How can the Revenue Operations team benefit from Self-Service Analytics?

Self-service analytics is a powerful tool that can help Revenue Operations (RevOps) teams make data-driven decisions and optimize their revenue strategy. By giving team members access to data and the ability to analyze it on their own, self-service analytics can save time and resources while improving the accuracy and effectiveness of revenue forecasts.

Here are some specific examples of how RevOps teams can use self-service analytics platforms:

Alignment of business functions

Revenue operations align the efforts of various business functions such as sales, marketing, customer success, and account management to improve pipeline progression and convert opportunities to revenue successfully. Self-service analytics can analyze data sources across these business functions to provide all teams with a 360-degree view of pipelines and accounts. For example, using insights on customers with high renewal rates, sales reps can identify upsell opportunities whereas account executives can assess future orders and invoice processing. This way RevOps teams can ensure increased collaboration, transparency, accountability, and growth in profits.

Opportunity and pipeline monitoring

Self-service analytics can provide clear visibility of the pipeline and the status of opportunities in its various stages. RevOps team can track opportunities and win rates across various dimensions such as products, regions, time periods, and deal sizes. They can identify bottlenecks and monitor the health of the pipeline continuously and effortlessly. This ensures that no opportunity is wasted and efforts are prioritized based on real-time insights.

Revenue metrics tracking

Self-service analytics can track important revenue metrics such as annual recurring revenue, cost per acquisition, average revenue per user, days sales outstanding, and revenue backlog. These metrics help RevOps team to track revenue growth across products, channels, geographies, and customer segments. Empowered with such important insights at their fingertips, RevOps teams can allocate resources better, identify issues earlier and forecast revenue in an accurate manner.

Customer retention

The role of RevOps team does not stop at deal closers and customer wins. The real challenge is to keep winning customers over again and again, especially in the subscription era. To ensure recurring revenue and measure customer adoption, RevOps teams can use self-service analytics to track churn rate, renewal rate, customer satisfaction scores, customer lifetime value, and customer retention rate. This can help teams segment customers, create targeted offerings and improve customer experiences at various touch points.

Revenue forecasting and growth

Self-service analytics can uncover patterns, highlight trends, and drive accurate revenue predictability by analyzing real-time data. RevOps teams can not only track their accounts and win rates but also find new ways to grow revenue. The existing revenue data can be easily analyzed to identify new leads, uncover emerging customer behavior patterns, and build new revenue models that appeal to target customers.

How can RevOps teams get started with self-service analytics?

Gather and organize data:

The first step in using self-service analytics is to gather all of the relevant data that the team will need to analyze. This can include data from product SKUs, order management systems, invoice and payment portals, and revenue metrics. Once the data is gathered, it should be organized and cleaned to ensure that it is accurate and easy to work with.

Choose the right tools:

There are many different self-service analytics tools available, and it's important to choose the ones that are best suited for your team's needs. Some popular options include MachEye, Tableau, Power BI, and Looker. Consider factors such as cost, ease of use, and the types of data and analysis that the tool can handle when making your decision.

Train team members:

Once the tools are in place, it's important to train team members on how to use them effectively. This includes not only how to navigate the software, but also how to analyze and interpret the data. It's also a good idea to establish best practices and guidelines for using the tools, to ensure that everyone is on the same page and working with the same data.

Create dashboards and reports:

One of the key benefits of self-service analytics is the ability to create customized dashboards and reports that can be shared with the entire team. This allows everyone to see important metrics and insights in real-time, and make data-driven decisions.

Continuously monitor and optimize:

Self-service analytics is not a one-time solution, it should be a continuous process. RevOps teams should continuously monitor their pipelines and accounts, and use the data they gather to optimize and improve their efforts over time.

By following these steps, RevOps teams can effectively use self-service analytics to drive better results and make more informed decisions.

In summary, self-service analytics platforms give RevOps teams the ability to track and analyze data in real-time, allowing them to make data-driven decisions that can improve the effectiveness of their revenue strategies, understand how different channels and revenue models impact sales, gain insights into the pipeline progression and revenue backlogs and identify opportunities to increase wins and shorten sales cycles.