“Companies need the right technology, process, and strategy to accelerate revenue streams and efficiency.”
— Meredith Schmidt, EVP, Revenue Cloud & Solutions, Salesforce
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Diorio and Christopher Hummel. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Diorio, Stephen G., author. | Hummel, Chris K., author.
Title: Revenue operations : a new way to align sales & marketing, monetize data, and ignite growth / Stephen G. Diorio, Chris K. Hummel.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021062097 (print) | LCCN 2021062098 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119871118 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119871132 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119871125 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Revenue. | Selling.
Classification: LCC HJ2305 .D56 2022 (print) | LCC HJ2305 (ebook) | DDC 336.02—dc23/eng/20220118
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062097
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062098
Cover Images: Courtesy of Chris K. Hummel; © koosen/Shutterstock; © Ollustrator/Getty Images
Cover Design: Wiley
We are grateful to the many people who took the time to share their thoughts and experiences with us. So many people helped us along the way who have our heartfelt thanks, and that list inevitably goes far beyond the people listed here. The leading minds in the science of growth from business, academia, consulting, technology, and association worlds participated in and supported this work.
That starts with all the executives and CXOs who graciously provided such detailed insight, anecdotes, and stories. Your real-world experience is the backbone of Revenue Operations. This includes the ongoing advice and real-world perspective from our network of executives who have led Fortune 500 sales and marketing organizations, including: Toni-Clayton Hine (EY), David Edelman (Aetna), Peter Horst (Hershey), Denise Karkos (Sirius XM), Shannon LaPierre (Stanley), David Master (Janus Henderson), Mike Marcellin (Juniper Networks), Jaime Punishill (Lionbridge), Steve Shannon (Kia Motors), and Connie Weaver (The Equitable). A big “thank you” to the hundreds of other executives we spoke with who are out there fighting to add science to the art of growth. This book is anchored by research, lessons, and insights from leaders of Analytics@Wharton at the Wharton School of Business, including Professors Eric Bradlow, Kartik Hosanagar, Raghu Iyengar, Leonard Lodish, David Reibstein, and Abraham Wyner.
We loved learning from several leading academics in the science of growth over the last five years. We are grateful to receive insights, research, and education from Neil Bendle (Terry College of Business), Bobby Calder (Kellogg School of Business), Paul Farris (Darden School of Business), Dominique Hanssens (UCLA Anderson School of Business), Peter Howard (Questrom School of Business), Purush Papatla (Northwest Mutual Life Big Data Institute), Don Sexton (Columbia Business School), Dave Stewart (Loyola Marymount University), and Kimberly Whitler (Darden School of Business).
Our research would have been impossible without access to experts who have helped hundreds of businesses become more data driven, accountable, and productive, including Howard Brown, Cam Tipping, and Neil Hoyne. This also includes key friends like Ian Lowles, Bill Wohl, Rick Devine, Rob Halsey, and Anthony Johndrow and others who provided counsel on the ideas and models we built.
We drew heavily from the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), and in particular their leaders Frank Findley and Tony Pace, who are doing the hard work of proving the financial contribution of growth assets and investments.
We learned critical lessons on breaking silos, aligning revenue teams, and creating a common purpose across the organization from General Stanley McChrystal and Victor Bilgen of the McChrystal Group.
We also received generous perspective and advice from the leading analysts in the sales and marketing technology sphere, including Brent Adamson of the Gartner Group and Rich Eldh, the Founder of Sirius Decisions
This research leaned very heavily on the decades of experience from the leadership of Blue Ridge Partners, an elite go-to-market consultancy. We relied heavily on the experience, judgment, and research of Jim Corey, Carter Hinkley, Marten Leijon, Allen Merrill, Jim Quallen, Michael Smith, and Corey Torrence.
We received tremendous support and access to research and executives' perspectives from the leading associations and professional organizations in the field of growth, notably: Bob Liodice of the Association of National Advertisers, Bob Kelly of the Sales Management Association, and Earl Taylor of the Marketing Science Institute.
We are indebted to the team that sponsored and guided the production of this book, including Richard Narramore, our editor at John Wiley and Sons, and his crack editorial, production, and marketing team that kept us on task and on time, including Jessica Filippo, Deborah Schindlar, and Donna J. Weinson.
Researching a book takes a tremendous amount of analysis and digging. Heartfelt thanks to our research team that analyzed thousands of technology solutions, including Blake Brown, Robert Diorio, Jeff McKittrick, and Greg Munster.
We needed the painful and valuable contribution of our crack editing team, including Ingrid Wenzler, Adam Sirgony, and Matthew Schmitd, plus special contribution from my brilliant daughter Anna Diorio, who added elegance to our visuals and storytelling.
Of course, none of this could have happened without the personal support and encouragement of our families. They were strong enough to push us when challenges seemed insurmountable and were gracious enough to give us the space we needed when we hit our stride. We are blessed to have our spouses, Lyn and Tatiana, who provided the support, motivation, food, and “air cover” to make this book possible. Our children, Anna and Robert and Angelina, Dante, Chris Jr, and Arabella, should all take credit in this, too, for the inspiration they provide us every day.
Growth is good. Really good.
Growth elevates short-term performance. Growth has a disproportionate effect on valuation. Growth – especially organic growth – generates intangible goodwill and positive momentum among customers, influencers, analysts, and employees.
Here's the challenge: organizations too often treat growth like a disconnected, functionally driven art form rather than the interdisciplinary, data-driven science it should be.
The core revenue-facing functions – Marketing, Sales, and Service – all operate in silos. Each function is trying to do its individual job and maximize the impact of its activities on customers and revenue. Managers optimize the parts – brand, demand generation, pipeline conversion, retention rates, etc. – while coordination between the three is episodic, temporary, and heavily influenced by the personalities involved. They allocate resources as a cascade along organizational lines using historical precedents as the primary guide.
Even when this approach works, managers generally celebrate only the fact that growth happened, since they usually cannot explain why. Teams assume that someone else will take responsibility for the whole. When cross-functional collaboration happens, it requires Herculean efforts to marshal the collective troops and achieve one-time, almost artisanal objectives.
Who is ultimately responsible for coordination of key growth assets and initiatives in the business? That often falls on one person: the CEO. Because no other c-level officer typically controls more than 40% of the identified 18 levers of growth, CEOs get dragged into the nitty-gritty of optimizing all variables that cross organizational boundaries. There are a lot of these. Organizations may be built around functions, but real-world opportunities and challenges ignore those artificial boundaries.
So, we have functional experts trying to manage an interdisciplinary, multifaceted problem. This gap between the importance of growth to firm value and the limited understanding of how to achieve it creates heated discussions in boardrooms, management meetings, and planning sessions everywhere. What are we all missing?
Today we lack a system for growth.
Such systems for the back office and supply chain have already been developed over decades. It's time that we brought similar discipline, rigor, and methodology to the process of expanding our revenues. The three teams involved work hard and do their best, but somehow things just aren't clicking. The front office needs standardization and repeatability, too.
To understand how a systems-based approach to growth might work, let's look at what's happening inside each of the revenue-centric functions. To start, here are some common problems all functions are faced with:
Telling the company story, getting the offer in market, and orchestrating the customer experience. These are valuable activities that all contribute to demand generation and firm value. In a digital world where innovation, trust, and customer experience matter more, the perceived value of marketing activities has increased, yet budgets are shrinking, and the scope of the function is fluctuating.
A relatively recent invention of the twentieth century, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role has changed dramatically over the course of its short span of existence by shifting from managing media and building brands and demand in the last century to curating the customer experience in digital channels and managing customer analytics in the modern era.
At its best, Marketing should be a commercial function that delivers significant, tangible impact on the business performance of a company, affecting both revenue and valuation. Whether you're the CMO, a brand manager, or a creative specialist, the role can be exhilarating, frustrating, intellectual, administrative, strategic, creative, scientific, powerless, and game-changing – usually all of these and often simultaneously. Transformation is happening, and many fronts are moving. Ambiguity is a marketer's constant companion. Why?
Marketing leaders need to recognize that these ambiguities weigh on marketing personnel and their peers across the company. At its most impactful, marketing orchestrates – engaging with all other parts of the company, providing holistic views of the customer perspective, and amplifying the best of the organization to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Otherwise, like a decaying satellite, the marketing function will continue to appear quite sophisticated and even cool from the outside as it inexorably heads toward its own demise.
Sales teams are tasked with converting interested prospects into transacting customers, increasing revenue per account, and managing relationships to increase loyalty and trust. These activities exist at the center of any drive to expand revenues.
Sales is a powerful function. The skill sets of sales reps, account managers, and other sales personnel can vary widely, though, and often depend on the sales model, product sophistication, and buying cycle. Because sales manages the pipeline of business, it has unparalleled visibility of the upcoming revenue streams. It also represents the “last touch” before the transaction with the customer. Sales leaders leverage that control point to exercise authority in many areas beyond their official remit. The surety of that dominant position, however, is now starting to fade as sales confronts transformation in its own area.
Even where sales leaders recognize the value of other functions in driving more and/or bigger transactions, they struggle with a lack of access to full information on all the touchpoints with customers. Technology needs to be seen as more of an asset than a tool. At its peak value, sales can act as a true customer advocate, serving as the bridge between customer and company and using its performance-driven culture to push accountability across all functions to serve the customer's needs. If not, sales may find itself stranded as the king of an increasingly less relevant hill.
In the context we use for this book, service drives the customer's consumption of your product or service. This function covers activities like onboarding, activation, implementation, support, adoption, change orders, upgrades, maintenance, and many more. In most cases, these responsibilities are distributed across multiple organizations with many labels such as customer care or field service. Occasionally, the role is so important that a company will bundle many of these responsibilities into a branded, differentiated service offering like Apple's Genius Bar and BestBuy's Geek Squad.
“Service” isn't really one function but rather an amalgamation of roles from a variety of other organizations. This minimizes the institutional authority of service, even though the product consumption experience has become one of the most important factors in growing lifetime customer value. Cloud software companies do often have a function called “Customer Success” that handles much of the adoption process for complex offerings, and this function is starting to pop up in other industries that have complex implementation requirements.
The role of service has been elevated as it now commands a rising share of the customer interactions in the business, play a bigger role in revenue growth and relationship expansion, and have more direct control over the primary objectives of the business: namely, growing customer relations' lifetime value and net recurring revenue.
Service leaders come from many different backgrounds – often project management – and hold many different titles. Yet the access to customer intelligence in this “function” rivals and maybe even beats marketing's data sets. This is a new, emerging space on the org chart that is worth watching.
The three teams work hard and do their best, but somehow things just aren't clicking.
Stepping back into the CEO shoes, there are common observations from all the functions.
This book combines primary and proprietary research, a deep analysis of existing academic and corporate material in the field, consultations with world-class experts and thought leaders, and finally our own decades of personal experience as practitioners and analysts in the business world. As only teaming up an authority on go-to-market transformation and an operational executive can do, we argued over big-picture and minute details. In the end, we both agreed on what the real issue is and what needed to be done.
The foundation of the book is our primary research. This includes thousands of surveys with executives, managers, and performance professionals who manage growth in large and small businesses across many industries. When we reference our surveys, we will cite the actual survey and source document in a citation.
We also conducted in-depth interviews with over 110 growth leaders. These generally included the most senior executive responsible for growth in the business. In many cases it was the President, CEO, or Chief Operating Officer because that was the only individual who managed all the growth functions – marketing, sales, and service. In other cases, we met with executives that had been given an expanded remit to align revenue teams and resources around the customer. These executives had titles like Chief Growth Officer and Chief Revenue Officer. In some other cases we interviewed the functional leaders of marketing, sales, and services. Sometimes these executives insisted on being interviewed together because they regarded themselves as a team, not a manager. We will reference these interviews in statistics and direct quotes and will use the material for case studies about their challenges, best practices, and accomplishments.
In addition to this primary research, we made an exhaustive analysis of academic research and commercial research on the subject, which are also cited in the text. Our team comprehensively analyzed the most meaningful and relevant academic and commercial research on the science of growth. Here we were lucky enough to have the support of the leaders of the Marketing Sciences Institute, The Marketing Accountability Standards Board, The Sales Management Association, Analytics@Wharton, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and many associations and partners. These studies and academic papers are cited directly with links to the complete research reports and publications provided in the citations at the end of the book.
Finally, this research initiative drew heavily on the experiences and expertise of the world-class practitioners, academics, and experts of the Revenue Enablement Institute. These world-class experts include sales and marketing executives like Jeff McKittrick, Michael Smith, Greg Munster, Bruce Rogers, and David Edelman. They also include leading academics like Professor David Reibstein and Raghu Iyengar from the Wharton School of Business. We also were able to tap into decades of experience from experts in the science of growth including Cam Tipping, Bob Kelly, Corey Torrence, Bruce Rogers, Michael Smith, Doug Laney, and Howard Brown. All of these experts are quoted directly in the body of the book.
Our analysis of the commercial technology ecosystem was based on a comprehensive analysis of over 4,000 technologies that support sales and marketing over the past 18 months. Using the Revenue Operating System that you'll learn about in the book as a filter, we arrived at an initial list of the top 100 that we believe are transforming the commercial model and enabling the emergence of Revenue Operations, a system for growth. While this list is dynamic and will evolve over time, these initial 100 innovators are mentioned in context in the body of the book, and a full list is available on a website and research report listed in the citations.
Finally, it's important to mention that we, the authors, have obviously colored this analysis with our own background and experience. Thankfully, that experience includes senior leadership and c-level roles at growth businesses and innovators like Oracle, SAP, Schneider Electric, United Rentals, Siemens, GE, and Citigroup. Ideally, this personal history helped us synthesize our research with a more practical perspective and amplified the solutions we outline with conviction of people who have been there. We've sat in the board rooms and management meetings trying to push growth agendas. We've made the hard decisions on where and how much capital to invest in different initiatives. And most importantly, we've lived with the consequences of those decisions.
Executives and managers today are using outdated twentieth-century tools to govern and manage twenty-first-century businesses. These archaic twentieth-century management tools were built around a functional structure that sought a balance between the responsiveness of a strong local presence and the efficiency of centralized, global-scale operations. Today's reality is different, and personalized offerings delivered with the efficiency of global scale are expected. We're fighting a different battle between fragmentation and alignment. To connect the dots and layer in the science of growth, data, insight, and knowledge must be shared throughout the organization to provide them the EQ, the IQ, and the bias for actions that deliver results.
That's what this book is all about: Revenue Operations, a bold system to steadily drive growth in the twenty-first century. We'll take you through three core sections. Part I defines Revenue Operations and its impact. Part II articulates the key pillars that make up the management system and helps you decide which leadership model works best for you. Part III lays out the building blocks of the operating system for your business. Here we focus on improving the return on your technology, data, process, and team investments and on giving you a good sense of the priority capital investments you need to make. In Part IV we bring it all together with the concept of Smart Actions and provide you tools to best implement Revenue Operations for your own company.
This book will help owners, CEOs, and the heads of the marketing, sales, and service functions – the growth leaders that we will refer to as “CXOs.” This work will also help revenue-centric employees on the front line take a more systemic approach to growing their business. Furthermore, the lessons and insights inside will help large enterprises and small companies looking to accelerate growth.
We sincerely hope you enjoy Revenue Operations.