Reimagining Revenue Operations with Gen AI

Generative Intelligence, or Gen AI, is on its way to revolutionize almost every aspect of “work” as we know it, be it bringing products to life, getting them to the hands of customers, after sales support, or other corporate functions. Revenue Operations or Rev Ops, in many ways a more recent addition to the list of functions, especially in B2B tech, is a prime target for disruption by Gen AI.

A little bit about myself - I am a Sr. Director of Rev Ops at Cisco. Here is my LinkedIn profile ; prior to Cisco, I was a consultant at McKinsey, with a background in Industrial Robotics and Electrical Engineering.

Before we go too deep, what is Rev Ops, and how is it different from Sales Operations?

Sales Operations: Focuses on optimizing existing revenue streams by helping sales reps improve sales efficiency and effectiveness.
Revenue Operations: A strategic function that integrates and aligns business planning, marketing, sales, and customer success.

Rev Ops seeks to break down the traditional siloed approach within go-to-market with a more holistic approach that drives revenue growth and customer outcomes with end to end integration and optimization of data & insights, tech stack, and customer interactions.

Generative AI, with its multi-modal capabilities (text, image, voice, audio) presents a unique and never-before opportunity to optimize and reimagine workflows across Rev Ops. Even within the now-familiar hype-train, we have started seeing real and tangible examples of successful adoption of Gen AI in this space which makes it extremely risky for anyone to ignore the possibilities. In fact, once you move past the meme-generative use cases of Gen AI, Rev Ops might be one of the few areas where the hype might be real - with potential to digitize, automate, and scale capabilities rapidly with readily available tech. To highlight a few:

Data-Driven Decision Making: Siloed data architecture and the high cost of integration has been one of biggest hurdles for organizations to leverage proprietary data. Generative AI, with its context learning and real-time augmentation capabilities, enables organizations to stitch large and diverse data sources together and generate valuable insights quickly to inform decision-making. This is a gamechanger for identifying trends, customer preferences, and market dynamics, which leads to more accurate business plans, investment allocation, forecasts, and targeted strategies.
Dynamic Personalization and Targeting: AI can create hyper-personalized content and recommendations for customers, lowering customer acquisition cost, improving conversion rates, and ultimately resulting in higher customer satisfaction. RevOps teams can tailor their approaches to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations.
From Enablement and Automation to Redesign: This one is not new - automating repetitive tasks through process automation has been around for a while. What Gen AI adds is the ability to learn from tasks across teams to redesign entire workflows. We are no longer talking about reducing the number of steps in a workflow- we are squarely in the realm of streamlined workflows across functions, and automated agents that works side-by-side with humans.
Enhanced Sales and Marketing Collateral: AI tools can generate high-quality sales and marketing materials, such as enriched product descriptions and demos (with images, video, and audio), and email campaigns, quickly and consistently. This enables teams to present a more compelling and personalized story for their brands across diverse buyer personae quickly and at-scale.
360 degree customer view, scoring, and qualification: Advanced algorithms in generative AI can analyze data from multiple sources to generate a true 360 degree view of customers, enhancing lead understanding and quality, enabling sales teams to prioritize efforts dynamically.

In the following articles, we will take a closer look at how these capabilities and use cases come together across the 4 pillars of Rev-Ops: Planning, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success.