What a year! 2021 was one to remember, to say the least. The world seemingly stood still, followed by what appeared to be a light at the end of the tunnel. But through all the uncertainty that surrounded all of us, one thing was constant:
The steady growth of Revenue Operations.
Whether it’s companies focusing on their scaling efforts, creating content to inspire our thinking, or even starting up communities to connect this rising industry, established leaders and emerging professionals woke up every day to push our industry forward.
Let’s take a look back at the past year and remind ourselves of all the exciting RevOps trends of 2021.
Lead routing: the backbone of your revenue operations
The majority of companies understand the value of RevOps, yet many don’t quite understand what it takes to fully operate under a RevOps model. Others may view RevOps as a “nice to have” function, delaying the process of building a RevOps foundation until it’s too late.
But the truth is, it’s never too early to start planning and hiring for RevOps. Because RevOps brings together the entire revenue function of a company, it’s critical that your initial planning is done early and correctly. This leads us to our first RevOps trend of 2021: setting up lead routing to serve as the foundation of your revenue operations.
Proper lead routing improves your team’s speed to lead, a key factor in converting leads into opportunities. As your company scales, it becomes one of the indicators of overall growth. Not only that, a strong lead routing process will also enable deeper sales strategies such as territory planning, allowing for flexibility to operate under any sales models that work for your company.
That’s why having a robust and flexible lead routing tool is a must for RevOps leaders. And knowing what to look for in a lead routing tool can be the difference between a scalable RevOps function and one that gets left behind.
Successfully scaling your sales team for growth
Once you have a robust lead routing tool and strategy in place, the fun can begin. With the flexibility of customizing your rules to fit whatever model you wish to operate, you can start scaling your sales team without worrying about your processes breaking down.
First things first: In order to achieve sustainable growth and success, a strong alignment between marketing and sales is needed. This will strengthen the working relationship between the two teams. The end result is an enhanced go-to-market strategy of the product.
There are a few ways to go about creating deeper alignment between marketing and sales. One of which is to create a lead score that both teams can agree on.
With marketing and sales working in harmony, the next step is to scale the sales team. SDRs are the frontline heroes of your revenue operations, and ensuring their success can’t be overlooked. It takes a bit of planning, but there are some tried and tested methods that’ll set your SDRs up for success on day one.
But even with a highly functioning team, sales success can hinge on your ability to create accurate forecasts. Accurate forecasting plays a key role in guiding key business decisions, so it’s imperative that this is done right. Tools like the Sales Process & Gating Template can guide you along. By clearly defining your sales process, you can gather the correct data to enhance the entire sales cycle.
Turn Salesforce into the driving force of your RevOps engine
At the center of every RevOps function is the CRM system, with Salesforce being the top choice of many organizations. But that doesn’t mean that organizations know how to fully utilize Salesforce to their advantage.
We see it all the time: ops professionals and admins build processes and automations that make perfect sense on paper. However, that doesn’t translate to adoption from sales reps. In the end, both sides are frustrated and the CRM system turns from a central source of truth to just another clunky piece of tech.
To fix this, keep this rule in mind: the user experience for your reps is just as important as the user experience for your admins.
In high-growth settings, ops is often tasked with building processes in Salesforce to increase CRM adoption. One way to do that is to create enhancements to your Lightning pages, which gives your reps a more streamlined experience that entices them to stay in the system.
It’s important that admins have efficient processes as well. After all, they’re the ones working hard behind the scenes to create a good Salesforce experience for everyone.
A golden rule that our consultants live by is to eliminate the use of Process Builders and Workflow rules, and build automations using Flows. Flows provide admins with an automation tool in a low-code environment, meaning they can harness the power of code-like logic without using Apex. With the correct safeguards in place, admins using Flows will gain more flexibility over automations in Salesforce. In the end, this will lead to more possibilities to build user-friendly processes.
Use the RevOps trends of 2021 to advance your career in 2022
And there you have it – a brief recap of the key RevOps trends of 2021. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of everything that happened in the world of RevOps this year, we hope it highlights some key points of inspiration to take into the new year.
No matter where you are in your ops career – whether you’re just starting out and learning Salesforce, or maybe you’re in position to lead your company to record growth in 2022, understanding the key RevOps trends of 2021 can prepare you to turn 2022 into a year of accomplishment and career advancement.
To set your career advancement goals into action, make it a priority to compliment your understanding of RevOps trends with the right mindset. The term that our own RevOps leaders like to use is the C-Suite mindset. The C-Suite mindset is all about understanding the big picture and creating a forward thinking mentality. Believe it or not, a simple change to this mindset can be the catalyst that accelerates the advancement of your ops career.
And if you ever need some extra inspiration, just know that every ops superstar once started out as curious, wide-eyed rookies with humble ambitions. But don’t just take our word for it. Hear the stories of rising and established RevOps stars to learn how different roads advanced their careers to put them in positions to guide their companies through $150 million+ in funding.
Revenue Hero Stories of 2021
To wrap it all up, we’re handing it off to some of the Revenue Heroes that emerged in 2021. Their stories show us what’s possible when you combine the RevOps trends together into your work. They truly encapsulate everything it means to be drivers of the RevOps industry.
From planning and building the foundational processes of their scaling efforts, to choosing the right tools to execute their ops strategies, and expanding their use of Salesforce to drive their revenue, their stories showcase the limitless possibilities for growth that RevOps has to offer.
Take some inspiration from Tiffany and Mike as they successfully took on the challenge of switching their operations to an ABM model.
Or take a deep dive to learn how Krystal was able to harness her RevOps expertise to build a seamless customer journey during her time at Capacity.
That’s all for a whirlwind of a year! With the momentum of RevOps in 2021, there’s no doubt that 2022 is going to be an even bigger year. We can’t wait to see which trends carry over into next year and what new trends will emerge. So join our community of RevOps enthusiasts in the Revenue Hero’s Toolbox to keep up and take your ops game to the next level.
To all you Revenue Heroes out there, keep on learning, sharing, and pushing the industry forward. We’ll see you in 2022!
Get Into the Revenue Hero's Toolbox
Level up your knowledge with the latest revenue ops resources.
