There exist numerous definitions of Product-Market Fit (PMF), but they all boil down to the simple notion that you build something and customers are willing to pay for it. 

PMF is not a binary state, it is a spectrum. Getting closer to the right end of it is a real challenge that can make or break your company. It also requires a great deal of alignment among teams to reach it. The client-facing revenue teams (Marketing, Sales, CS) depend on the Product team to sell and market the product whereas the product team relies on the insights from revenue teams to keep building the right thing. 

Below we list 6 practical ways RevOps can make Product-Market fit inevitable for growing companies

1. Customer Journey Mapping

Your product might be brilliant but if you don't understand the customer journey then you miss a great opportunity. This is where the Customer Journey Mapping comes into play.

At the start, this will be hard. You need to think like your customer:

• When does the client notice they have a problem?

• What channels will they consult to find a solution?

• What is their preferred way of communicating?

• How quickly will they make a purchase decision?

• What is important for them to make a decision?

• Who is making the decision?

This is just a selection of many questions that help to think of your customer journey. 

2. Tech Stack & Data Foundation

Less is more. At the start, you don't want to build a complex system but what you want is to build a solid foundation. This will help be the groundwork for more complex projects e.g. PQLs (product qualified leads), customer health score, or a customer 360 view.

We often get consulted to work on such complex projects. But then we actually have to clean up the data foundation to allow for these value-adding projects. Our tip is to invest from the start in a solid data foundation. 

You can consult an expert to help you with that. This does not need to be a massive project, you just need the best practices tailored to your business to get this right. An experienced RevOps professional can help you out. You can check out RevOps-as-a-Service offering.

3. Setting up Feedback Loops

Product-Market Fit has two components in itself, which you might have guessed right, are Product and Market. At this stage, most companies have also Marketing and Sales units and likely are starting Customer Success (CS). Ironically enough, many of them focus on the Product part only ignoring the data and information from the other side of the equation, which is the Market.

Sales and CS have piles of valuable data and drown in feedback. They talk to your customers day in and day out. It is a truly invaluable resource.

The challenge is to organize the capture and sharing of all the information they accumulate. RevOps task here is to help to: 

1. keep proper track of all the relevant information such as appreciation, frustrations, feature requests, bugs, suggestions, etc.

2. ensure feedback is delivered to the right pair of eyes and can be followed up

3. (bonus point) unlock new data points and insights for all

This feedback loop is a source of information that will fuel product development in the right direction driving you closer to a stage where you can start scaling your business.

4. Aligning Pricing with Your Goals and Targets

Getting the pricing right at the start is hard. You have to consider the competitive landscape, the cost of not doing anything, aligning features to value, consumer psychology, and the list goes on.

This requires working across Sales, Marketing, CS, and Product to get to the right price. Here the feedback loops discussed above become very important. RevOps is in a great position to facilitate the process. 

Tip: Don't be too rigid. It is a time of trial and error. You can change the price on a monthly or quarterly basis. Nothing is stopping you. 

Some founders we work with are worried about locking in the clients at too low a rate. This worry is not really justified. You can always fix clients that are on favorable contracts later on. Remember, we do this trial and error to find the optimal pricing for the Product-Market Fit.

5. Creating shared data infrastructure for Product and Commercial

Eventually, you will sit on a small mountain of valuable data that needs to be exposed, analyzed, and interpreted. These insights become crucial in navigating product development ensuring that product vision, development, and distribution align. 

The challenge however is to find the right person to interpret the data. At this stage not all companies have dedicated data analysts, sales operations are already too busy with QBR (Quarterly Business Review) and product managers might lack understanding of the commercial side. 

RevOps is perfectly positioned to bridge the data interpretation gap. Most likely it is one of the few operational roles in your organization that can speak the Product and Sales languages fluently. Some of the questions they might help with are:

• What are the sales by product vertical?

• What is the value of open/won/lost opportunities related to a feature or product?

• What products have the highest win rate?

• What features should we prioritize based on open pipelines/requests?

• Which customers are about to churn based on feature utilization?

• Which features should we stop offering?

• Which features are being underutilized but could provide a lot of value?

• Which features might be utilized heavily that could lead to an upsell?

• Which customers based on feature usage could benefit from training to improve adoption?

6. Enabling Teams Alignment

There are many memes created about Sales<>Product relationships and it feels like by now we should have learned the lesson. But in RevOps we still see these problems happening all across the board:

Sales

  - keep asking for new features
  - overpromise on product features or value
  - think they are unable to sell with the existing features
  - offer custom features
  - keep asking the same questions

Product

- are unaware of revenue goals and strategy
- build new features without clear revenue goals in mind
- lacks resources to create and distribute product resources (roadmap, tutorials or use cases)

RevOps could facilitate the alignment between the teams by:

• working with Product to recurrently create documentation and materials 

• running walk-in Q&A sessions for commercial teams

• facilitating the exchange of information between the commercial teams

Want to learn more about PMF, here are some reads and books we recommend

• A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit

• The Only Thing That Matters by Marc Andreessen

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries