Navigating Buyers throughout the Customer Journey
B2B buyers live in a B2C world where the customer experience has become the predominant factor in the decision-making process. This places renewed emphasis on how to best organize and align our customer-facing resources to execute against the buyer journey and create a clear competitive advantage.
As the Steward of the buyer journey, RevOps is responsible for continuously updating the buyer journey and ensuring radical alignment with all customer-facing processes across the customer lifecycle. With a clear understanding of the stakeholders, buying activities and key milestones at each stage of the buyer journey, Revenue Operations helps define the right resources, sales activities and tech/tools to deliver a superior customer experience at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
“We don’t have to be smarter than the rest; we have to be more disciplined than the rest”
RevOps executes activities against the buyer journey to drive pipeline progression
Buyer Journey
Stakeholders in the buyer journey include the specific titles (e.g. VP, Talent Acquisiton, Director, Legal Compliance, Category Manager, Indirect Procurement) which have any influence over the buyer journey (e.g. awareness, consideration, decision, expansion).
Activities in the buyer journey include those activities conducted by the stakeholders which have any influence over the buyer journey (e.g. awareness, consideration, decision, expansion).
Milestones/expected outcomes include the outcomes achieved by passing key gates at each stage of the buyer journey (e.g. downselection to 3 finalists after a review of RFP responses).
Enterprise Sales Process
The appropriate investment in an enterprise sales process ensures customer-facing resources are conducting activities which supports the buyers' requirements and meets their expectations at each stage of the buyer journey.
The appropriate investment in technology / tools (e.g. software, templates, playbooks, thought frameworks, etc) improves the efficiency and/or effectiveness of customer-facing activities across the buyer journey.
The appropriate investment in a well-defined model to engage subject matter expertise ensures resource allocation decsisions are proportionate with the expected returns of customer-facing activities.
Sales Cadence
A sales cadence is a series of scheduled events designed to review customer-driven activity (e.g. opportunities, projects, service requests) with customer-facing individuals / teams to properly stage the buyer activity, update the pipeline and reprioritize resources and effort as needed.
A sales forecast process is a series of scheduled events designed to update the revenue plan based on time-based commitments across the sales pipeline.
The Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is the single source of truth for all customer data which enables a better customer experience through peronalizaton at scale.