide data-driven strategies to succeed. RevOps must communicate daily or weekly with the revenue teams to understand their needs and their pain points. At this point, a RevOps manager will become the catalyst to your success.

Also, you must make sure you're using the right technology and build an optimized CRM platform to capture all the data, analyze it and move tasks forward from one department to the other. Each delegated stakeholder must manage the customer journey milestones in the 360 customer overview to build in the CRM.

To do that, RevOps needs to address this communication and ensure every department communicates effectively and provides the necessary data to succeed. Because each department’s success is a company success, right?

Q. Can you share an example(s) of when and how you’ve adapted (for example, your value proposition) or pivoted over the past year at Syte to ensure continued revenue growth?

A. Every time I’m establishing a department, what I do first is listen. I have a conversion with each team or stakeholder to learn the existing processes to build the sales process and the right customer journey process within the CRM.

I don't think management or leadership understand how essential and crucial the RevOps function is to a company. They usually hire us after the company is already well-established, and they don't understand if they’re doing things right. So my value proposition is that once a RevOps function is established at a company - or even a sales ops function - we can start moving forward and build a successful revenue machine - and see growth.

Previously, when I joined a company where the sales teams and process and are well established, I first understood the process and strategy foundations. I rebuild them, modify or improve them before moving forward. I don't believe in creating many fields; I believe in logic, methodology, and best practice. But, I do think outside the box and try to be creative and innovative. I don't believe in saying yes to every request. But I do listen; I do say no.

I believe that if you build the right foundations, you can create a mansion. But if you don't, then everything will fall apart. Thus, to better understand why we’re losing deals, it will be useful to build an optimized CRM platform to analyze the data to avoid losing business opportunities in the future. RevOps can help the revenue team lead the company with scalable results, grow and win profitable deals.

Q. How have SaaS businesses fared in comparison to other industries since the pandemic hit?

A. It depends on the vertical and their product. I think RevOps and sales ops functions have survived the pandemic well. Companies understand that they can succeed with selling their product or create marketing campaigns to raise awareness for their solution.

Eventually, they need insights and analysis about the team's efficiency and productivity and their success. And this is somewhere RevOps, and sales ops have expertise. I think the pandemic emphasized how RevOps sees the process at a high level and can improve SaaS businesses to scale even at uncertain times or in a massive health crisis.

Q. How is the role of revenue enablement different from traditional sales leadership?

A. I think what has happened in recent years is that sales organizations have transformed into revenue organizations.

When we look at the customer journey, we can see that sales are not the only team or department responsible for revenue.

We also have marketing accountable for generating qualified leads that will later convert to real business opportunities. We have customer success and support for maintaining relationships, ensuring customers are satisfied with the product, and encouraging renewals and upsells.

It's not just sales - it's the whole revenue organization. This is how a customer journey is built: from the top of the funnel to the bottom. To keep the cycle rolling and renew, we have to ensure that the prospect or the customer is being treated most efficiently and productively in every step.

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