As organisations battle with a global economic crisis, organisations are striving to do more with less and achieve the efficiencies that are regularly spoken about.
The role of Revenue Operations was at the centre of the conversation as Annapurna and Mindtickle brought together some of the leading Sales & Marketing professionals to a VIP roundtable event in Central London.
The conversation was led by Anthony Parker (General Manager & VP Sales, EMEA at Mindtickle) who was joined by Eric Anderson (President at Mindtickle) and Craig Carney (Senior VP, Global Sales at Mindtickle), which was open, interactive and brought about the following takeaways:
Balancing profit, revenue & responsibility
The economic downturn has brought about many a challenge across organisations and budget constraints have been an inevitable knock-on effect. Marketing budgets have been squeezed as one of the first points of action for managing the change.
This 2nd wave of economic uncertainty is still in the recovery period from the pandemic, whereby there was a significant reallocation of resources with a shift in companies investing heavily in their employees as they look to battle ’the great resignation’ and changing employee needs.
The group spoke openly about what were some of the most significant changes to impact their organisations and the change in investor focus being towards pure profitability and the top line. This organisational mindset has seen an impact on the sales function in particular. During times of economic challenge, people will not necessarily want to buy as much but are still happy to talk to salespeople. This factor causes great challenges within organisations that use technology/sales platforms to forecast growth due to its nature of counter-intuition. The macroeconomic influences of geographical-specific challenges will always play a factor in how successful sales are but the role of enablement should be in place to be able to counter such impacts.
RevOps has evolved and is a key driver of unification, both in people & technology
Successful organisations are built on teams that work in unison, rather than in siloes and with their own agendas. The role of RevOps (Revenue Operations) has evolved and in 2023 was listed as the number 1 growing role in the US (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-jobs-rise-2023-25-us-roles-growing-demand-linkedin-news/). Creating efficiencies and ensuring areas are running well within the business is vital and the role of RevOps should be a key influencer in driving sales enablement and strategy. RevOps has changed, they should be driving better value into leadership, rather than previously maybe just being perceived as ‘answering the slack channel’.
The group discussed how in many organisations, enablement becomes a key factor in the strategy, whereas, on the other hand, a number were not included in the conversation. There must be a continued passion for selling the role, the importance of it and the desire for closer collaboration. Working together is crucial, setting the strategy, upskilling your people and embedding the technology on the operations side.
Historically, the enablement role would grow as a direct result of the number of salespeople in a business. Enablement must develop as a role due to the disconnect that can occur between them and sales organisations. Enablement is not yet in the position to answer questions on metrics and what the baseline metrics are trying to impact. If a program has been completed, the value of sales enablement must be demonstrated and brought closer to RevOps.
The RevOps role should be working on strategy, target allocation, revenue objectives and the enablement team sits behind this to achieve success.
Change is needed for there to be adoption and learning from technology.
Creating a culture of sales excellence can only be achieved by everyone singing from the same sheet. A common talking point within sales teams is the role of the CRM and how sales teams use the technology.
CRMs can have misleading information, if certain information is inputted, it can show you’re hitting targets but when actually digging further, it might not be entirely accurate with regard to deals, opportunities and follow-ups. We must be careful not to rely too much on the CRM as a metric of market movement and instead look at the reality of the market. We can use advancements in technology, such as AI, to listen to calls and show the probability of deals closures.
The battle to obtain the ‘best technology’ is one that continues to prevail and many organisations suffer from bloated tech stacks that occur due to the CRO or CFO having adopted too much tech and being adamant it will deliver. Learning from technology is not just learning from new technologies, it’s also learning from the failures of previously poorly implemented technologies. The approach should be that if the tool has no use to the leaders, then it has no use to anyone. Tech should be as simple as possible and adoption goes hand-in-hand with patience. Everyone has to have patience with using new software and rolling it out, the effects aren’t going to be seen straight away.
We are all responsible for the adoption of technology within our organisations, you could have the best CRM but if there is no incentive to use it, then it’s wasted money. You can have the best training but if it doesn’t meet the needs of the business, then it doesn’t matter.
About Mindtickle
Mindtickle is the market-leading sales readiness platform, helping revenue leaders at world-class companies like Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, and Wipro, be ready to grow revenue by increasing knowledge, understanding ideal sales behaviours, and adapting to change. Dozens of Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies use Mindtickle to define excellence, build knowledge, align content, analyze performance, and optimize behaviour throughout their sales organizations. Mindtickle is recognized as a market leader by top industry analysts and is ranked by G2 as both the #1 enterprise software product and #5 sales software product.
