How a RevOps platform can transform professional services

Late payments. Inconsistent invoicing. Fragmented onboarding. Scope creep. A patchwork of tools that may not integrate well, leading to miscommunications and errors.

These are common (but costly) hurdles that professional services businesses deal with day in and out. But revenue operations (RevOps) tools can make your business more resistant against them. 

RevOps software is designed to help your customer operations, marketing, and sales teams work together for more efficient revenue growth. It’s not just “one more app”: Without it, your business could be missing out on revenue-generating opportunities and stunting its own growth.

If you’ve been running your business without a RevOps platform and haven’t been seeing the growth you want, it’s time to consider leveraging one in your everyday operations. Let’s take a closer look at how RevOps software helps professional services businesses and explore five of the top platform options.  

Handling manual repetitive tasks that are part of the proposal-to-payment lifecycle (like invoicing and creating proposals) takes up your team’s valuable time that could be better spent. Not to mention, handling tasks like collecting payments manually can significantly increase the risk of human error.

With a RevOps tool, you can automate these workflows and free up employees to tackle more strategic, client-facing projects that move the needle. These tools reduce admin burden on your teams and eliminate the risk of manual errors, boosting accuracy and speeding up your cash flow. 

Take C3 Evolution Group’s experience as an example. Implementing Ignition for RevOps support slashed the accounting firm’s proposal time by a whopping 75%. C3 has been able to scale its business much faster, doubling its cash flow in the process. 

Relying on disjointed tools or outdated spreadsheets for tracking pipeline, forecasting revenue, and onboarding clients can create headaches. You might end up with data silos and information scattered across systems, or you might face bottlenecks and less productivity thanks to inefficient workflows. 

A RevOps platform can help overcome these challenges—or even prevent them. 

These tools provide real-time visibility into proposal status, deal stages, and revenue projections. Your RevOps teams will know when proposals are sent and signed. They’ll be able to identify opportunities more easily, and you’ll have more accurate forecasts for confident decision-making. 

Your company’s onboarding process is your chance to make a good first impression and set client engagements up for success. Delays or a disorganized process makes it harder to build trust with new clients, potentially hurting your relationship with them from the start. 

RevOps platforms can help. With standardized onboarding tasks like contract creation and upfront payment detail collection, RevOps tools can put your new engagements on the path to long-term success. 

This software can empower you to offer faster time-to-value for your clients, encouraging them to continue their contracts and recommend your business to others. In addition to making a better first impression, a RevOps platform ensures consistent delivery that improves the client experience.

Revenue operations software benefits your internal teams, too, fostering better collaboration between your sales and delivery teams for ongoing success. 

Having client data across disconnected tools (like accounting platforms, proposal systems, and CRMs) means you’re missing out on opportunities to analyze and use it effectively. This lack of analytics can stunt business and revenue growth, even when you successfully collect data from proposals, feedback, and invoices. 

If you’re a smaller firm, you might not have dedicated team members to collect and analyze data insights. RevOps tools centralize data, helping you uncover valuable insights that improve operations, like highlighting recurring billing issues or surfacing your most profitable services. This can give you more predictive indicators of revenue or cash flow, which you can use to adjust service offerings, pricing and packaging, or operations workflows as needed. 

No matter what kind of professional services business you run, scope creep and billing delays can take a major toll on your financials. With a RevOps platform, you can use automated invoicing, billing, and payment collection to help head off issues that affect cash flow. 

You may not be able to completely prevent the occasional cash crunch or revenue gap. But RevOps tools provide built-in forecasting capabilities to help you anticipate these situations, allowing you to plan proactively and sail through them more easily.

Ignition’s Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard is one of these tools. The BI dashboard consolidates client data into one intuitive interface and gives you real-time visibility into revenue, cash flow, and proposal performance. This gives you at-a-glance insights you need to optimize your strategies and focus on your most profitable offerings.   

From law firms and bookkeeping businesses to consulting groups and marketing agencies, professional services businesses can thrive with the right RevOps tool. Let’s compare some of the top solutions on the market. 

Ignition is a RevOps platform purpose-built for professional services businesses. From capturing leads to ensuring timely renewals, Ignition automates and supports the entire client lifecycle, reducing admin headaches and guaranteeing secure year-round revenue with on-time payments.

Features:

• Proposal automation with customizable templates that reflect your brand and provide clients with a seamless experience 
• Automated billing and invoicing with upfront payment collection to ensure you get paid on time, every time
• Revenue dashboards and reporting with real-time insights for instant pipeline visibility 

Clari is an AI-driven RevOps tool with a strong focus on forecasting and pipeline analytics. Its automated CRM and forecasting features can offer valuable insights and greater efficiency for RevOps teams, but these features are designed primarily for sales teams working for larger companies and enterprises.

Features:

• Dashboards offering real-time sales pipeline visibility and in-depth analytics 
• RevAI Copilot that offers next actions for increased revenue growth
• Forecasting and deal inspections using AI technology 

Clari’s forecasting and analytics focus may offer some use for professional services businesses as far as optimizing the revenue cycle. But it doesn’t provide the whole package for comprehensive RevOps coverage. Ignition fills this void, offering integrated automated billing, client agreement management, and easy payment processing.

HubSpot’s RevOps platform is Operations Hub, a tool that provides centralized data and multiple integrations that make collaboration between teams more efficient, like programmable automation, workflow extensions, and data sync. As a RevOps solution, it could be a viable option for businesses that are already using HubSpot depending on the depth of workflow control needed.

Features:

• Complex automation with programmable capabilities using JavaScript and other technologies
• Cross-functional, customized reporting to track sales performance 
• Automated data quality tasks that clean and format CRM data for better accuracy and fewer errors 

Operations Hub may make sense for current HubSpot users. But it’s not well-suited for professional services businesses due to more generic workflow automations that are better suited for product-focused businesses. Ignition offers more flexible automations, including a HubSpot Zapier integration and custom proposals geared toward accounting, consulting, and other professional services. 

Salesforce’s Revenue Cloud is a RevOps tool with automated quote generation and approval workflows. It also offers predictive analytics and features that support more of the entire revenue lifecycle, such as accelerated contract redlining, contract creation with templates, and usage-based billing. Its complex interface is designed for bigger companies and enterprises with a larger client base. 

Features:

• Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) to optimize complex pricing and quote generation
• Predictive analytics and revenue intelligence using real-time data to gather forecasting insights 
• Billing and invoicing automation to reduce errors and improve accuracy 

Revenue Cloud may be a suitable option for your business if you’re already paying for Salesforce, but its steep price point may be prohibitive for many professional services, and its features focused on product-focused businesses may be limiting. Ignition provides a more affordable RevOps solution (and a Zapier integration with Salesforce) that’s more service-based-business friendly. 

Gong offers RevOps software that focuses on analyzing sales and customer interactions for insights. It’s designed to help companies understand and improve pipeline health and ensure more efficient cross-team collaboration. 

Features:

• Pipeline visibility that makes it easier to identify and address pipeline issues earlier 
• Conversation Intelligence for analyzing communications and generating clear insights 
• Automated forecasting using AI to produce pipeline forecasts based on internal and client interactions 

While Gong can help you gain insights that improve forecasting and performance, it’s much more limited for professional services businesses. You won’t find features for billing and proposals that service-based businesses need. Gong’s features, like call and deal intelligence and sales process optimization, are better suited for B2B sales teams. Ignition’s upfront payment collection and bulk proposal creation can provide more value to professional services businesses who are looking for an all-in-one solution.  

Most RevOps tools aren’t built for service-based businesses. Instead, they’re often designed for product-led SaaS or other sales-heavy businesses. Choosing one of these platforms can lead to operational inefficiencies, such as data silos and disconnected apps and integrations in your tech stack. 

Professional services businesses have unique needs that generic CRMs and other sales tools don’t really address, like managing recurring engagements or handling variable billing. These tools might force you to use fixed pricing, recurring product subscriptions, or simple deal structures that don’t fit your needs. 

You might also deal with common limitations, like no support for scope-based invoicing or a lack of proposal customizations. Your business needs a RevOps platform that suits your company’s unique needs—and Ignition provides that.

Ignition is purpose-built for professional services businesses, instead of being adapted from SaaS playbooks or designed for enterprise sales teams. It supports the things your service-oriented company needs for revenue growth, like workflow synchronization and flexible service offerings. 

Ignition integrates everything, from proposals and contracts to billing and payment, into a single platform, providing outstanding support for service-based businesses facing RevOps challenges. This all-in-one approach results in a streamlined client lifecycle that helps your business scale.

Relying on a RevOps tool like Ignition that’s designed for professional services businesses brings all sorts of benefits your way. You get happier clients, better revenue insights, streamlined processes, and (best of all) sustainable revenue growth. 

Ignition unifies the client lifecycle, giving you more time to focus on delivering a great customer experience. The result? More business, stronger client relationships, improved team performance, and a boost to your bottom line.