Since the research interviews were conducted in late 2020, it is interesting to look at the response to this question about the future of RevOps and see which predictions came true and which we may still be waiting on. The exact wording of the question back then was: 'Where do you see RevOps headed in the next year? Next 5 years? Is it a fad?' The fad question is also less relevant now, five years later during editing, as RevOps does still exist!
Hopefully, the positive predictions came true, at least for companies that have been practicing RevOps since 2020, creating a good chance that companies starting to adopt RevOps now will experience the same benefits in the future.
The questions analyzed for this future of RevOps chapter:
- Can you talk about how RevOps may or may not thrive in the current economic conditions?
- Where do you see RevOps headed in the next year? Next 5 years? (this blog)
- What is RevOps content you wish existed that could help people? (may not be a full blog)
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Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
- This is a draft, which is not exceptionally clean, clear, and concise writing yet.
- Everything may change between now and publishing.
- The job titles are from the time the experts were interviewed (otherwise, I'd be changing them constantly)
- If you were interviewed and your quote feels out of context, please contact me now while there is time to correct it.
- I am not adding new research or new quotes to the book. I had to stop the research to finish editing and publishing.
Where do you see RevOps headed in the next year? Next 5 years? Is it a fad?
Common themes :
Some of the expert responses to this question included:
- RevOps is here to stay: 16 out of 35 people agreed
- We will have more structure, education, and resources for a clear career in RevOps: 14 people
- It will continue to evolve, grow in importance as the early-adopter companies grow in maturity, or expand to older and larger companies: 13 people
- The name may change or need to change to enable more adoption: 7 people
- It will get a seat at the leadership or C-suite table: 4 people
Let’s take a look at some of the predictions.
RevOps will continue to grow and evolve
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, said, “I think you're gonna see a lot more of the title, but I think underneath it, pulling the covers back and looking under the hood, I think there's still a lot of RevOps roles that are really doing a portion of the RevOps function. And so I think over the next couple of years, we'll probably see more organizations really migrating to a true RevOps function where they have a revenue operations leader who has experience end-to-end in the revenue cycle. And then start to see more of those individuals in expertise in the different buckets like forecasting or demand gen (generation) or customer success. I think we'll start to see those individuals start to probably move more quickly than in prior years, start picking up skills across the entire revenue platform.”
Richard Dunkel, Global Head of Field Enablement at Celonis, also had a positive outlook for revenue operations. Richard said, “There’s no turning back. Operational silos will continue to be broken down as digital data becomes more accessible and utilized to identify opportunities for process improvement to achieve targeted business outcomes.”
Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, talked about companies adopting more of a ‘true’ RevOps practice or function in the coming years, such as focusing on customers instead of on software administration. “I think this is where it started. Everything was about the customer journey 15 years ago, and marketing, sales, and customer operations sat within one group. It was amazing. I think that we hit a systems and tech explosion. And I think that's what separated out as folks in RevOps got tied to their systems, and not to their customers internally and their customers externally. And I think we're starting to see that shift. I think where Zoom’s done a good job was with our focus on delivering happiness to customers, and it can really unite you around that area of your reps and your customers versus your systems. So I think if it's done the right way, I think it could be extremely cool. I think it can be just an amazing discipline and function and really elevate what has been done for customers and for primarily revenue teams that are there. I just think it comes with a lot of questions and caveats and considerations before you just decide to build it, move it, shift it, or look at it as purely shuffling people around and calling in a different name,” Hilary said.
Untying the existence of RevOps to whether or not the company has a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) was a prediction from Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep. “I hope that it's seen as a necessary function whether without a CRO. I think a lot of folks view it as if [they] have to have a CRO, [they’ve] got to have a RevOps function. When I think RevOps can be more than just one dedicated function as the right-hand person to CRO. It can be a council of the existing parts of your business today. I hope that's the direction that we're all headed towards," Jeff said.
RevOps as the industry standard model for conducting and structuring operations is a prediction that Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, talked about. ”It’s not a fad. Rather, it’s a transformative approach to business that will dictate how companies of the future structure their operations departments, solve for scale, and the processes for how ops teams work together. In 5 years and beyond, RevOps will be the industry standard for ops professionals...” Alison said.
An anonymous industry executive discussed how RevOps will spread to larger and more mature companies as the current companies practicing it mature as well. “A $10 million revenue SaaS (software-as-a-service) company does not have RevOps today. But again, these worlds are going to collide because the volume is going to go up, the margin needs to go up, and the cost per customer has to go down. I think the only way to do it is to just continuously improve operations and efficiency across every element of the business. I think revenue is [where it started] just because we've been in high-flying times with high revenue growth. You can forgive a lot of mistakes when you’re venture capital-backed or your customer acquisition is going well. When times get tougher… then there's less room for error, fewer margins.”
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, also predicted the expansion of RevOps to larger companies. “What we're going to start to see in the next 5-10 years are companies that have been respected for so long, like the Red Bulls of the world and Coca-Cola, they are going to start believing and implementing this model. They have the capacity, they monitor the risk and the monetary resources. It's only a matter of being courageous enough to say, 'Let's stop doing what we've been doing for the last 20 years.' So that's my perspective on how this is going to change. It is not only going to be a SaaS thing. Right now, the SaaS industry is very excited about revenue operations, and a lot of companies are branding themselves as RevOps products or software. It's going to expand…to the companies that have been there forever,” Lorena said.
The success of companies embracing RevOps in 2020 will lead more companies to adopt it, said Karen Steele, Founder and Advisor at Alloy. “I think it's here to stay. We're going to start to see the companies that have embraced it, even painful as it might be, are the companies that are going to really be the well-oiled machines in terms of go-to-market execution. There are some great case studies out there of companies that are already looking at [what] business performance was before [they] had [RevOps] in place, and here's where we are today… I think it'll be more robust. I think some people still believe they're starting RevOps by just saying, ‘Hey, I'll take sales ops and marketing ops and marry those two functions, but let's leave customer stuff alone.’ And so I think people are taking baby steps. In the next five years, I think we'll see truly flushed-out departmental thinking around this function…to the entire universe of anything that touches revenue.”
Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, spoke about the maturity journey of RevOps following the maturity and growth of the companies that adopted it first. “I have definitely seen a trend where more and more portfolio companies are following our example and introducing a formal RevOps function. I like to think we’ll see more centralized teams emerging, likely with smaller companies at the forefront that will mature into more established, larger organizations over time. These companies will become the example for the industry on how to scale RevOps,” Jenna said
There will be more structure, education, and career paths for RevOps
This future understanding of ‘true’ or ‘complete’ RevOps was something Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, also spoke on. “I think, hopefully, there'll be more understanding of what it is. Even the fact that you call it RevOps, and I call it go-to-market operations, but I think it's the same thing or very similar. And so I think it's maturing and growing out of its puppy feet. I would like to say right now that [RevOps] is a little bit in the puppy stage. And in terms of, what do we call it? And what is it? And how do we define it? And what is it growing into? So I think I see it becoming more mature and understood within companies of what it is, how it's structured, who are those key players within a RevOps function, and just evolving from there…Similar to how marketing ops wasn't a thing [at one point and it] just kind of evolved. I see revenue operations or go-to-market operations becoming a thing where there's actually titles… so it's a more understood structure… an understanding of a matrix and operating successfully within a matrix organization,” Lauren said.
As opposed to the common phenomenon of ‘falling into ops’ later in careers, Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, predicted increased education and career paths for operations professionals. “Maybe in five years, once people understand [RevOps], this is something that I'm working on within my community, maybe courses or courses or executive programs will be established to teach or raise the new generation of RevOps... But it will take time for that,” Leore said.
Briana Okyere, Community Lead at AdaptivOps community and Community and Events Lead at Tonkean, also spoke about future education opportunities in RevOps. “I think in the next five or so years, people will be graduating from college and saying they want to start a career in operations. Whereas before, somebody was falling into the role. They were seeing inefficiencies and then they were realizing this is really gratifying and interesting work that I'm doing,” Briana said.
"I would love to see more resources like a book…so we don't have to learn through this apprenticeship model [which is] extremely slow. If I can get a degree and revenue operations at universities, I'm all for it," Jeff Ignacio said.
We'll discuss this more in the next section of the chapter about RevOps content the experts wished existed. Several books and courses on RevOps have been created since this research was completed, which is exciting to see.
RevOps will be included in leadership teams, including the C-Suite
Matthew Solomon, Sales Operations Manager at Mainsail Partners, spoke about both the structure and leadership opportunities of RevOps in the future. “In the next 5 years, I think we will see a more solidified definition and structure to the RevOps function within organizations. My hope is that RevOps will take on more strategic leadership within an organization, driving effective change instead of having to act reactively to senior leadership requests,” Matthew said.
Related to the C-suite seat at the table response of many experts, since the time this research was completed, Rosalyn Santa Elena was named the Chief Revenue Operations Officer at Carabiner Group in 2022. which was possibly the first appearance of this role.
A future RevOps C-level role was also discussed by Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design. “As RevOps becomes more holistically focused on GTM (go-to-market), a C-level role is really going to come with it. Organizations are still deciding what really sits in RevOps (some only include acquisition sales and marketing, others opt to include CS (customer success) and renewal teams), and as it starts to include all facets of the GTM engine, there will be a new C-level function to go with it,” Nicole said.
The name may change and evolve, too
The evolution and speed of change in various areas of business in recent years was a topic Nicole Pereira, Founder and CEO at Remotish, discussed. “I'm not sure if this is the end of this road. I think [RevOps is] a progressive step in an evolution. But I don't know what that end looks like. And I say that because that's how my field has been the entire time I've been in this field. Compared to a lot of other functions, [such as] how you perform HR has only changed so much in such a matter of time, how you do accounting has only changed so much. But in sales, marketing, and customer service, which are all very high-touch customer functions and directly connected to making revenue, [there’s been so much change.]… I don't know; I think there might be something else [after RevOps]...And I don't think it's just a matter of changing the name again. I think it's continuing to move in a direction of more efficiency,” Nicole said.
Several experts discussed the evolution of the name and structure of RevOps was discussed by several experts, including Mallory Lee, Senior Director of Operations at Terminus, who said more teams would be centralized and may include centralizing additional ops groups such as development ops. Virinchi Duvvuri, Senior VP of Sales and Revenue Operations at UST Global, also spoke about changing the name in the future since some people don’t understand revenue is not just sales, as discussed in previous chapters with alternate terms such as Growth Ops, which may include more company-wide ops a Mallory was predicting. This discussion about what to call this type of centralized operations practice was discussed more in-depth in previous chapters.
Perhaps the next book will be “What is ___ Ops,” as the name and practice evolves in the next few years! Here’s to predicting a bright future for RevOps and what it may grow into!
Other questions that will be answered in this chapter (and blogs):
- Can you talk about how RevOps may or may not thrive in the current economic conditions?
- What is RevOps content that do you wish existed? (may not be a full blog)
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