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The decades-long era of "growth at all costs" is over. In response, revenue leaders are building a brand new playbook for 2024.
This research aims to offer a glimpse into how the landscape for revenue operations and strategy teams has changed, and, more importantly, what new RevOps best practices will the new playbook include.
Executive Summary - Challenges and Priorities for RevOps Leaders in 2024
The majority of leaders we surveyed expect 2024 operating budgets for Sales and RevOps to either remain flat or decline relative to 2023 levels.
With this shift in resources, leaders will need to find ways to optimize costs
- especially on Sales, their most expensive team by far while still hitting aggressive growth targets. How do they plan to do it?
- RevOps Practitioners cite poor process and alignment (23%), along with data quality issues (21%), as their biggest challenges, which will force a renewed operational focus on process rigor in 2024.
- Revenue Leaders are prioritizing RevOps strategies around cost optimization and resource efficiency - including new channel partnerships, changed or optimized sales roles, and cross-functional collaboration over rapid headcount growth.
- The most critical revenue operations metrics to track, for both leaders and practitioners, are related to pipeline health: generation, coverage, and conversion. But several other metrics related to revenue retention and expansion suggest that generating more revenue from the right types of customers is a top priority.
Introduction - RevOps Survey Data
The macro trend is clear: 2024 represents a turning point for any business that relies on subscription revenue, especially in technology.
Inflation and interest rates remain stubbornly high. Investor appetite for unprofitable, growth-driven-at-all-costs companies is low. All of this creates an environment that prizes efficient and profitable growth above all else.
In this new landscape, revenue operations (RevOps) teams will play an increasingly central role in revenue generation.
Yet nearly all of the research on RevOps trends and practices tends to be backward-looking, providing a glimpse into what worked in the past.
This research aims to deliver insights into what's coming next: What do leaders expect will happen with RevOps operating budgets? What are the challenges and opportunities facing these organizations?
To gather the data, we surveyed two groups:
- First group: RevOps and sales leaders ("Leaders"), a select group of VP and C-level executives. We asked them primarily open-ended questions.
- Second group: individual contributors and team managers ("Practitioners") primarily in operations roles. For this group, we asked a mix of multiple-choice, rating, and open-ended questions.
The surveys launched in late October, 2023, and responses were accepted until mid-November. We had 95 survey responses in total.
RevOps Budget Expectations in 2024
We asked Leaders: "What changes do you expect to see with SalesOps and/or RevOps operating budgets in the next 12 months?"
Revenue leaders expressed a great deal of uncertainty regarding 2024 budgets.
The majority of revenue leaders project the same or decreased budgets (64%) relative to 2023 levels. (See Fig. 3)
This view reflects the status quo budget and hiring environment for technology companies, many of which endured hiring freezes or even reductions in 2023.
Qualitatively, revenue leaders were more nuanced in where and how operating budgets would be allocated. Several respondents shared that operations teams were highly valued, and contributed significantly to business success. They predicted RevOps budgets would increase - or at least continue at 2023 levels - accordingly.
Two leaders also shared the idea that RevOps teams would have to augment or even substitute for headcount growth as levers to influence revenue growth in 2024.
"RevOps... [is] a highly valued organization that drives a lot of improvements within the business. But with that said, we are not being given additional budget to hire right now."
- Curtis Hommes, VP of Revenue Operations and Strategy, Juniper Square
Download the 2024 RevOps Trends Report
Key RevOps Challenges for RevOps Leaders - Pipeline and Business Growth
We asked Leaders and Practitioners: "Looking ahead to 2024, what are you most worried about with respect to your business?"
The most common challenge that Leaders cited was the macro economy - a theme that appeared in about 25% of all responses.
What's more interesting is the next tier of challenges. For example, Leaders cited pipeline-related challenges (generation, velocity and reliability) in about 20% of responses. This idea is perhaps best captured by Rex Galbraith, Chief Revenue Officer of Consensus, who said "Net new business is more difficult to acquire than a year ago."
Surprisingly, only one leader mentioned customer renewals specifically as an area of concern - although this may result from ambiguity with the term 'pipeline'.
Budget constraints and proving ROI were also some of the main themes that emerged. Several revenue leaders shared concerns that budgets - either internally, or with prospective buyers - seemed to be focused more on business continuity, and less on growth.
For Practitioners, the most common challenge was poor process and alignment, followed by issues with data quality. (See Fig. 4).
While these are enduring challenges for operations teams, they are somewhat surprising because both problems are solvable, and are not related to the macroeconomic concerns shared by the Leadership group.
Perhaps a strong leadership focus on efficiency and effectiveness will lead to a renewed operational focus on sales process rigor in 2024.
"With respect to RevOps, #1 for me is their inability to quantify ROI to their contribution... Nobody trains RevOps leaders or offers them tools to quantify value to their projects. If they could have some tools or training they could justify why they need to hire another head or more."
- Matt Durazzani, Chief Revenue Officer, Olumo
2024 Go-to-Market Innovations - RevOps Leaders' New Initiatives
We asked Leaders and Practitioners: "Looking ahead to 2024, what new GTM initiatives are you considering or do you need most?"
The Leaders we spoke with shared a wide variety of initiatives for 2024.
However, the responses were nearly evenly split between new or increased activities (e.g., hiring for new sales roles) and changed or optimized activities (e.g., outsourcing digital marketing). Additionally, initiatives largely fell within four functional areas: Sales, Marketing, Partnerships and Alliances, and Product and Pricing. (See Fig. 5).
Within Sales, most initiatives were focused on changes to improve individual and/or team performance.
For example, Matt Durazzani, Chief Revenue Officer at Olumo, shared that his team was exploring a shift to a value selling rather than a feature selling approach. Rob Stanger, VP of RevOps at Vendavo, shared that his organization had planned a shift toward vertical specialization for AEs so that they can better serve as trusted partners to prospects.
With respect to Partnerships, the most common initiative was pursuing more partnerships and channel sales to drive channel-sourced pipeline. In fact, this was the single initiative with the highest proportion of responses among Leaders (12%).
Leaders also shared several initiatives related to renewals and customer success - for example, expanding measurement and insights on post-sale opportunities.
However, these efforts were often cross-functional and not necessarily owned by Customer Success teams.
Overall, the picture from leadership headed into 2024 is one of go-to-market innovation around partnerships, sales performance, and collaboration with CS and marketing.
This runs contrary to many past years when sales teams were often hyper-focused on hiring to drive scale.
"Not new, but [we're] doubling down on content, partnerships, and customer success."
- Anthony Enrico, CEO, LeanScale
Download the 2024 RevOps Trends Report
Similarly, the Practitioner group cited revamping process and enablement as their most common new initiative. This finding is consistent with the top-cited challenge from this group - poor process and alignment. (See Fig. 6).
For RevOps Practitioners, the next two most common initiatives for 2024 were focusing on renewals and retention and improved dashboarding or reporting capabilities.
The focus on renewals and retention is particularly interesting because it underscores the need for RevOps teams to understand revenue across the customer lifecycle rather than only prior to an initial sale. This finding is also consistent with the challenge of customer churn, shown above in Fig. 4.
For Practitioners, improving forecasting accuracy and improving technology and RevOps automation comprised the #4 and #5 most common initiatives. It makes perfect sense that RevOps professionals would look to make improvements in these areas, given potential budget constraints and pressing leadership challenges related to the sales pipeline.
"First, we're growing out our channel partner organization. Second, we're taking a step back and figuring out how we enable reps to achieve higher productivity through a more effective enablement tool stack. The last piece is around post-sale. With all the energy and effort that's gone into pre-sale and the forecast, we need to be doing the exact same thing on the post-sale side - so, making sure that we've got churn predictors, health scores, expansion predictors."
- SVP, Revenue Operations, B2B Saas Business
RevOps Metrics in 2024
We asked Leaders and Practitioners: "Looking ahead to 2024, what are you most worried about with respect to your business?"
Nearly all Leaders we spoke with identified pipeline health as their main objective heading into 2024. And while a healthy pipeline can be defined in several ways, common metrics among the leadership group included:
- Pipeline generation: number and/or value of new opportunities created in period
- Pipeline coverage: value of opportunities in pipeline / target value for the period
- Pipeline progression: rate and speed of converting opportunities from one stage to the next within the period
These are tried-and-true revenue operations metrics for sales and operations teams. Still, the fact that there is so much focus on pipeline health at the leadership level suggests that many sales teams are looking to execute flawlessly on fundamentals in 2024.
"[I plan to look at] New pipeline. The top of the funnel is an indicator of the overall machine. This has been the first metric I have checked for the last decade and I do not intend to change."
- Anthony Enrico, CEO, LeanScale
"Slipped or regressed deals are the key risk to holding the forecast each period, and reps don't often volunteer this bad news promptly. Going and finding it means there's time to adjust."
- Chandler Collison, VP of Sales, Mission Cloud
Download the 2024 RevOps Trends Report
Several other RevOps metrics and indicators are designed to spot and mitigate risk within the pipeline.
Similarly, the Practitioner group was focused on generating qualified pipeline (19%). Some of the specific indicators that the audience mentioned that supported pipeline generation included key steps in the sales process
- another sign of renewed focus on process rigor.
2024 Pipeline Health Monitoring - New Focus for RevOps Teams
We asked Practitioners: "Compared with 2023, how closely will you be monitoring the following signals to tell you about the health of your business pipeline in 2024?"
Understanding which opportunities in the pipeline you are most likely to win is a perennial challenge for RevOps and SalesOps teams. This challenge is likely only going to become more urgent in 2024 as new opportunities become more difficult to generate and costly to close.
The signals that RevOps practitioners plan to monitor more closely in 2024 include account engagement or activity and CRM/seller inputs. (See Fig. 8).
Account engagement or activity represents a particularly interesting set of signals for understanding deal health, and the fact that over 80% of respondents said they plan to use these signals more next year is telling.
It suggests that activity data such as email exchanges or call transcripts are beginning to gain broader acceptance as leading indicators for deal health and rep performance. It also suggests that in an era of spending scrutiny, engaging multiple contacts within an account is becoming more important than ever. This finding also reaffirms the finding in the Metrics section above regarding qualified pipeline generation.
CRM data such as opportunity stages can also provide powerful indicators for assessing deal health. While concerns about data quality persist for many organizations (see Fig. 4), a well-defined sales process combined with regular and timely CRM updates can serve as a shared foundation for assessing deals across regions, products, or other dimensions.
The only signal that RevOps practitioners plan to monitor at the same rate or less in 2024 is past funnel performance. (See Fig. 8). This may reflect concerns about over-reliance on past performance to predict future success.
Conclusion
"Necessity is the mother of invention," as the old proverb goes.
With continued uncertainty in the global economy and with operating budgets staying flat or declining for most Sales organizations, leaders are finding new ways forward.
They are prioritizing efficient growth and scale, which can be achieved in several ways: Tighter processes and cross functional alignment, enhanced channel sales and partnerships, expanded value and stronger relationships with existing customers.
And while many of these initiatives rely on better execution, they also require new approaches to measurement and reporting. For example, finding ways to examine pipeline risk in a more systematic and comprehensive way.
The future of revenue operations is bright, and 2024 is only the beginning.
