Is RevOps Merely SalesOps in Disguise?

RevOps is often viewed as the “silver bullet” to siloed decision-making and data, but most of the attention falls on sales and marketing, with teams answering to either the chief revenue officer or the chief marketing officer. 

But you can’t expect to create a perfectly cohesive operation among teams simply by renaming it. So ask yourself this question: Is your RevOps really just SalesOps in disguise? 

“If sales is still the dominant voice in your go-to-market planning and execution, you’re missing out on the potential benefits of a truly cross-functional Revenue Operations Group,” warns Sean Lane, host of Operations with Sean Lane. 

“Achieving success within these cross-functional teams isn’t easy,” Lane said. “When you have multiple internal stakeholders, it’s difficult to prioritize work across all of them. It’s even harder to move fast when you have to stop and consider what a decision in marketing might mean for sales, for example, or the ripple effects of a new sales process on customer success.”

Sean explained that RevOps managers are uniquely positioned to build, strengthen, and maintain these cross-functional relationships. “We are the central connectors of our companies,” he said. 

So, how do you develop the right types of relationships beyond sales to pull this off? Let’s explore each function.

Marketing

RevOps managers can’t just be focused on acquiring new customers. Rather, functions like customer marketing or digital customer experiences require extensive cross-functional support. 

If you’re looking for a list of potential ideas of how RevOps might be able to work with marketing, consider these: 

• Determining your ideal customer profile 
• Building firmographic and behavioral scoring
• Working on lead distribution speed to lead 
• Setting an SLA for the marketing team on the reaction time to leads. 
• Scheduling campaign planning 
• Campaign forecasting 
• Campaign execution

Use your marketing automation platform to coordinate on design, administration, marketing, spend, and budget to partner closely with your marketing customers in your organization. 

Customer Success 

Don’t make the mistake of just prioritizing sales and marketing over your post-sales teams. “Whether it’s onboarding customer success or professional services, ops partners can drive enormous value for all of these teams,” Sean said.

“The first step is to recognize the importance of the customer success function early in your growth,” says Cathy Francis, chief revenue officer at Capstreet’s Operating Executive Group. “It should have the same level of importance as sales, marketing, and product.”

The second step, according to Francis, is a successful implementation of the CS function with a designated team. “This step is historically where things go sideways. Often, companies create a customer success team without a clear plan or strategy,” she says. 

One study found that 77 percent of leaders prioritize customer experience, yet only 26 percent believe their customer-facing team handoffs appear seamless to customers. “This lack of foresight can lead to the team becoming an extended customer support team or an underperforming expansion sales team, rather than effectively enabling customer value through product usage, customer retention, upselling, and cross-selling,” Francis says. 

Here are some ways RevOps might work closer with customer success groups:

• Coordinate on key customer journey touchpoints like handoffs roles and responsibilities
• Customer health scoring
• Review renewal and retention analysis
• Contribute to the customer voice design
• Capacity planning

Product

This partnership is critical to maintaining alignment between product and the rest of the Go-to-Market teams. “They should be able to leverage the vast amount of data available in the product teams across all your different revenue teams,” Sean said. “This is especially true if you have any sort of product-lead growth environment. If your company leverages its product to drive initial adoption, for example, there is a treasure trove of data available to help your revenue team succeed.” 

Your job as a RevOps manager is to help make that data accessible, relevant, and actionable. If you find yourself in a situation where interactions between RevOps and Product have not been the norm, here are some options:

• Scheduling time to highlight product functionality to stakeholders and the entire RevOps team
• Inviting product to share and advise on pertinent data as it pertains to messaging

Finance

Finance is undoubtedly one of the closest cross-functional partners for RevOps, from annual planning to comp design to budgeting. You simply can’t run the business if finance and ops aren’t on the same page. 

Ways to incorporate finance include the following: 

• Building your company’s operating plan 
• Coordinating capacity planning and hiring 
• Comp design 
• Tech stack budgeting
• Bookings
• Establishing policies and rules of engagement 
• Cooperating with everything that’s involved in the order forms, billing, and subscription management of your company and your customers

HR Team

Due to the nature of their work, RevOps and HR managers are usually the first ones to know sensitive information. They often work hand in hand behind the scenes to ensure a good experience for all of the other employees in the company. 

“Let’s say the RevOps manager is making a big hiring push. You need to align with your recruiting team about every single hire, and the funnel that you’re building for those hires is critical,” Sean said. 

RevOps and HR can provide seamless service in the following:

• Performance management 
• New hires
• Onboarding as well as offboarding 
• Coordinating in performance review frameworks and succession planning 

Instead of looking at coordination among teams as an overwhelmingly large laundry list of individual relationships, consider this alternate perspective:

“RevOps teams aren’t there simply to seek out new efficiencies on the path to revenue,” Sean said. “We exist to serve as a center of excellence; a role model for all varieties of operational efficiency. Each cross-functional interaction you have is an opportunity to be an ambassador of that efficiency to the rest of the company.” 

Every team in the company, not to mention your customers, will get better as a result. 

For the full podcast episode, click here.