Catherine Mandungu is Leading the RevOps Revolution with her company Think RevOps. Catherine works with Tech Startups in the B2B sector to optimize efficiency and improve the customer journey. The company focuses on identifying and removing revenue leakage caused by inefficient processes. She founded Think RevOps after gaining operations experience in leading companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, and Hootsuite. In this Interview with TechBullion, we will hear more success stories from this innovative founder.
Tell us more about yourself and your experience so far in the Tech space?
I launched Think RevOps in 2019, after working in commercial operations at several companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe and HootSuite. Today, I have crafted my own unique operating model that takes tech startups and scale ups through a more structured, yet adaptable process that helps them transform their broken go-to-market processes into repeatable, data-driven journeys.
Think RevOps aims to optimize efficiency and improve the customer journey for B2B Tech Companies, tell us more about Think RevOps and how it works?
The customer journey is a continuous process. As the market evolves and your company, product line and technologies advances, you will need to continually improve your customer journey. It is therefore important that you create and maintain your business blueprint as your business grows to ensure that you’re at the forefront of what is happening and keep innovating your Go-To-Market operations around data and insights, process, revenue tech stack and enablement.
How big is the Revenue Operations (RevOps) market and why must businesses pay close attention to this strategic integration?
The global revenue operations (RevOps) platform market size totaled 2.7 Billion US Dollars in 2021. The market is expected to reach 15 Billion US Dollars in the next decade.
RevOps platforms help companies optimize and align their revenue engines to propel potential growth as much as possible. Why adopt RevOps?, because chances are your competitors are already integrating RevOps into their TechStack strategy.
What are the most prevalent causes of revenue leakage and how do you identify and remove revenue leakage caused by inefficient processes?
Go-To-Market processes that aren’t streamlined
There is often a disconnect between a prospect converting in your funnel to when the business development and sales teams engage with the prospect. Most common challenges are defining lead to (marketing qualified leads) MQL correctly through lead scoring; SLAs around MQLs being engaged with on a timely manner; bad qualification; and lack of handover procedures. This affects the velocity of the leads; a lot of “waste” in terms of opportunities coming through; high drop off rates during early sales stages; increasing closed loss ratio and decreasing pipeline conversion rates and win rates.
Lack of an engagement model
Often we see customer life-cycle engagement models that haven’t been properly or at all defined. Most businesses manage customers on an ad-hoc basis or with some basic activities, often missing the fundamentals of deliberate engagement strategy with the customer. They don’t meet the customers where they’re at. This means that the business will struggle in understanding their customers especially since there will usually be a lack of data gathered. If there are data points that are being gathered, the business would not know what the right leading indicators need to be to define “success”.
Tech stack mis-alignment
What we see a lot is that businesses have bought every revenue tech tool out there in hope it would solve their challenges. Especially when they have never defined their blueprint first which causes even more friction in their tech stack. Often tools are not well implemented nor integrated. They lack the right tech skills or experts to do the work, so they do a Do-It-Yourself job which causes even more friction. This causes breaking of processes and leads to poor quality of data and wasted time and money.
Lack of insights
If you don’t have the right data and insights, you cannot truly understand the customer journey. Usually the issue here is that data has been an afterthought, rather than part of the Go-To-Market Strategy.
Could you give us an evaluation and more insight into Go-to-Market Processes?
Before you even think about what tech to purchase, you should really first do an assessment of your buyer journey. If you don’t already have a use case catalog for the business, then begin with a Google Doc or Spreadsheet and list all the processes in your go-to-market kit. Consider layering your revenue operations. The first layer should be the customer journey followed by your business process and then the data flow and finally the tools or systems you have to support it.
At Think RevOps, what strategies do you have in place to drive more Revenue and achieve predictable growth for businesses?
This is dependent on what is required for the business at hand. Think RevOps first makes an assessment of the business’ go-to-market operations and recommends areas that need to be prioritized. We then put a plan together around customer journey transformation strategies, data monetization strategies and tech stack strategies.
The so-called recession is threatening and many tech businesses are feeling the impact, how could Rev Ops help?
RevOps will play a massive role for growing businesses who are navigating their way into a global recession. It is now a good time as ever to start maximizing revenue efficiency. Your customers’ will also be feeling the recession, and will start taking measures on where they can reduce costs – often they look at their tech stack.
- First, map your risk across your customer base. Having a customer engagement model especially helps you quickly identify which customers you have opportunities for expansion and growth and which ones are likely a risk for churn. Understand your revenue distribution across your customers and project the exposure you will have so you can put together an offensive strategy (rather than be defensive down the line).
- It’s important that your customers understand and can see the value of your products and/or services. Ensuring you enforce your ROI benefits becomes critical here. Some value engineering might be required by deploying your internal resources to fine-tune your products and/or services.
- Furthermore, you might want to ensure that you can provide your customers with flexibility. Think about contractual flexibility here around payment terms to improve liquidity or accepting contractual decreases for extended terms or promotional incentives.
- Increase your own internal spend control. You should also start with your own tool stack rationalization. The best way to do this is to do a stack assessment to understand your stack overlap, redefine why and where it is used in your customer journey; understand its capabilities and reduce cost where possible.
- Understand how you can drive efficiency and margins in your commercial activities. Do this by re-assessing your Go-To-market strategy and review your cost and resource allocation.
- Data is even more important in a time like this. Ensure you have a strong insights strategy to continuously measure your commercial activities. Especially being in a position where you truly connect with your insights and are data-enabled so you can quickly get to be informed and make decisions. Agility is key.
Building a successful business is not always easy, what challenges are you facing and where do you see the future of Think RevOps?
The biggest challenge is finding the right talent, like most businesses will struggle with. We are therefore changing our talent acquisition strategy and investing in programs that will help the young skilled workforce be the next generation of RevOps talent.
Think RevOps, is refining their model and value proposition so we can become a true partner and platform for businesses globally looking to operate at maximum efficiency and build a scalable and sustainable future.
Do you have any available opportunities for investors and partnerships at Think RevOps?
At Think RevOps, we are always looking at partnership opportunities with tech partners and other service providers. We welcome conversations where we can explore synergy and be successful together.
What are you currently working on and what is next on your roadmap, do you have more information for our readers today?
We are creating exciting new programs to manage RevOps and Data assessments, for businesses that just really need to look under the hood and understand their gaps in their go-to-market operations.
For more information, visit: https://www.thinkrevops.com/
