Ran Mullins By Ran Mullins • November 2, 2023

Customer Success in RevOps: A Winning Strategy

Working in customer success frequently feels like you're operating on an island from the rest of your organization. Goals and expectations are typically kept in-house, limiting the department's success. When an upsell to an existing customer leads to an average increase in revenue of 10-30%, and 70-95% of revenue is generated from renewals and upsells, there’s a significant advantage to gain by emphasizing customer success in your revenue plans.

Customer success has a significant impact on revenue generation and stability. A recent survey revealed that 40% of businesses identify an apparent disconnect between customer success and sales and marketing. This is why many industry leaders are transitioning to RevOps, also known as revenue operations.

RevOps is a winning strategy in B2B as it opens up an organization’s revenue team to include sales, marketing, and customer success. Operating together with shared goals and resources heightens expectations and emphasizes customer success. RevOps is designed to create a sustainable pipeline of quality B2B leads and predictable revenue. We’ll cover more about customer success in RevOps and where it fits into this unique system of business operations.

Understanding RevOps

Leading B2B experts are quickly adopting revenue operations as the go-to revenue strategy. RevOps is a structure of business that officially merges sales, marketing, and customer success into the same “RevOps” department. These teams all have complementary elements that feed into the success of one another as one revenue team. 

With greater sales insights, customer success and marketing will have better data on customers and create more meaningful deliverables that speak to current and prospective customer needs. Similarly, sales reps will better understand the needs and expectations of leads to shorten the sales cycle. 

As sales cycles expand and become more complex, every touchpoint and tactic is more important than ever. Offering a white-glove concierge experience through a thoughtfully developed customer success strategy can significantly elevate conversation rates, lead quality, and sales totals. 

Leveraging customer success in RevOps will help organizations quickly identify areas needing improvement, prevent lags in the buying journey, and increase revenue generated from strategic renewal and upsell opportunities. Through RevOps, customer success can and will have a more significant role in your company’s growth.

The Role of Customer Success

With conversion rates for B2B sales hovering around 3%, minimizing client churn can be a more impactful way to ensure revenue success. Rather than simply focusing on sales or marketing, RevOps encourages a holistic approach to revenue management. RevOps businesses are positioned to explore customer success initiatives that raise and support the bottom line. Here are a few of the top advantages that come with improving your customer success department:

  • Rise in renewal sales and revenue
  • Faster and more effective customer onboarding
  • Reduced client churn
  • Less cost per conversion
  • Improved customer loyalty and retention
  • Increased lifetime value of each client
  • Heightened annual recurring revenue (ARR)

While customer success plays a critical role in supporting revenue operations, the most remarkable feature of RevOps is how it encourages interplay between these revenue teams.  

The Interplay: How Customer Success in RevOps Connect

By design, RevOps establishes a culture and systems that ensure sales, marketing, and customer success can communicate and collaborate efficiently and effectively. Omnichannel tools keep co-workers updated and informed in real time, no matter how many moving parts a given RevOps team may have. 

Customer success teams can maintain their own training and development programs and metrics while leveraging sales and marketing insights and expertise. This interplay is both essential to RevOps and a byproduct of its design. Once you’ve established an initial framework for your revenue operations department, it’s crucial to audit processes to avoid roadblocks and dead-ends continually.

RevOps, and its ability to foster productive customer success programs and strategies, helps revenue leaders create a winning strategy in B2B sales. Let’s take a closer look at this strategy and how you can forge your winning strategy in your industry. 

The Winning Strategy in B2B

In a B2B setting, your organization can’t win if you don’t help your clients win. Ensuring customer success is the best way to retain your client base, receive invaluable reviews and referrals, and achieve lasting, lucrative client lifespans.

Rather than making customer success just an initiative, companies with an established RevOps department have an entire team of experts. This means they can fully commit to finding new ways to help clients flourish. 

Connecting internal objectives and communications across multiple clients requires the use of a robust CRM. The best CRMs will integrate with existing tools to enable client success teams to delve into analytics, proactively advising clients to strategic success. Having a pulse on real-time business insights will allow your client success team to become true business partners, rather than just a contractor.

A fully matured customer success team will also have the leadership and experts in place to fully integrate within client teams, for hands-on assurance that clients’ needs and initiatives are being fully actualized. This can include:

  • Auditing client systems, teams, and processes
  • Selecting and setting up tools and resources
  • Hiring and training staff
  • Integrating AI and automated workflows
  • Meeting with leadership/stakeholders to generate meaningful alignment
  • Integrating data across the buyer journey

Under a prosperous customer success division, your organization will develop a bank of insights and tactics that can be leveraged to help clients succeed in unique ways. With specialized customer success experts, mature teams continually identify retention, upselling, and cross-selling opportunities. By adopting a RevOps approach, your customer success team will have the most support and resources to help you and your clients earn transcendent victories.

Relequint Can Help Coalesce Customer Success in RevOps

We’ve covered the strategic advantages of emphasizing  customer success in RevOps in your financial planning. How developed is your company’s customer success team and strategies? With a thorough audit, you can identify the tools, hires, and tactics your company needs to establish a mature customer success division. You can also leverage the expertise of a proven leader in the RevOps space, like Relequint. Relequint has the leadership, vision, and experience to guide B2B companies through this significant shift in client (and revenue) success. Schedule a free consultation to set up a customer success maturity assessment with Relequint today!

 

customer success maturity assessment