Building a sales engine boils down to a few principles. Predictability, scalability, and repeatability. Can you run a process and be confident in the outcome? Can you do it again and again? As business expands and sales grow, can you maintain the same level of efficiency, i.e., keep costs in check without being constrained by your current structure?
Revenue operations (RevOps) strives to solve these challenges by putting people and processes in the right places to succeed. It’s a popular methodology for inside sales-driven companies, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors. As companies grow, it’s nearly inevitable that the teams most vital to continue growth become increasingly siloed from each other. At the very least, communication between different teams becomes more inefficient.
A strong Revenue Operations function unifies these groups into one team. And it works just as well for the outside and field sales crowd wearing hard hats on job sites or scrubs at providers’ offices as it does for those wearing hoodies in tech.
As competition grows in the field, outside sales teams must adapt their strategies. What began in tech and inside sales is not more than applicable to outside sales. It’s the way forward.
Build Your RevOps Engine with RepMove
In SaaS, RevOps unites sales, marketing, and customer success under one roof. There’s no guessing. Teams are aligned. Everyone uses the same dashboards. Everyone targets the same revenue goals.
Most field sales leaders aren't buried in tech stacks and CRM dashboards. They’re simply trying to understand how many stops their reps are making. What customers they’re visiting. How they can increase numbers.
Revenue Operations solves for all this. And so much more.
Territory planning and strategy. Lead management. Deals. Real-time visibility. Centralizing customer interactions. It streamlines communication between inside and outside teams and eliminates revenue leakage.
A modern Revenue Operations field sales tech stack does not require a large operations team or data scientists. But it does need thoughtful construction upfront. Connect the dots, standardize processes, set clear goals, and watch your numbers climb. Here’s the playbook.
Disconnected spreadsheets and notebooks massively limit your revenue potential. But when outside salespeople hear Customer Relationship Management (CRM), they shudder. For good reason, mostly.
The large legacy CRMs were not made for them. They were made for inside sales. They’re complex to set up and run, but more importantly, add no value to reps on the road. They slow reps down.
A field sales CRM is different. It is mobile-first. Its design is not only simple and easy to use, but actually provides value. Reps quickly log notes and action items from sales visits. They create optimized routes and territory templates. Their tool shows them what customers need to be visited. Managers and leaders see everything in real-time in the CRM’s web interface.
Investing in and building a CRM that works for the field is step one. It’s also likely not nearly as expensive as you might imagine.
Many field reps simply call on the same customers time and time again. They drop everything for non-urgent issues. Why? Because that’s their comfort zone. Prospecting face-to-face unfortunately results in face-to-face rejection. So they find a routine and stick to it.
These reps need direction and motivation to go out and create new revenue opportunities. A tool like RepMove allows leaders to import and automatically assign leads. It makes it easy for reps to build a sales route and then filter for prospects in close proximity to their planned visits. It provides the reporting management needs to ensure their teams follow-up on new leads.
Putting this system in place might not be comfortable for everyone, but the revenue it creates will be well worth the growing pains.
Reps that drive from one side of town to the other, back and forth, waste an incredible amount of time that should be used in front of customers and prospects. Route planning tools use real-time traffic data to create optimized routes that save time they can then fill with extra visits. Connect route planning to CRM data? That’s where the magic happens and money gets made.
Assigning customers or leads to reps and building sales territories often creates an administrative headache that managers end up putting off. A territory management tool eliminates this pain. Create logical assignment rules, import accounts, and automatically build territories, route leads, and assign customers based on your criteria.
It’s a lot tougher to grow something if you aren’t currently measuring it. Of course you have your main metrics, such as quotas, total sales volume, or customer retention rate. But what underlying numbers get you to these goals more effectively? How are you tracking toward your numbers and how can you take corrective steps to ensure you hit them? Answer: Create key performance indicators (KPIs) for your reps. Here are good metrics to start with:
Track metrics and talk through them weekly. Build this discipline into your process and numbers are bound to climb.
RevOps doesn't stop when the deal closes. What happens after the PO lands? Are your customers calling your outside sales rep every time they have an issue even though you have a team for that? Probably. Are reps spending time running around trying to help them when they should be out selling? Also likely.
A post-sale feedback loop and hand-off process eliminates this revenue vampire. Create clear boundaries between teams. Make sure customers are crystal clear on who their support is and that reps pass them off to the right team. You might be shocked at how much time they’ve been wasting and revenue they’ve left on the floor.
Put a communication system in place, ideally one connected to your CRM, so that these inefficiencies get caught immediately and everyone is doing the job they were hired for.
Grit and charisma can only take outside sales so far. Structure drives real growth.
Revenue Operations will never replace the hustle outside sales requires. What it will do is ensure the hustle isn't wasted.
RepMove was built to scale the hustle. It gives reps the tools they need to be more effective and managers the visibility they need to lead. It’s a RevOps engine built for the field. Try it out free or get a demo.
