RevOps Maturity Model for SaaS Tech businesses

SaaS Tech businesses have unique RevOps requirements to enable them to continuously grow ARR and meet revenue goals. 

By working with over 100 SaaS Tech businesses over the past 6 years and continuously researching and applying SaaS best practices, AE CRM team's has developed a RevOps Maturity Model which currently includes over 60 key areas across 6 RevOps Motions. 

A healthy RevOps function should consider the entire customer journey and the experience that prospects have with your business from the moment they land on your website for the first time to becoming a customer.

AE CRM works with SaaS businesses to empower 6 RevOps Motions: Awareness - Consideration - Decision - Onboarding - Renewals - Upsells. 

Awareness Motion 

The first motion of the RevOps Maturity Model is Awareness and most processes at this stage sit within the Marketing team. This stage corresponds to the moment prospects find out about your brand through various channels like Organic, Social or Paid. 

The Awareness stage is arguably the most difficult stage for the RevOps function, as there are so many key RevOps areas to consider from lead scoring to ensure we identify hand-raisers that should potentially speak to the sales team to lead routing and ensuring leads are quickly and correctly assigned to the right departments. 

Consideration Motion 

The Consideration motion is where your sales team starts to engage with your leads and this is another opportunity to create an amazing customer experience. 

Many of our customers leverage SDR teams to qualify leads and ultimately handing them over to Account Executives. 

It is critical to consider the stages that leads need to go through at this stage from the moment an initial discovery call is scheduled, up to the customer signing their contract. AE CRM works with customers to define what sales stages they should consider part of their sales process, and most importantly how automation can be leveraged to keep prospects engaged and reduce the sales cycle. 

Decision Motion 

This motion marks the end of the customer's journey with the sales team, and it's critical to have in-depth visibility at this stage into critical areas like Forecasting, but also ensure the sales teams is equipped with the right process and tech to fulfil critical closing processing like CPQ (Configure - Price - Quote).

Once the decision motion is completed and the customer signs their agreement, we can now celebrate as the hard work was completed, right? Well, not quite - we actually need to start delivering value to the customer! 

The hardest job really starts when your client starts their onboarding journey with your company, as they start interacting with several new departments and stakeholders like your Customer Success Team, Account Management.

Onboarding Motion 

A make or break point in your customer journey is when your client starts their onboarding process with your company, as they start interacting with several new departments and stakeholders like your Customer Success Team, Account Management.

During the onboarding process, the AE CRM team sees probably the most friction. It is critical to consider what are your company's onboarding stages, and assess when and how you can automate processes across each of these stages. 

The last thing you want to happen is for all the new members of your team to start reaching out to the new customer at the same time, and even worse ask for the same information which other teams have already collected.

By building the right processes, each team should feel empowered by the knowledge collected by other departments, and filling in the gaps required to onboard your customer should happen almost automatically through automated emails and forms. 

Renewals Motion 

Increasing ARR relies heavily on being able to renew successfully your customers. If you have the right processes leading to the renewal point, this should be just a formality for your customers. 

There are many critical RevOps key areas in the Renewal motion, but a few stand out including customer health. At any given point in the customer journey, your company should have an overview of how happy your customers are. AE CRM always advises that customer health is treated almost like a lead score, where multiple criteria have a contribution in determining the overall customer health. 

No matter the customer size, and whether the customer receives a low, mid or high touch service, your company should constantly find ways to gather customer feedback and where possible automate this process using tools like feedback surveys. 

Upsells Motion 

Upsells are a critical part of your overall ARR growth, and you should definitely give this motion the attention it deserves. A common theme we notice when discussing with GTM leaders about upsells is the process tends to organically happen, rather than a lot of strategic thinking being put behind it. 

AE CRM advises our customers to have a dedicated Upsells Sales Process and assess what are the right stages for this process for their business. For organisations that reached a sophisticated RevOps maturity, upsells opportunities flagging should be automatic where internal systems are connected to HubSpot and flag when customers should upgrade or purchase new products.