How Is Revenue Technology (RevTech) the Glue Between Marketing and Customer Success?

We’ve all seen bad marriages. Different goals, different approaches to life, different opinions on what constitutes a decent hamburger. (Is it too much to ask for one family cookout unsullied by angry meat competitions??)

Sadly, bad marriages aren’t confined to Aunt Joan’s house. We see them all the time in the software as a service (SaaS) sphere, where Marketing and Customer Success tussle for resources without giving the other a chance to support them. Oh, and let’s not forget Sales, also fighting for its pie wedge.

It’s time to move past this tired model … and revenue technology is here to do just that.

RevTech is affectionately known as the glue between marketing and customer success – or at least, it can be if you let it. In today’s post, let’s look at some of today’s most common questions about revenue growth and workflows.

Namely, how can RevTech and RevOps (revenue operations) help you prioritize customer satisfaction? What does this mean for your sales team and marketing teams? How does RevTech help optimize automation, increase renewals and reduce churn, streamline decision-making, and break down silos?

And how can a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) use these tactics to create a successful marriage between customer success and marketing?

Let’s take a look.

What is Revenue Technology (RevTech)?

Revenue technology is a set of tools and processes to help you optimize revenue operations at your organization, from pricing to marketing, sales to support. Typically, your tech stack should include tools such as:

• A CRM, or customer relationship management, system to create a view from above of the entire customer lifecycle
• Sales enablement and intelligence tools that leverage your market strategy to bring in new customers, streamline handoffs to customer success, and oversee revenue generation from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle
• Analytics tools that allow your RevOps team to track real-time metrics related to customer retention rates, customer acquisition, and other KPIs
• A content experience platform for the creation and distribution of marketing materials and other collateral
• A Learning Management System (LMS) for training, credentialing, and badging
• Additional project management tools
• Appropriate cloud storage capacity

Together, these tools give reps from small startups and behemoth enterprises alike the ability to manage the entirety of the customer journey. Too bad RevTech isn’t widely implemented … a fact which has had negative repercussions across the B2B SaaS landscape.

The Current Marketing and Customer Success Alignment

As of last count, Way Too Many Companies (that’s a technical term) were sadly misaligned vis-à-vis marketing and support. This isn’t good for profitability, and according to Reliable Anecdotal Sources, it has led to a significant increase in ulcers among existing customers, support team members, salespeople, and those who helm marketing campaigns.

What’s going wrong?

Essentially, marketing puts out a bunch of information about an offering, gets a prospect hooked on the idea, but doesn’t let them get their hands dirty. So, when they pass them off to sales, they’re still novices. The rubber has not hit the road.

Sales then explains the product or service in more detail, making promises as needed to get that signature. That completes the sales process voilà, your organization owns a shiny new customer.

Once “on board,” but without much onboarding, your prospect-turned-customer meets your product, more or less for the first time. They don’t have much skill set regarding using it, so they are likelier to fail, churn, and drag down your average customer lifetime value.

Marketing often gets blamed for false advertising, sales for overselling, and support for under-servicing. With only a touchpoint or two between departments, it’s no surprise everyone’s angrier than your in-laws at a Fourth of July barbecue.

Get this, though: there’s a solution.

Bridging the Marketing and Customer Success Gap with Revenue Technology

The situation described above is common because it’s easy for organizations to create a stilted and disjointed customer journey and somewhat more complex for them to create a seamless, de-siloed one.

That’s where revenue technology comes in. But wait, you’re wondering, how can revenue solve a problem built on different departments all scrambling to take credit for more than their share of income and use more than their share of resources?

Because when you let revenue drive decision-making and point out missed opportunities and errors, the picture gets much clearer.

Let’s face it: you want to help and see the customer succeed, but your main goal is to drive revenue. Naturally, that means you need a smooth customer journey because only then will they stick with you, work to learn new skills, turn to customer success teams when needed, and take advantage of your new initiatives.

By using RevTech to track both the customer and the prospect’s data metrics that matter– pricing, upsell and cross-sell opportunities, the success of new incentives, the value of social media campaigns, the popularity of a webinar even – you can answer far wider-reaching questions, such as:

• Where can we smooth the buyer’s journey?
• How well are we serving our prospects and customer base and creating a valuable customer experience?
• Are we meeting a common goal among all departments to keep people around and see more deals/renewals/profits?
• What is our audience telling us about customer needs at every point?
• What do the snags mean for our bottom line?
• How can we make our marketing, sales, and customer success team more proactive?
• How can we use this information to foster a culture of continuous improvement?

These questions have one crucial thing in common: Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success can all ask them and must look to all phases of the customer lifecycle to answer them.

In other words, if you make revenue the Virgil to your organization’s sales cycle Inferno, you’ll finally find the answers you seek.

Steps to Implementing Technology for Your Company’s Revenue Operations

So, how do you get it done?

The answer will vary from organization to organization. Depending on the size of your company, the nature of your service, the makeup of your buyer persona(s), and other differentiating factors, you will have to adjust as needed. However, almost any company can increase profits and decrease churn by taking the following six-step approach.

1. Assessment and Planning

First and foremost, it’s time to take stock of where you’re falling short. Who’s frustrated at the company? Outside of it? What do your leads, prospects, customers, and partners complain about? Is onboarding a widely used resource, or does it languish in obscurity while folks churn off into the sunrise?

The answers to these questions will give you the starting point for your RevTech solution. There likely isn’t an out-of-the-box solution here. Instead, you’ll need a highly tailored system that helps you educate prospects from the beginning, transition them coherently from Marketing through Customer Success, and unstick the sticking points along the way.

2. Research and Selection

There exist several solutions on the market today, making research and selection weighty chores indeed. Take your time to do the research right and find a solution that will meet all of your needs, not just some of them. The more holes you leave, the more additional solutions you’ll have to find and integrate – which is no one’s idea of a good time.

Speaking of integration …

3. Data Integration

This is a crucial step. Misfiled, misnamed, miscategorized, or otherwise mis-ed data can create the kind of nightmare even Dante couldn’t have dreamed up. If you’re unsure how to proceed with migrating data to a new system – and we cannot stress this enough – get help.

4. Automation Setup and Customization

Automation and customization are critical components of a good customer relationship management system and RevTech as a whole. If you elect a go-to-market model that fails to meet the specific needs of specific customers, they will feel that absence of care and leave.

Thus, your solution needs to account not only for what different departments need but what your audience needs while at the stages of their journey represented by each department. Your solution must be unified so they don’t notice a difference as they move through them.

5. Training and Onboarding

Once you have a system in place, it’s time to train people. That means setting up digital academies that prioritize learner autonomy, internally and externally, serving the audience and adding to their journey experience.

6. Monitoring Metrics and Optimizing the Customer Experience

If you’ve put the above steps into place effectively, you should already have the tools to analyze what’s working and what’s not. Again, let revenue be the alpha and omega in guiding you toward problem points and solutions.

With the right RevTech and a RevOps team, you’ll then need someone overseeing the show. If you haven’t yet created a Revenue Strategy at your company, it’s worth doing so now. The CMO can and should direct a plan for implementing Steps 1-5, gathering data, and analyzing the results.

Make Revenue Technology a priority today

Ready to step into that bright future where none of your marketing efforts are wasted and all your current customers are satisfied? Revenue technology is the answer, and Raven360 is here to help ensure you make the jump as smoothly as possible. Get in touch to learn more, request a demo, and build the bridge both Marketing and Customer Success deserve.