Data is the new oil but it needs efficient engines to take you places

Today, companies operating digitally have no dearth of data. Each team is generating its own. The number of programs and apps being used by employees and different divisions of the company grows by the year.

Unless they talk to each other to provide a unified picture, the time wasted in assembling the sum of the parts takes up most of the company’s operations resources. 

That’s what led to the creation of HubSpot’s newest Operations. Revenue Operations or RevOps helps operations teams get the chaos under control and align data streams within.

HubSpot believes that in order to scale better, companies need to run better. To run better, you need an operations team that’s unchained from disconnected, dirty data and mundane, manual processes.

Like silos between company departments, data silos have to be connected as well, so that there’s a dynamic exchange of relevant information to increase collaboration

With your operations teams working together under a unified RevOps strategy, they’ll be able to more efficiently set up your go-to-market teams for success, and help delight your customers at scale. But merely adopting a strategy is not enough. You need the right tools and processes to execute and support your RevOps strategy.

HubSpot is now leading the RevOps charge with a new Hub that is specifically designed to empower operations professionals. With Operations Hub, your ops team is equipped with the tools necessary to automate away their daily pain points, and they are fully set up to be a key player to help scale your company.

Syncing diverse data streams is where the magic begins

RevOps strategy involves finding which operations and processes feed into each other. Where is it essential for departments to intersect and exchange data? Imagine a billing process that requires sales to notify the accounting department about a deal coming through. The client details, the terms and various other internal processes have to align to ensure that there’s no delay between signing up and generating revenue for the company.

Similarly, the sales team would need to brief onboarding or service teams of the previous history with the client and the expectations to help make the transition smooth and trouble free. Management would need to see whether the revenue is realised within specified time frames.

This can be achieved with email and periodic reports between departments but following up and making sure that things happen as planned involves several steps.

Identifying the flow of data channels within and how it impacts the company is critical. It can work to enhance reporting, reviews and future plans

That’s where RevOps comes into the picture. By synching the steps both ways – from informing sales to letting the sales teams know invoices have been generated to informing management when the revenue is realised can be done with the required teams being notified automatically.

For that to happen, internal programs tracking this need to be synched both ways, continuously. In certain cases, it is only necessary to synch the data one way. All of these can be controlled within HubSpot according to individual company requirements.

Data never stands still

As your business scales, your data proliferates. More objects, more fields, more metrics. It gets harder and harder for business users to build meaningful reports. Too often, they’re forced to lean on operations teams and analysts to answer one-off reporting requests. The result: slow, inconsistent, and often ad-libbed reporting for business users, and a reactive ops team struggling to stay afloat.

With datasets, ops teams can curate data into clean and reusable tables that can then be used by downstream users to create reports. This saves operations teams time and gives them more control over their data, and gives their downstream business users faster, easier, and more consistent insights.

As a part of datasets, for the first time, you can now calculate formulas directly in the context of HubSpot reporting — no need to bog down the CRM with additional fields solely for reporting purposes. With this new feature, you can calculate date differences (e.g. time to first conversion), sales cycle speed (e.g. time in deal stages), sales commissions, and more.

Enabling this is part of RevOps. With over 90 external programs and apps, HubSpot can synch data seamlessly, both ways. This list is being revised continually to expand the base.

These datasets can belong to any department. Ensuring that they work together is the task that operations personnel are constantly tasked with. And RevOps hits the sweet spot in helping them manage

Enabling Operations teams to raise their game

Operations teams carry the responsibility for making sure that, well, everything works. If a marketer is having trouble segmenting a contact list, they reach out to operations. If a salesperson's automated emails are misfiring, operations get tagged in. If a service professional can't access a customer's communication history, it's operations to the rescue again.

They're the people who set every customer-facing team up for success. As such, they are the orchestrators of the customer experience. And yet, most companies view operations as a reactive function whose sole purpose is to frantically find fixes to issues as they arise.

It's time to re-imagine operations and transform these teams from reactive fire-fighters into proactive friction-fighters. How can we do this? With revenue operations (RevOps).

Operations teams can only fulfil their potential when they work together under a unified RevOps strategy and are equipped with the right tools to execute that strategy.

Once these tools are in place and the streams of data flowing as required, the difference in efficiency will be clear.

At Blueoshan, our consultants can work with you to identify and construct the connections that must be made and the data synchs that should be in place. We have experience managing huge databases on HubSpot and will be glad to show you how it can work.