MarketStar Blog | Articles (12)

Key Insights

• The buzz around RevOps continues to build, with companies adding new roles at a record pace

• One of the reasons why RevOps is gaining such unprecedented traction is its potential of bringing together different teams

• Businesses looking at unleashing the potential of RevOps must utilize the emerging trends for overall business transformation

In many of the fastest-growing B2B organizations, Revenue Operations or RevOps can be seen as the newest functional team.

A report by LeanData highlights that almost 58% of B2B organizations have put a dedicated RevOps team in place or are in the process of building one. 

RevOps can be defined as an organizational function dedicated to streamlining operational processes in order to provide alignment across the revenue journey, including sales, marketing, customer success, and support. 

Since the ultimate goal of any business is to increase revenue, it makes sense to have revenue operations as the main component of a company’s structure, influencing decisions made by all departments. 

So, with the continued rise of RevOps, what can we expect in 2022? Let’s take a look. 

The Top 5 RevOps Trends for Business Success in 2022 

1. The Rise in RevOps Job Titles

The RevOps role is fairly new and interesting. 

With the boom we see in tech startups, it is natural for companies to look for new roles to solve new business challenges. 

Job titles with the word “revenue” such as Director of Revenue Operations, VP of Revenue Operations, and Chief Revenue Officer have become a big trend on job posting platforms like LinkedIn

With new roles opening up in revenue operations, we see new technology for RevOps as well. Such technological innovation defines the very core of RevOps by ensuring that your teams, data, and processes are all in perfect sync. 

2. Decreased Focus on Historical Trends

Typically, those in RevOps had the option of looking at past data to evaluate and assess what to expect the following year. 

2020, however, was not your typical year. 

What it did teach us is that we cannot flip a switch and go back to “normal”. Instead, we adapted, incorporating external factors into our forecast, and developed a plan that optimizes growth. 

Organizations relying on historical data must take into account the rapidly-changing conditions and behave proactively to scale the success ladder with RevOps. 

3. Streamlining Processes with Automation

Your RevOps team cannot work without robust integration and automation backing up your technological stack. 

A unified tech stack will allow RevOps teams to be more efficient by providing transparency across all processes. It can help in better allocation of resources and increase the collaborative flow of work. 

Additionally, businesses can improve efficiency, fix revenue pipeline, and make more data-driven decisions with process automation. 

When different departments are looking at different numbers, it is even more difficult to align toward a common vision. Combating this problem requires automation that takes care of quality control processes.

4. Increased Focus on CAS

Customer Acquisition Security or CAS has become the new core area and focuses on eliminating the fast-growing problem of fake users and bots from customers’ funnels, campaigns, analytics, and CRMs. 

Even Sales and Business Development Representatives (BDR) teams can benefit from CAS by using it to clean up their CRM, helping them to reduce the time wasted on prospecting fake users. 

A White Ops survey shows how 22% of companies believe that at least 25% of their first-party database is populated by fake and fraudulent contacts. 

CAS can eliminate these problems, helping BDR teams to go after real leads who are most likely to convert. 

5. A Central Component of CX

While a necessary function of modern business, teams in marketing, sales, or customer success often tend to operate in silos. 

Furthermore, they don’t define success the same way. If salespeople are focusing on sales alone, those in marketing or customer success are relying on KPIs to measure their goals. 

RevOps recognizes the need for collaboration between these teams, in not just generating and maximizing revenue but also in enhancing the overall customer experience. 

As a unified team, RevOps is best positioned to deliver a stellar customer journey. 

The Road Ahead

As stated by Matthew Volm, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel IQ, RevOps is the glue that holds the entire go-to-market function together. 

Utilizing revenue operations within your organization will enable you to better align your teams, make way for unified data and a more sophisticated tech stack in order to streamline your processes for maximum agility. 

And as the unknown continues, there has never been a better time to make a change for the better. 

Key Takeaways

The market for sales-as-a-service continues to grow across the globe with major multinational and fortune 500 companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft augmenting their in-house sales teams along with outsourcing sales operations to drive revenue and efficiency in operations. 

Social selling is one of the most overlooked strategies in B2B selling. Many sales reps consider social media to be a waste of time when it comes to reaching prospects, but platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram are actively used by the buyers you want to target. Social media can be an excellent source of insight and can help you learn more about your target buyers. Using social selling channels such as LinkedIn can provide a means to directly connect with prospects. It also provides a forum where you can influence potential buyers and build a rapport over time.

Our journey starts in the midst of a company wondering why they can't keep customers using their products. The leaders of the company meet in their boardroom, and everyone has the whole day's schedule dedicated to answering the question... "why aren't our customers renewing with us?"  

Key Insights

• With digitization opening more avenues than ever for customers to make a choice, it’s crucial for businesses to stay on the pulse of customer experience

• Creating a culture and practice of prioritizing customer engagement is easier to brainstorm than execute

• While many business ventures might still be averse to outsourcing this customer-facing function, there are clear benefits to doing so

• These range from a deeper understanding of the customer success space to industry-leading methodologies to execute customer success goals

Customer success may be a relatively new term, but growing customer expectations have solidified its significance to revenue growth and long-term success.

A report by Forrester highlights that customer success is on top of mind for many businesses, with 72% reporting it to be a priority.

In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic drove home its importance in protecting relationships with existing customers.

As the economic fallouts of the pandemic unfolded through constrained budgets, shifting business priorities, and disrupted operations, companies realized that a continuous race for the next sale was not sustainable. More important was nurturing the existing customer base beyond the point of sale.

A visible aspect of this shift is the value of trustworthiness in ensuring customer loyalty.

So, should you outsource customer success? To answer this question, one must look at what customer success does for an organization.

What are the Benefits of Customer Success?

Focusing on customer success involves tracking different kinds of value provided to the customer. A Deloitte research identifies three types of value that constitute customer success: performance value, business value, and experience value.

In the B2B world that we are in, getting the signature on the dotted line is only the beginning of the journey with customers.

• Customer Retention: Renewal decisions are based on perceived value. When you focus on customer success, you help your customers realize more value in your products and services. This leads to increased renewal rates and longer customer tenures, both of which increase a customer’s lifetime value and help you drive growth and profitability.

• Increased upsells and cross-sells: As per a report, vendors are 60-70% more likely to sell to existing customers rather than selling to new customers. Existing customers are also more likely to have undertaken integrations that maximize the value to be drawn from greater engagement with related products and services. It is precisely this advantage that customer success secures by increasing the likelihood of customer satisfaction.

• Operational Improvement: Focusing on customer success increases customer predictability. It provides you detailed insight into developing issues. It will also help you uncover drivers of that outcome, which will help you with recurring revenue predictability and capacity planning.

• Increased Revenue: Customer success is not just about keeping revenue in the business. It also helps generate more revenue at a lower cost. Customer success provides a mechanism for not only creating these chances but also capitalizing on them.

Why Should You Outsource Customer Success?

It might make more sense for you to outsource more transactional engagements such as customer service or customer support rather than outsourcing a long-term, relational role like customer success.

What is important is to acknowledge that outsourcing customer success does come with its fair share of challenges. Despite these challenges, however, outsourcing key customer success activities can contribute in several ways to revenue and growth.

1. Cost Savings

An obvious advantage of outsourcing is cost savings. But this advantage is often misperceived as resulting from hiring low-paid offshore customer success representatives.

Such misperceptions only consider the salaries as part of the costs of building a customer success team. But there are numerous other hard and soft costs such as facility, equipment and technology, travel, recruitment and training, and management costs.

By outsourcing all or part of the customer success function, companies can save on operational costs related to onboarding and training, renting and maintaining office space, management costs, and investing in the latest tools and technology stacks.

2. Skilled Representatives

When you have an in-house team, it can take months or even years to build the kind of high-quality team you have in mind for long-term success. While it might look rewarding, you are putting years of resources and thousands of dollars into building such expertise.

With outsourced customer success, you receive a top-notch crew whose sole responsibility is to provide excellent customer support. Such a team is better equipped to ensure that there is no lag in customer experience.

3. Access to leading technologies

A 2021 report by Talkdesk highlights that while customers want to talk more and for longer, they are not willing to wait on hold for longer than a minute.

Reputable outsourced customer support vendors understand this shift.

An outsourced customer success team will ensure that processes are in place to reduce average wait time (AWT). They have dedicated QA auditors to coach agents on how to minimize “dead time” between calls.

4. Effective Management

An in-house team can cater to high-value customers. However, real growth requires customer success at scale, catering to all segments of customers.

Most companies are likely to have a large segment of long-tail customers who cannot be converted into high-growth customers because of a lack of bandwidth among in-house customer success teams.

Outsourcing the long-tail customers can help organizations move beyond an 80-20 trap in their revenue generation and grow a much larger base of valuable customers.

5. Focus on Core Competencies

Customers are the key to success for any organization. Nevertheless, customer support may not be one of the core competencies of your venture.

Outsourcing customer success can help you focus on what your company does best, without sacrificing customer satisfaction in the process. And this can happen without a huge upfront investment of resources.

Finding the Right Outsourced Customer Success Partner

Pearsons’ Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance shows that the probability of selling to an existing customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling it to a new one. 

By bringing an outsourced customer success team, you are better equipped for future growth. The sooner you establish a reliable partnership in this important business segment, the easier it will be for you to master future challenges.

Key Insights

• Over the past few years, industries everywhere have begun using a subscription-based business model

• While convenience and recurring revenue are the top reasons for its popularity, the model does come with its own set of challenges

• Businesses must overcome these roadblocks to cater to the ever-increasing consumer demands

• For the model to be successful, enterprises must have a laser-sharp focus on not just subscription management, but also customer management, financial planning, and performance metrics

It started with magazines and telecom companies and trickled down to the music and video streaming sector.

At present, a wide variety of businesses–from meal boxes to cars to even electronic equipment–have embraced the subscription-based model.

Virtually any product or service can be sold through a subscription-based business model. Sectors that have not jumped on the bandwagon will do so in the future.

The trend to the subscription-based model continues to grow at a CAGR of 17.9% and is forecast to represent 83% of total software revenue by 2025, as per a report by IDC.

Despite its tremendous uptake, the subscription-based business model is not as straightforward as it sounds. There are multiple roadblocks that subscription businesses must be prepared for to provide a stellar experience and a hassle-free customer journey.

But before we jump into the unique challenges of subscription-based businesses, let’s look at what the domain is all about and why the model is growing so fast.

What Are Subscription-based Businesses?

A subscription-based service model is based on the idea of selling a product or service to receive monthly or yearly recurring subscription revenue.

Such a model focuses on customer retention rather than customer acquisition.

Take Spotify or Netflix, for example. Closer to home, we have businesses such as Zomato, MakeMyTrip, and many others where customers can opt for memberships to avail themselves of exclusive deals.

Subscription-based business models benefit both the company and its customers.

As a customer, you can automatically repurchase a product or service. As a business, you retain customers for future sales rather than needing to re-engage with them on a more frequent basis.

Why are Subscription-based Businesses Becoming So Popular?

Subscription-based businesses are popular for one main reason: convenience.

The shift to online shopping and availing of products or services from the comfort of one’s home was rising even before the pandemic. With lockdowns in place and storefronts closed, the need for recurring goods and services rose sharply.

So, even when the pandemic had a negative effect on much of the economy, the subscription-based market grew about 12% at that time, as per the Subscription Economy Index by Zuora.

Digital media, video streaming, and eLearning platforms had subscriptions grow by over 25%, according to the same report.

Several factors are driving the surge. For businesses looking to shift towards a subscription-based service model, three factors reign supreme:

• Predictability

• Recurring revenue

• Customer insight

Additionally, such a model offers more definitive revenue sources that business trailblazers can rely on for planning and investment.

Customer insight is another bonus. When businesses have consistent relationships with their customers, they are better equipped to track and gain deeper insights into how customers interact with their offerings.

Overcoming the 6 Unique Challenges in Subscription-based businesses

Many subscription-based businesses are enjoying unprecedented popularity.

However, plenty can go wrong if there is a gap in alignment between pricing, product, and customer management.

Let’s look at six of the most common challenges plaguing subscription-based businesses.

1. Providing Multiple Subscription Billing Models

Subscription plans are all about flexibility. It should cater to each customer’s unique demands. This means that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to pricing models.

Any subscription-based business must offer multiple categories of billing models so that customers have the choice and freedom to choose what they like.

Taking into consideration that the model you opt for has a direct impact on revenue, there are a few you can make way for:

• Freemium: This type of subscription plan allows customers to get started for free with the option to pay when/if they wish to upgrade

• Fixed Schedule and Pricing: In this type of plan, customers are charged a fixed amount at a time period for a pre-decided quantity of the product

• Tiered/pay-per-unit pricing: In this type of plan, the customer is charged based on the quantity purchased as per the pre-defined tiers

2. Customer Management

Subscription-based businesses tend to have a significant number of users at any given time, making it a tough task for businesses to manage all the customer records.

An inaccurate customer management database can have a damaging effect on the customer relationship if mistakes are made. Mostly, these mistakes often come down to repetitive manual tasks that lead to human error.

Additionally, any gap in customer data would lead to inadequate information flow among the staff. In this case, they would not know if customers were on trial or if their subscription period had ended.

You can avoid this by using an effective subscription management system that categorizes where your customer is in the sales process, giving you relevant data of any previous interactions.

3. Flexibility and Real-Time Modifications

Even when you have a detailed pricing plan, your customer might want to upgrade, downgrade, cancel or change their plan a few days before their billing. You must provide them with the flexibility to change their plan without having to wait for the next billing date.

Real-time modifications are another area to look into.

Additionally, the changes your customers are making to their plans need to be properly accounted for and communicated to the customer. By doing this, you ensure that their experience remains the same, hassle-free, and smooth.

4. Reducing Churn

While subscription-based businesses don’t typically have to worry about their service losing novelty, they do need to ensure that their service is always adding value to their customers’ lives.

Routine surveys are a great way to assess what your customers like and dislike about your product or service. Creating stackable loyalty reward programs is another way to keep your customers delighted.

These tactics can help you keep your customers engaged and prevent them from buying products from a competing business.

You can regularly surprise your customers with reward points so they feel genuinely valued. This goes a long way in decreasing dissatisfaction and, consequently, reducing churn.

5. Go for Automation

Giving your customers flexibility also means more complexity for your business.

As a subscription-based business, your customers have various options for customizations, enhancements, and convenience to pause or resume their plan and to upgrade or downgrade. But this also makes invoice management a challenge.

Manual billing is completely out of the question, considering the massive amount of data you would have to stay up to date with. You must automate your billing system so that invoices are generated and sent to customers without any delay.

6. Tracking the Progress

Rather than measuring success by tracking Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), churn, and recurring profit margins individually, combine them.

A combination will allow businesses following a subscription-based business model to have more actionable insights and answer critical questions about the company’s overall financial health. A real-time dashboard can help you visualize the progress better.

Riding the Subscription Wave

At the heart of the subscription-based business model lies customer-centricity. It is all about putting customers at the center and creating personalized experiences, on the strength of technology.

To make it big in the subscription-based business landscape, think of these challenges as tiny roadblocks which you need to overcome.

As long as you focus on delivering a stellar customer experience, you are better positioned to create a niche for yourself in the marketplace.

This is the first installment in our series on Unique Challenges where we deep-dive into hurdles faced by businesses in different industries and their game-changing impact on business growth.

Head over to our blog, Overcoming the 8 Challenges of On-Demand Delivery Services, and explore eight of the most common challenges plaguing on-demand delivery services and how to overcome them to be successful.

Key Insights

• In order to bounce back from the disruptions caused by the pandemic, organizations must work out a plan to ensure that their business model remains flexible and agile

• Remote outsourcing solutions can help accelerate the process 

• A remote outsourced partner can help shape business results and culture 

• Remote outsourcing can provide a more outcome-focused strategy for businesses to scale up and stay relevant in this ever-changing business landscape

Every organization wants to see its business grow. 

While you would want to be hands-on with business operations, the scenario will be different as you grow your customer base. 

By contracting work to other companies, you not only clear your own resource pool from tedious and time-consuming tasks, you also cut, at least, 70% of your labor costs. 

Virtual outsourcing solutions have never been as important as they are now, against the backdrop of multiple lockdowns and a switch to remote work setup. 

In this current socio-economic climate, most teams are looking at virtual outsourcing solutions. The pandemic has opened the eyes of many businesses, helping them to realize that an in-office team is not a criterion for success.

What Does it Mean to Outsource Work?

Outsourcing is when a company is said to have given certain positions or jobs to a third party for completion.

Take, for example, a company that requires assistance with customer service.

It can cut costs and improve process efficiency by contracting third-party workers to help answer calls, send emails, and operate live chat features.

In the current business landscape, work-from-home outsourcing continues to grow. In fact, a survey by Clutch highlights that more than one-third (37%) of small enterprises are already outsourcing a business process. 

How Does Work-From-Home Outsourcing Differ from Remote Staffing?

While both remote outsourcing and remote staffing involve taking jobs that are typically conducted within the office and sending them to a distant location, there is one differentiator.

They differ in the management-worker relationship.

In simple terms, a company that outsources jobs simply sends work to contractors. Remote workers, however, are never actually employees of the company.

What are the Benefits of Remote Outsourcing Solutions?

While the pandemic has become a norm, many companies have long been practicing remote work setup.

With advances in technology, it has become even more popular today.

If you are still not sure about what work-from-home outsourcing can do for your business, check out these benefits!

1. Cost-Savings

One of the most important benefits of WFH outsourcing is the potential savings.

Employing virtual outsourcing solutions can help you eliminate the need to pay the traditional expenses of having an office and other factors such as utilities and rent.

Remote outsourcing can help lower your tax burden as well.

A report by Global Workplace Analytics shows that US businesses compatible with remote work have the potential to save almost $11,000 per employee each year.

2. Scalability

Outsourcing and work-from-home make the perfect combination.

With remote outsourcing, it is easier to add additional team members, when necessary, without worrying about workstations or compensation.

With additional tasks being handled by a third party, your existing team will not feel burdened, giving them the time and space to focus on the larger business goals. 

3. Outsourcing’s Remote Understanding

Whether it be accounting and payroll services or customer support and contact center operations, numerous companies trust remote partners, some onshore and many offshore, to oversee their vital back- and front-office solutions.

The remote outsourcing industry is equipped with deep expertise when it comes to overseeing, motivating, and measuring distributed teams.

From offshore specialists in far-off time zones to onshore yet off-site teams, successful outsourcing programs require balancing knowledge, workloads, and personnel across often-distant locations.

Companies providing work-from-home outsourcing solutions have proven expertise in such matters.

4. Improved Productivity

A study by Airtasker (a gig economy platform) revealed that remote workers put in an additional 1.4 days of work or three extra weeks per year compared to office employees.

In other words, they tend to be more productive.

This might be because remote workers feel more fulfilled owing to better work-life balance. This has a direct impact on revenue generation.   

 5. Global Talent Pool

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, it is becoming critical for business owners to access talent from around the globe. 

Instead of depending on staff who live within commuting distance, remote outsourcing can help you tap into the abilities of some of the best experts in their fields. And with a wider talent pool to choose from, you can quickly find someone who is truly cut out for the job. 

The Way Ahead

If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is that remote work is a viable option for many companies. Businesses across the globe are allowing employees to work from home with some even letting go of their offices completely, 

With outsourcing remote work being beneficial to both employers and employees, it is time to look into the many returns of remote outsourcing. 

Such a model provides you with opportunities for growth and innovation. Your virtual outsourcing solutions partner will equip you with the right technology and resources to help your team adjust better. At the same time, you enjoy a specialized remote workforce in your most badly hit departments.