For Jasmine Powers, Founder & Owner of Jasmine Powers Multimedia, her journey began with marketing. Specifically, content. Along the way, she soon learned that to ensure the work done by content marketing was effective, businesses needed the right systems in place. She wanted the content she produced to do what it was meant to do (drive inquiries, repeat purchases, etc.) while making sure customers and potential customers are informed or engaged correctly for their stage in the Customer Journey.
Here’s a twist you weren’t expecting from a RevOps Co-op blog – Jasmine really doesn’t talk to her clients about the formal function of RevOps per se. But RevOps needs frequently arise when she talks to her clients about standardizing processes to make their organizations less crazy.
“Inevitably what happens is people say they need marketing and then I realize that everything else in the company is chaotic and now you have to go fix that stuff,” she says. “It goes into systems administration and really helping them define their plans and getting the team to communicate and define what their processes should be so that moving forward, it doesn’t have to be crazy.”
For her, cross functionality is built in! Marketing is present at almost every stage of the Customer Journey, so it makes sense. Her clients tend to be early-stage startups with a few processes in place, but without documentation or maximal adoption.
“They’re still just figuring it out,” she says. “But that’s where I come in and offer both marketing and operational support.”
She doesn’t think all people get the term RevOps.
And you know what? That’s a fair call. For those who haven’t been exposed to the term and what it means within communities like ours, it’s not necessarily intuitive. Try bringing up the term “RevOps” at your next networking event and see who gets it.
“Unless they are in a SaaS background, then they get it,” Jasmine says. “But otherwise, no. So I think, the way I define it to people is operational consulting, process improvement, organizational improvement, the things that they heard about in the corporate world and understand we need, to bring efficiencies into the organization.”
She approaches RevOps with her clients by outlining the work to be done: setting up the CRM, integration of tools, creating reporting, etc.
“That way, when I talk about it, I would just say change management, process improvement with a new name,” she says.
An organization’s leadership, priorities and internal setup will determine which ones “get” RevOps and which ones don’t. Jasmine is the proverbial fly on the wall and learns from her clients while working with them what is really being prioritized. Sometimes, a CRM admin or a sales ops department is the extent of RevOps within these orgs.
“There are other organizations that really, truly see it across the full revenue organization,” she says. “But that person is usually a CFO who really is looking at the entire business, or business operations saying, these things are inefficient.”
She’s worked for both types of organizations. Those that think having someone come in to manage ad hoc HubSpot requests from the sales team is RevOps. As well as those who look at the entire Customer Journey and lifetime value of a given customer as a cross functional goal. The best person for RevOps to report to isn’t so much about the title or the role, but about the focus and view.
“It depends on who really sees the big picture,” she says.
“If the sales guys are getting all the attention, all the focus is on their needs,” she says. “It’s building workflows or territories and the systems admin part and the sales ops part. That’s it.”
The further this goes on, the more other things slip through the cracks.
“There’s these other pieces that are not being attended to, to deliver the best experience for the customer,” Jasmine says. For example: “You know who needs to be upscaled and renewed but the team is not being armed with the training to be able to do it.”
When important customer metrics like renewals and upscaling are ignored in favor only of new business metrics, massive opportunities are lost.
“There is no loop,” she says. “They were sold and now they are your customers, but they don’t stay.”
Although she built her business from a marketing perspective, there are a number of skills she gained over the years that help her use that RevOps mindset to benefit the organizations she works with.
“I did well as a customer success person,” she says. “Somebody who is in hospitality, the type of person who wants to deliver excellent experiences for a person, will do well in a RevOps role.”
For her, it was the marketing analytics aspect that allowed her to understand, appreciate and optimize her customers’ experiences. Understanding metrics, optimizing testing and making changes is what’s going to make the difference rather than someone who can run Facebook ads.
Looking to the future
She sees a great amount of benefit when tasks can be automated. Using AI and machine learning to reduce human inputs will make everyone’s jobs easier and the data better.
“We can’t have accurate reporting if the data hygiene is terrible,” she says.
Some of the tools currently available that could be adopted more widely include things like automation of subscription renewals or other basic operational tasks that make a big difference to the bottom line. The simple steps of renewal reminders and capturing new card information get missed by some companies and their executive then wonders why customer satisfaction scores stink and renewals are a single digit number.
“It’s one thing to forget that you have paid for a subscription,” she says. “But it’s quite another thing if you’re not receiving regular communication from this app.”
Sadly, it isn’t just start ups making these mistakes.
“It’s super basic, but these are the types of problems that even, quote-unquote, larger organizations are still having,” she says.
When Jasmine is able to guide companies to better processes, she sees higher renewals, more awareness of the complete customer journey, CSS having more high-fives and departments caring about how they manage hand-offs.
“Be really clear on your customer journey,” she says. “define how you would like a person to flow through your organization.”
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Jasmine Powers is a RevOps Consultant and Fractional CMO with a focus on EdTech and Business Intelligence. She works with Seed Stage startups and helps them build out initial processes and establish baseline metrics. Her RevOps superpowers are revenue team analytics and KPIs.
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