Sales Won the Deal - Here’s What’s Next for RevOps

Your team just won a new sales opportunity and signed a new enterprise customer! Now what?

Everyone loves it when Sales finally closes that deal.

Whether it’s the ring of a gong, cheering from an entire company, or the sound of a Slack or Teams notification for a company-wide announcement with a flood of emoji-filled celebration messages, there’s not a SaaS organization in the world that doesn’t get excited about a closed-won deal.

In reality, the work is only getting revved-up for RevOps. The period of time immediately following a customer’s signature on the dotted line is crucial for RevOps to ensure that all the data is in the right place to support revenue reporting, renewal forecasting and preparation, onboarding the customer, and more.

In this article, we’re going to talk about five of those crucial post-deal activities that RevOps should be taking to help elevate overall customer lifetime value (LTV).

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1. Validate and Update Deal Information in Your CRM

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Double-checking your data should be priority number one for RevOps teams. 

Whether it’s business intelligence, forecasting, or pipeline management, having the appropriate contract details from the start can save more than just time down the line. Even so, according to Zoominfo, Sales teams waste nearly a third of their time updating data fields because the information in their CRM is inaccurate.

Once a deal has been marked as closed-won in Salesforce, RevOps should have systems and processes in place to verify that all the information about the customer’s pricing and payment terms, contract dates, and product license numbers are accurate and up to date. Putting systems and processes into place can help you be more certain that the entire company has access to the right data. It can also help prevent the Sales team from spending erroneous time duplicating efforts, as well as ensure management has the most accurate reporting.

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2. Get the Right Information to the Right People

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What was once primarily a process managed by the sales team begins to cascade throughout the entire organization once a new customer contract has been won. The ability for RevOps teams to collect customer data from multiple sources and feed it into a single source of truth, such as a CRM like Salesforce, allows for greater visibility between all stakeholders.

Then, once the right people have confirmed that the appropriate data is correct, they can better communicate with the Accounting team how and when the customer should be billed and how revenue should be scheduled and recognized in the accounting system. 

SalesforceThis ensures that everyone along the chain – from Sales to Accounting – is able to properly manage subscription bookings, billing, and revenue recognition.

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3. Plan and Execute Cross-Selling and Upselling Strategies

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Cross-selling and upselling, also known as account expansion, can help you increase customer lifetime value and prevent churn. 

Once a customer has begun to trust your company by interacting with your team and using the product, you may have earned an opportunity to assist them in exploring other products and services your company offers.

RevOps teams should use their CRM, Salesforce or otherwise, to accomplish this. Here it’s important to set-up reports that pinpoint customers who have been using the product for a certain number of months. Customer Success and Account Managers should review these reports regularly to consistently identify the best windows to reach out to upsell and cross-sell customers. 

From there, RevOps teams can make this process more fluid with automation. Alerts can be built into the CRM that are triggered whenever a customer reaches a predefined amount of time of using the product. This can be used to create an automated message that gets sent to the Customer Success or Account Management team, alerting them of the potential opportunity.

These processes can help to generate incremental revenue from existing customers, and can give your team a deeper understanding of your customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors.

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4. Monitor Customer Health Scores and Scalability

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While focusing on short-term wins may be exciting, RevOps teams must also think long-term. 

That includes monitoring customer health scores closely to identify potential risks or events that could lead to opportunities for account expansion. RevOps teams should be monitoring customer health through some sort of health score to assess overall satisfaction, engagement, and likelihood to renew or upgrade. 

A common way  teams do this is by using a system known in project management as a Red, Amber, or Green Status report which is named after the colors of a stoplight. This report, also known as RAG Status, gives teams a quick visual insight into the current health of an account at any given time. Red is equivalent to “in trouble,” amber equivalent to “cautiously moving forward,” and green equivalent to “proceed as normal.”

By enabling the Customer Success or Account Management teams to track these sentiments, you can help them to predict customer retention and identify where to invest resources to improve the customer experience.

5. Analyze and Share Post-Sales Data Insights

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Each newly-won customer helps to add color the picture of how to achieve scalable growth. 

To improve the Revenue team's performance and enable them to make data-driven decisions, your RevOps team should make it simple for the right people to analyze post-sales data regularly. This data can help your company understand which strategies are working, which ones need adjustment, and which ones should be scrapped. Once you have this data, make it as easy as possible for teams within the company to share it confidently. 

There’s probably a massive trove of data to draw insights from once your team has won a new customer, an expansion, or a renewal. If your RevOps team can put the right systems in place to make sense of this data, those insights can be immensely valuable to every single team in your company, from Product Management, to Marketing, to Sales, to Customer Success, and beyond.

Where RevOps Can Grow Beyond Closed-Won

Optimizing the customer experience after closing a deal requires RevOps teams to take a proactive approach to foster a successful relationships with customers. 

The five essential activities outlined in this article are just the tip of the iceberg—aiming for a high-value renewal is always just around the corner. RevOps teams must build strong communication channels, cross-functional collaboration, and data-driven insights to support the retention of customers and revenue growth.

By doing so, your team can create a win-win environment where your customers get more value from your product, and your company can reach its goals for growth.

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