For many organisations, siloed departments remain a prevalent challenge, inadvertently blocking the path to an optimised revenue operations set-up by adding friction, miscommunication and at times, missed opportunities.
When marketing, sales, and customer service teams operate in isolation, they create data gaps, duplicate efforts, and, most critically, deliver inconsistent customer experiences. The knock-on effect this has on the revenue operations isn’t always realised until there is a need to report to the board or someone digs deep into the data, by which point, it’s often too late.
It’s something The Future Laboratory targeted as a key objective when looking to improve internal dynamics and unlock the opportunity for growth - unifying the marketing and sales team to improve how they work together.
"I think before we worked in silos. Nowadays, we're working sideways, it's much more enjoyable. The way we work now is completely different to how we used to work five or seven years ago." Rodrigo Tobal, director of marketing at The Future Laboratory
Disconnection, isolation, silos; however you want to describe core business functions working alone, it creates a myriad of problems for the overall view on the customer journey and the source of revenue.
With data often fragmented between systems, understanding how a lead comes into the business and moves through the various stages can be tough and can take far longer than necessary if the data isn’t well organised. Even integrations don’t always fix the issue, and a common scenario is contacts and leads being generated via marketing platform, being passed to sales after a few interactions and then never to be seen again by marketing as they move into a separate CRM.
Not only does this create issues around the source data and actions that convert the lead into a customer, it can also be the cause of credit misattribution. While you might all be playing for the same team, misattribution is damaging if a department needs to understand revenue contributions in order to create budgets and request funding for the business.
With data all in one place, you can consider different attribution models that take into account different actions within the funnel, for example, U-Shaped attribution, which more heavily weights the first and last touch of a customer journey and splits the middle-touch points more equally. Or linear attribution models, which give equal credit to each touchpoint in the customer journey. It’s only possible to implement the right model for your business if you have the data to support it.
Further to this, if the leads aren’t being handed between departments (forwards and backwards) at the right time due to miscommunications, then it can further lead to reporting issues and missed opportunities.
When teams don't share information or align on messaging, customers can receive disjointed communications, leading to frustration and a lack of trust. Efforts can also either be duplicated or just entirely different, leading to potential inefficiencies and once again, missed opportunities.
"Prior to [using] HubSpot, the difference in sales and marketing was that marketing would do one campaign, and then the sales team would have their cold list of businesses that they would go after. Every sales rep would have their 50 or 100 brands per month that they would just be trying to hit up cold. And that was what happened. And then any leads that came through were a bonus.” Angus Cross, head of business development, The Future Laboratory
When you consider that RevOps aims to align people, processes, and technology across marketing, sales, and customer success, it’s easier to understand why sharing data and communicating strategies should be a no brainer.
For The Future Laboratory, removing friction between the marketing and sales teams was a day-one priority. While their relationship was already robust, "there were frustrations with how data was flowing between systems and how data was being attributed."
By consolidating the tools and platforms being used, so that data flows from marketing to sales to finance and beyond, a single source of truth is created and the way that data is attributed and reported on becomes transparent and much more accessible.
Goals are then easier to align and agree on and how this is reported back to the business becomes a more strategic conversation. Furthermore, it also paves the way for collaborative process mapping and implementing clear handoff protocols between each department. In doing this, there is also a far greater opportunity to use automation between each stage of the customer journey, both in marketing activities and nurturing and in sales processes.
Even when every department and function is working well together, the journey doesn’t stop there. It’s a process of continuous improvement, optimisation and understanding how the data being gathered sets out future success.
In an increasingly competitive market, the ability of an organisation to align its revenue-generating functions is no longer a luxury but a strategic imperative. By fostering a culture of collaboration, supported by unified data and streamlined processes through RevOps, businesses can move beyond siloed frustrations to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, effectiveness, and, most importantly, sustained revenue growth.