For many years, marketing, sales, and customer success departments operated as separate teams, sometimes actually working against one another. Each department was concerned only with the role it played in the customer journey. Often, the left hand of an organization had no idea what the right hand was doing.
RevOps, or Revenue Operations, has been a game-changing strategy for B2B organizations. Using a RevOps mindset, companies can align the many, many activities of their go-to markets teams into one bigger organizational goal. With a RevOps strategy, all customer-facing teams coordinate their efforts to address the customer at each stage of their journey.
RevOps is the one team that has a 50,000-foot view of the customer journey. They know and own all the tools, systems, and processes your sales, marketing, and operations teams use and how they overlap.
In previous articles, we pinpointed the circumstances which can derail many well-meaning RevOps teams. Then, we showed you the strategies successful companies use to leap over those obstacles and drive revenue and helpful tools to get there. Now, we want to help you put that knowledge into action to unlock your organization’s revenue growth.
To recap, we believe the most common challenges teams face in successfully implementing RevOps fall into three categories:
To avoid these hazards, we have seen successful companies do the following:
We suggest a 3-point plan to help you enjoy the full benefits of Revenue Operations. We call it the P.S.P. Plan.
The right systems will help you meet your goals faster, more consistently, and with more accuracy. Consider the technological resources needed to gain insight from performance and support processes for sales, marketing, and service. Having everyone onboard will only make operations run smoother.
While you are removing steps and duplication for your sales team, it’s important not to change everything all at once. Find a document generation software that will play nicely with your existing tools. A seamless end-to-end workflow automates document-related tasks and keeps your team producing custom collateral and proposals at incredible speed.
According to Forbes, the average salesperson will spend 900 hours a year on administrative tasks. Nine hundred hours! That’s not exactly a salesperson operating at peak efficiency, is it? Often, your folks may need to retrieve data from multiple sources on your documents. Accordingly, whatever document generation (docgen) tool you use must have the ability to simultaneously support various data sources and process data.
At this point, due to organic growth, your company is probably using lots of different tech products across your company. Software like enterprise resource management (ERPs), sales engagement platforms (SEPs), customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and content management systems (CMSs) are just a handful of the core elements for companies to organize their front-end operations. Not to mention the back-end platforms like communication applications, project management software, accounting programs, and a host of other products necessary for operations.
Ultimately, your tech-stack needs to be interconnected, and there should be an outlined process for each tool. Documentation of your platforms is an integral part of RevOps. Time to insight is shorter, and those insights are more complete for when sales, marketing, and customer success go to use them. You’ll also reap the benefits of being able to tap into the same data for planning and budgeting purposes.
Sales teams don't need to worry about possibly offering up the wrong data in their communication. That puts your entire team on the same page, saving time and avoiding chaos.
A major key to RevOps success is making sure everyone on your team is “speaking the same language” when it comes to data. That may mean sitting down and looking at the entire customer experience holistically. It could mind-numbing work to clean up data and redundant data processes. But getting it right (or doing it right the first time) is one of the most important steps toward generating new revenue for your organization and optimizing experiences for your customers and your staff.
Ultimately, you are trying to create streamlined workflows to free up your team to spend on revenue-generating tasks. You are removing the tedious tasks of manually creating documents and eliminating the fallout that is bound to happen without a centralized system. Your sales team will have more time to dedicate to nurturing prospects and closing deals. With the right systems in place, teams can collaborate on cross-functional engagement that leverages technology from sales, marketing, and/or customer success tools.
A shared tech stack and data foundation make it possible to design experiences the way the customer sees them. This customer-centric perspective does a better job of creating, automating, and scaling experiences customers find valuable. Delivering fast, informative, and personalized proposals, contracts, and quotes, and other documents is a way for companies to stand out for the relevance of their overall engagement.
It's really more of a squiggle since your customers will reach your brand via many different channels, and at various points along the way in the buying process. Often, their journey isn’t a linear progression. They zig forward and backward along the way. Your organizational structure needs to account for this fact.
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Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
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This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
