23 May, 2023
• Revenue Operations
Written by McAlign
Revenue Operations Automation is a process that identifies revenue opportunities, tasks, and documents. It then automates the steps needed to ensure successful revenue generation. The result is quicker sales cycles and more efficient operations team activity.
Revenue Operations Automation can help you meet more people, sell more deals, and keep more of what you earn. Read on to learn how automation can improve your efficiency in the following ways:
Reduce manual data entry by 80% or more
Speed up lead qualification and deal closing by 50% or more
Increase productivity with fewer resources
The goal of sales planning is to create a set of goals that are achievable and profitable, while also meeting expectations and needs. This process involves forecasting the future, then creating a strategy based on those forecasts.
The more accurate your forecasts are, the more successful your sales plan will be. And since forecasting is an inexact science at best, it's helpful to have some automation involved to reduce human error.
When you manage a sales force, you need to set quotas that are specific and measurable. If your reps don’t know what they have to do each month, they won’t make good decisions or drive results. It’s important to use information like historical performance and current market conditions when setting quotas so that your team has a clear understanding of goals and how they can reach them—and so that you can track progress toward those goals over time.
Quotas should be aligned with the overall business strategy for both short-term objectives (such as achieving annual revenue targets) and long-term goals (such as building brand awareness). The best way to ensure this alignment is by aligning your sales ops strategy with other departments in the organization: marketing, product management, legal, etc., all of whom have different sets of needs depending on their respective departmental roles within an enterprise organization structure where everything is interconnected."
As you know, your company has an established sales process that includes territory management. In the past, you might have relied on manual processes to optimize these processes and maximize their efficiency. However, now that you have automation technology at your disposal, there’s no reason why you can’t use it as a way to maximize territory management as well!
Another way to improve the efficiency of revenue operations is to provide accountability for regional and national quotas.
This can be done in a number of ways:
Set regional and national quotas based on market size and growth. These targets should be linked to specific sales goals, such as increasing revenue per member or recruiting new members. The number of accounts within each region will vary according to its population size, but determining the correct quota can help you identify where you need more support from your team members so that they can achieve these goals.
Provide regional and national quotas to sales teams. This will allow them to understand how much they need to sell in order to fulfill their responsibilities at both a local level (i.e., selling services) as well as being part of a larger organization (i.e., selling products). It’s important that everyone understands what needs doing before they start working because otherwise there could be confusion later down the line when things don’t work out exactly how planned – which could lead some team members feeling like failures instead of success stories!
The ability to create incentives that encourage cooperation and integration between sales, marketing and customer service teams can be a powerful tool in improving the efficiency of revenue operations. For example, if you're a company with three distinct groups—sales, marketing and customer service—you'll want to make sure that each group is responsible for doing its part for each sale that comes through your pipeline. But how do you ensure this happens?
A simple way to implement incentives into the quota calculation is by rewarding all members of the revenue cycle who contribute toward closing deals at any point during the process. This will incentivize collaboration between departments because everyone knows their efforts will benefit from working together toward a common goal (i.e., getting customers).
Pipeline analytics is a critical component of your revenue operations, and it’s essential that you have access to accurate reporting.
This can be achieved through consistent management of opportunities across sales systems and stages. This means that once an opportunity has been won, it should be tracked in the same way from start to finish. For example, if a new opportunity comes in through a marketing campaign and it's assigned to an account executive (AE), it should stay with that AE until it's closed or moved elsewhere within your organization.
If you're not tracking opportunities consistently across sales systems and stages—and if those opportunities aren't being moved along smoothly as they move through different channels—you'll lose valuable insight into where things are falling down along various points in the funnel.
Developing an effective and consistent method to capture sales forecasts will improve the process of forecasting by creating a single source for all key reports that are used to drive business decisions. By eliminating the need to access multiple systems and manually compile information, organizations can reduce the risk of audit findings through improved compliance with revenue recognition standards (such as ASC 606).
How to improve forecasting accuracy
How to get sales reps to provide accurate forecasts
How to improve accuracy of forecasting by product and region
Just as it's important to understand how your customers buy, it's also necessary to know what they're buying. This can be done by analyzing the data you already have in order to create a more accurate profile of each customer. In particular, advanced statistical algorithms can help you identify patterns and trends among customers with similar characteristics.
By segmenting your customers into meaningful groups (such as those who purchase frequently or infrequently), you can better customize their experiences with your brand. Plus, automated segmentation tools make this process much easier than manually creating new segments because they allow you to quickly identify and prioritize relevant data points that will lead to better results over time—and all without wasting time on manual processes like sorting through endless spreadsheets or re-keying information from one system into another.
Automate commission calculations based on accurate data instead of relying on spreadsheets that are prone to error
Instead of having each team member calculate their commissions manually and then reconciling them in an Excel spreadsheet, create a single source for all key sales reports. This can be done by integrating your CRM with the payroll system or using an accounting software solution that can pull data directly from the accounts payable database.
When you automate commission calculations based on accurate data, managers will be able to focus on activities that add value rather than spending time reviewing and verifying spreadsheets every month or so.
Integrate with your existing financial systems to ensure automation from quote to cash processes with no manual interventions
Automate your quote-to-cash process for increased efficiency and reduced risk of audit findings
Automation is a great way to ensure that your sales operations team can access all the key reports they need, in real time. By providing a single source for all key sales reports, including quota attainment and forecasting, you're ensuring consistency across the board. This will help you gain better visibility into your customers' needs—and what they're buying—which can help you improve both their experience and yours.
When it comes to spending time and energy on activities that add value, your managers are probably already doing the best they can. Automation gives them more time to do what they do best.
A great example is when we talk about payroll processing. The process of collecting data from all over the organization, running reports and checking numbers can take days or even weeks for a manager to complete each week. If this task were automated, managers could instead spend their time focusing on tasks that add value—like coaching employees or engaging with customers in meaningful ways—and not have to worry about manual labor around payroll processing anymore.
As you know, revenue recognition is one of the most important areas of accounting. It can be difficult to get right, so it's critically important that your company gets to grips with this area sooner rather than later.
Automation can help reduce the risk of audit findings in several ways:
By automating the process for capturing contracts, automating invoice processing and reconciliation will become more efficient and less prone to errors. This will make sure that invoices are processed correctly and consistently across your organization.
Automation allows for greater segregation of duties; this means that employees who have access only to specific levels of information on a contract cannot modify or change anything without approval from someone else who has different permissions. This helps ensure that no single individual has full control over all parts of a contract at any given time (and therefore increased protection against fraud).
The bottom line is that revenue operations automation can make your sales process more efficient and help you meet more people, sell more deals, and keep more of what you earn.
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