5 Signs Silos Are Killing Your RevOps Strategy

RevOps = Silo-Breaking

When it comes to implementing a RevOps strategy, there’s usually a lot of focus on the goal of alignment across your go-to-market functions. The reason for that is simple: when your revenue team is siloed, it causes gaps to form along your customer journey. Those gaps are then felt by your customers, resulting in higher churn rates and decreased LTV.

 Silo Syndrome is a real problem for many SaaS companies. RevOps exists to break down those silos and create unified, cross-functional teams all tracking towards the same purpose.

Think about some of the challenges you’re facing in your role right now. How many of them are a result of silos that have formed as your company grows? Here, we’ll talk about 5 signs you should start breaking those silos for the sake of your revenue goals. 

1. Information Hoarding 

Nobody wins in the face of information silos; not your company and definitely not your customers. As companies grow, their go-to-market functions often become increasingly siloed as roles become more specialized. This results in information hoarding among teams that probably aren’t thinking much about whether that data could help alleviate friction somewhere else in the customer journey. 

One thing we’ve learned from working with SaaS companies to implement RevOps and break down silos is that these behaviors are rarely intentional. Before revenue operations, most go-to-market teams paid little attention to what went on outside their function. Still, the impact is what matters and the value of a RevOps strategy is that it helps ensure data is accessible to everyone on the revenue team.

2. Lack of Cross-Functional Collaboration

Do you hesitate to collaborate with other teams for fear of encountering bottlenecks? You’re not alone. A decrease in cross-functional collaboration is another unfortunate symptom of Silo Syndrome. 

When your teams are siloed, it’s extremely difficult for them to work together towards your company’s revenue goals. What ends up happening is that each go-to-market function becomes focused on their own initiatives, with little idea of what other teams are working on, or how those activities fit into your organization’s holistic RevOps strategy. 

In order for your revenue team to be truly effective, there needs to be certainty around what the big picture goals are and what work is being done to meet them.

3. Use of Misalignment Language

If your teams—or even individuals within the same function—don’t feel aligned, you’ll hear about it. From what we’ve seen, language that suggests a lack of confidence in another team is extremely common.

Another sure fire sign that misalignment language is a problem, is when it’s spoken in casual terms. When “not knowing what other teams do” is referenced lightly or shrugged off, Silo Syndrome is already setting in.

Misalignment causes frustration across the revenue team and makes everyone less effective. The only way to drive a holistic strategy for your business is to rally everyone around shared revenue goals. Whatever your North Star is, it has to be the incentive that’s pulling everyone in the same direction. 

It’s also worth noting that speaking a shared language across your organization is an important factor when it comes to alignment. Even if you think Marketing and Sales are in agreement about their KPIs, if they’re talking about them in different ways, it’s likely to cause friction sooner than later. 

4. Internal Competitiveness 

Competition is healthy, but it can also be misplaced. If your go-to-market teams are locked in competition with one another, there’s going to be a lot less focus on winning against your actual competitors in the market. 

This happens a lot—particularly in the hyper-competitive SaaS industry—because of a siloed mindset. People want to get credit for every win instead of looking at them as wins for the company as a whole. When people lose sight of the fact that everyone in your organization is on the same team, that’s also a sign of Silo Syndrome. This creates a culture that’s less about collaborating to hit revenue goals and more about vanity metrics and validating individual teams.  

5. Team-Based Identity 

Regardless of what team you’re on, you should be facing every success and challenge as one, unified revenue team. Our CEO, Jen, explained this idea best when she called out the silos inherently built into traditional org structures. Sure, everyone has their role, but when it comes down to it, we’re all on the same team. Silos make it easy to forget that. Once go-to-market teams are able to truly break free from the “sales vs. marketing” mindset and be intentional about understanding the customer journey from end-to-end, that’s when they’ll be most effective, most creative, and most impactful to revenue.