Source: John Willey & Sons, Inc.
“Revenue operations” has been a notable topic of conversation in the B2B world for the past few years.
Interest in revenue operations has been increasing because astute business leaders have recognized that revenue growth results from a combination of several interdependent activities that should be treated as components of a larger revenue generation process. The objective of revenue operations is to manage the entire revenue generation process holistically.
There is a fair amount of literature about some aspects of revenue operations. For example, much has been written about the growing number of companies that have created a C-level “chief revenue officer” position to manage most or all of the company’s revenue-generating functions.
Until recently, however, most of the published literature has not addressed revenue operations in a comprehensive way. A book by Stephen G. Diorio and Chris K. Hummel attempts to fill this gap. Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales & Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2022) provides a detailed discussion of revenue operations as a holistic growth management system.
Stephen Diorio and Chris Hummel are well qualified to write about revenue operations. Diorio is the Executive Vice President, Growth Strategy at Green Thread, a B2B practice focused on helping companies achieve more sustainable, scalable, and profitable revenue growth. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Marketing Accountability Standards Board and the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative.
Chris Hummel is the President of Green Thread and has been a two-time Fortune 500 CMO. He has also led sales, marketing, product, and digital teams at world-class companies like SAP and Oracle.
What’s In the Book
Revenue Operations is structured in four parts. Diorio and Hummel use the Introduction and Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) to lay out the business case for a new approach to managing revenue growth, and they pull no punches when describing the current approach.
“. . . organizations too often treat growth like a disconnected, functionally driven art form rather than the interdisciplinary science it should be. The core revenue-facing functions – Marketing, Sales, and Service – all operate in silos. Managers optimize the parts . . . while coordination between the three is episodic, temporary, and heavily influenced by the personalities involved . . . Even when this approach works, managers generally celebrate only the fact that growth happened,, since they usually cannot explain why.”
The authors argue that companies need a new system for managing the revenue cycle, and they call that system “Revenue Operations.”
According to Diorio and Hummel, Revenue Operations has two components – a management system that aligns the people in a company’s revenue teams, and an operating system composed of technology, processes, and data.
In Part II of the book (Chapters 3-5), the authors identify and discuss the six “pillars” of the Revenue Operations management system. Chapter 5 discusses the three most common leadership models used for Revenue Operations.
The Tsar – The company consolidates decision-making and operational control of all revenue-related functions under one leader.
