AMA: HubSpot Vice President of Revenue Operations, Sowmya Srinivasan on Customer Success / Revenue Ops Alignment

Ouch! Well, I am so glad to be responding to this question. First, let me start by saying Revenue operations (RevOps) is so much more than just reporting and dashboards. RevOps is a strategic function with a clear focus on optimizing revenue growth across the entire customer lifecycle. Think of this as aligning people, processes, and data from sales, marketing, and customer success teams to create a seamless experience for customers and drive efficient revenue generation for your organization. Customer success teams directly benefit from RevOps in several ways, below are 3 foundational things : * Analytics -> Insights & Insights -> Actions: Revops equips customer success teams with key insights about customer behavior, product usage, and revenue trends. This could be identifying at-risk accounts or opportunities for expansions , prioritizing interventions, and tailoring strategies to improve customer satisfaction and retention * Improved Efficiency: By aligning processes and systems across teams, RevOps eliminates silos and reduces friction in the customer journey. This leads to faster resolution of customer issues, more personalized interactions, and a smoother overall experience. * Strategic Alignment: RevOps fosters collaboration between customer success and other revenue-generating teams. This ensures that everyone is working towards the same goals, with a shared understanding of the customer and a unified approach to driving revenue.

While new business is absolutely essential for growth , an overemphasis on net new leads to missed opportunities with your biggest asset - existing customer base! Retention-led growth is a powerful strategy that can help companies achieve sustainable revenue growth, lower acquisition costs, and build stronger customer relationships. By balancing the focus between acquiring new customers and retaining/expanding existing ones, companies can create a more customer-centric and profitable business model. Shifting the focus 1to boost customer experience can transform CS into a growth engine - * Reduce churn and protect revenue * Increase customer LTV and drive advocacy- Happy customers buy more! It really is that simple. Understand the customer needs, deliver value and accelerate outcomes. * Improve profitability and operating margins - realize cost-effective frowth: Retaining customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, leading to a more efficient and profitable growth engine How can revenue operations help? * Deliver Insights: RevOps can analyze customer data to identify churn risks, areas for improvement in the customer journey with your organization, and uncover opportunities for expansion. Right engagements at the right time with the right customer. * Optimize processes and improve efficiency: Operations teams can streamline procceses, design playbook and deliver efficiency with system, AI and automation to boost experience. * X-functional interlocks & handoffs/touchpoints: Revops can help deliver a cohesive CX across the flywheel ensuring smooth seamless interlocks between sales, marketing and CS and ensuring everyone has an unified view of the customer yet pertinent to their roles to have the right engagements. Personalization is key! Simply put, investing in customer success and prioritizing retention can lead to significant revenue growth and improved profitability. By focusing on your existing customers, you can build a loyal customer base that will drive your business forward for years to come.

No singe department owns customer data. The GTM Data or the CDO office (depending on your org design) is responsible for data integrity and accuracy. A clear data governance policy and a unified view of the customer is an absolute must. It is important that all teams such as sales, customer success, marketing, support etc have a unified view of the customer (Customer 360) but the data needs and associated actions are different and this is where revenue operations teams play a critical role! Some key needs and actions based on persona - * Customer Success: understand customer behavior, identify pain points, and personalize interactions to improve customer satisfaction and retention and in some cases identify expansion opportunities. * Sales: Relies on customer data to identify potential leads, personalize outreach, and tailor sales strategies to maximize share of wallet. * Marketing: Leverages customer data to segment audiences, personalize campaigns, and measure the ROI. * Product: identify product gaps, prioritize feature development, and improve user experience. In the AI era, data is everything! Revenue operations team leverages customer data to analyze trends, identify patterns, forecast revenue, measure the effectiveness of campaigns/plays, and optimize processes across the customer lifecycle. So basically responsible bring it all together to deliver growth for the orgnanization!

Well, a CS Operation role isn't a necessity but it can be a valuable asset and a key differentiator to deliver superior experience, improve operational efficiency, and most importantly, drive scaleable revenue growth. If experience, efficiency and or/growth is a challenge is your organization - this is your indicator to incubate a it's CS Ops team or create a operations role! Some key considerations that will go into the different pods such as strategic planning, revenue planning, forecasting, AI and automation, business insights etc depends on size of your business, complexity of your post-sales teams and your growth aspirations. A strong revenue operations/CS Strategy & Operations team will help with the following - * Streamline processes, optimize resources, and ensure a consistent customer experience at scale. * Deliver operational excellence by developing programs, repeatable processes and identifying the right KPIs to measure progress and outcomes * Help the business make informed decisions and execute on strategy with the right level of data, analytics and insights. * Deliver predictive adoption and predictable retention by optimizing customer journey and tailoring strategies for right engagements at the right time. Reporting structure Reporting structure of CS Ops varies from company to company. In an organization where you have a revenue operations team, CS is a key part to ensure the right level of interlock across the flywheel (i.e sales & marketing).Being part of revops helps with broader alignment around company revenue goals. The other popular structure is for CS Operations team to report into the Post sales leader (CCO Office) or the customer success leader. This helps with business expertise and tighter alignment around execution. You can't go wrong either way. The one that fosters the most effective collaboration delivering to the needs and priorities of the organization is the most optimal.

When I think of CS Leader and the revops leader, to foster a strong partnership they need to be, and operate as two peas in a pod. This means - 1. Shared goals: The CS leader and RevOps organization should be completely aligned on their ultimate goal, which is to drive revenue growth by delivering an exceptional customer experience. This makes the CS organization purpose driven. 2. Clear communication & Transparency: Foster open communication channels between the two teams. Having regular meetings, run joint planning sessions, and encourage information sharing. Transparency about data, insights, and decision-making processes will build trust and boost alignment. 3. Clear R&R: RevOps and CS have distinct responsibilities The R&R clarity is very important for a great partnership. RevOps, as a strategic partner, is responsible for analyzing data, optimizing processes, and ensuring everything runs smoothly behind the scenes. Customer success owns the customer relationships and is responsible for creating value for the customer and steering them towards success. 4. Collaboration, not competition: RevOps is a partner and enabler of customer success. Their job is to work with customer success to deliver against the organization vision with the right KPIs , programs and clearly measuring outcomes. 5. Celebrate Success - Stronger together: RevOps and CS should celebrate joint successes. Whether it's hitting a revenue target or improving customer satisfaction, acknowledging and rewarding these achievements reinforces the value of their partnership. If I have to use an analogy, revOps is like the pit crew in a car race. They work behind the scenes, analyzing data, delivering insights, designing processes and making sure everything runs smoothly. Customer success is like the driver, focused on winning the race (keeping customers happy and bringing in revenue). When the pit crew and driver work together seamlessly, they have the best chance of winning! Lets do this!