Now that you know the different ways you can collect data and the various models you can use to measure and track that data, it's time to talk about why it's so important. Many organizations have access to vast amounts of revenue data. Data capable of maximizing their growth potential and eliminating friction, but they don't know what to do with it. Without knowing first how to capture critical data and then how to read it, understand it, and act on it, its value remains unrealized.

Let's think about a metaphorical example. Imagine owning a car, a top of the line luxury vehicle loaded down with every imaginable upgrade, but you don't know how to drive. If this were the case, that beautiful machine would just be sitting in the garage collecting dust. It'd be completely useless, a clunky obstacle that you would just have to maneuver around every day. That's what it's like if your CRM and your data collection is not refined and clear. Bridging that gap between having the data and being able to act on that data is the crucial next step in building a revenue operation strategy. Done well, rev ops allows an organization to understand what did happen, hindsight, what is currently happening, insight, and what will happen, foresight.

Of course, you aren't going to be able to magically understand all of that hindsight, insight, and foresight right away. You're not going to be able to see every gap in your process immediately. There's a learning curve. RevOps is a process, not a one and done project.

And the more you dive into the data and track your North Star metric and primary and secondary KPIs, the more you'll learn over time. As you gather more and more data over time and find more improvements and optimizations within your data model in systems, you'll become even stronger at refining your revenue strategy. You'll start to use your customer relationship management system or CRM as an extension of yourself, leveraging it to continue updating and upgrading your business. Here at RevPartners, we use maturity levels to measure this growth and represent how far a company is in their revenue journey.

There are five maturity levels. Level one is all about data. Are you surfacing the right data? Can you see the full customer journey clearly?

Level two is about foundational KPIs.

Dive in and look at those primary KPIs you chose earlier and check them against this new customer data you have available.

Are they still the right metrics to focus on?

Level three is all about tactical improvements. Can you start taking action on the data you've got in front of you? What are your foundational KPIs telling you? What have you learned?

What can you move forward on? Level four is the KPI drill down. This is where your secondary KPIs come in. Dive in and look at those partitions you created.

Are these still the right metrics to represent your customer base in your revenue journey? Did you pick correctly, or do you need to refine and optimize?

Level five is where it gets exciting. This is where you have total revenue visibility. Can you capture and visualize the entire revenue journey now? Do you have the right reporting readily available to help you pinpoint friction in real time? For the purposes of this lesson, we will go over all five of the levels, but we'll really only dive into the first two as we move through the next couple videos. Remember, today, we're focusing on building out the foundations.

We're just getting started revving that revenue engine.

Full maturity will come in later lessons. For today's examples, we're only going to be using net new revenue, the left side of the bow tie model that we discussed earlier. Like I said, we wanna start with the foundation or the house will never stand. There are many areas that we could dive in further to maturity levels, and it all gets way more complex when we begin adding recurring revenue and expansion efforts into the mix.

So we'll save that for another day. But don't worry. We will get there. Alright. So let's dive into the differences in maturity, those five levels or really those six levels if you consider an immature CRM or an incomplete revenue strategy to be level zero.

Well, what do I mean by that? An immature CRM or revenue strategy would be the one that doesn't have any clearly defined performance indicators, doesn't have the visibility into the revenue cycle or a clear picture of the friction points, and hasn't got the dashboards built out to accurately visualize the customer journey. Let's take a step back and actually look at level zero a little bit deeper. Let's take an example.

The company that has clearly identified their marketing KPIs and is tracking them, but it's tracking them in a different system.

Why would that make this an immature and complete CRM? Well, because not all of the information is in the same place. That would mean nobody has the same level of visibility.

Cross departments wouldn't have the same information as other departments, and all of your metrics then wouldn't be able to be easily compared. Not everyone would have the same level of insight. Another example would be a company that uses different definitions for deal amount between departments.

Everything would be murky. No one would be absolutely sure that they're comparing one to one if everyone's using a different equation to get to deal amount. You'll know that you're beginning to mature when you can easily surface the conversion information you're looking for, and every department consistently uses the same definitions and formulas. Basically, think about it this way. You need everyone in your department to be speaking the same language when they're referring to your revenue metrics. Because otherwise, you can't guarantee consistent responses to your questions.

So pulling your company up to level one maturity begins by organizing the data you have and beginning to create the reports and dashboards to capture everything. Let's dive in to each of the other maturity levels a little bit deeper.

At level one, you should have all the processes organized and data integrated into your CRM. At this point, you should be able to roughly visualize the customer journey from acquisition to closed deal, and you should be ready to start diving in deeper to the data you're collecting.

At level two, you'll have clearly identified and more importantly refined the primary KPIs that will measure the success of your revenue strategy.

This is the time when you should be updating, optimizing, and honing the primary KPIs you established in your KPI discovery doc to ensure you have the right metrics to drive performance.

It's at this point you should also begin to have a road map forward.

At level three, you'll begin to make improvements and optimizations to your strategy. This is when you will actually start driving business performance with the limited rev ops visibility that you've built out so far. This is the exciting point because it's when you start to really feel the results of your hard work, but don't rest on your laurels. There's still more work to be done. That's where level four comes in. Now that you've really poked around under the hood of your revenue engine and started making refinements, level four is where you'll dive in and optimize your secondary KPIs to ensure the partitions you've chosen are the right ones. This is where you again take the opportunity to check your work and refine those secondary KPIs even further to drive deeper level insights and forecasting.

Then we get to level five. Get ready to get excited because at level five, this is where you are fully able to understand and execute a revenue plan in-depth while still being able to pivot quickly based on the data. At this point, you'll be actively utilizing primary and secondary KPIs to predict future performance, and you'll be able to pinpoint revenue leakage mid cycle rather than having to review it in the rear view mirror when it's too late. As you continue to grow your revenue strategy and capture data, you'll begin to notice trends and flags.

This is what you should be seeing. It's how you'll be able to improve and optimize your strategy along the way. What do I mean by that? Well, let's take a look at this example slide.

When you're consistently tracking all your primary KPIs from sessions through to closed one revenue, you'll be able to see the areas where you actually need to dive in deeper. For example here, let's just take a look at quarter one of this year in comparison to all of last year. Our sessions have spiked more than thirteen thousand in this quarter. Do we know why?

Is it busy season, or did we launch a new product? Did we revamp our website?

What happened in quarter four that made this number rise? That's where you start digging in.

Now look over at the lead to MQL conversion metrics. Fifty nine point seven percent. That's the highest it's ever been. More sessions didn't necessarily lead to more leads. As you can see, the highest number of leads was actually in quarter two of last year. But, clearly, the leads that we're getting in this quarter are higher quality, at least by our current marketing qualification standards.

So the question that you need to ask yourself is, is that true? This number here tells me that I'd want to dive in and actually look at those leads and see how qualified they really are. Because if you look over at the deals created to deals one conversion metric, that dropped. So now we know that we have to dive in. Were leads just not as qualified as we thought? Do we need to adjust our marketing qualification criteria?

Maybe, maybe not. Because if we actually look at last year, thirty three percent of a conversion rate isn't that off. After all, quarters one and two definitely had about the same conversion rate. It spiked though in quarter three a lot and then dropped down a little bit, but quarter four is still much higher than this thirty three percent. So we'll need to look at this, take it all apart.

Is there a qualification issue?

Was it just a busy time?

Maybe it's not a qualification issue at all, but instead, these deals just hit some sort of friction point in the sales process.

What happened to cause this disconnect, this drop?

That's what you'll need to find out. And once you know that, you'll be able to refine and optimize your strategy even further. And that's the key. That's rev ops.

Consistently finding the gaps, answering the questions, and pulling the levers to keep on improving. Now you know what you're working toward, but don't get ahead of yourself. Remember, revenue operations is a process. It takes time to get it right.

But when it is done right, you can transform your organization, and it will definitely unlock the full potential of your revenue data and steer your company towards scalable growth. Now that we've gone over data and how to measure your revenue maturity and growth, and now that you've seen an example of what you're working toward, it's time to start implementing.