Since one of the goals of this book is to increase understanding, respect, and career options for RevOps professionals, identifying and solving the problems in the RevOps industry or discipline is important.
Though this research was completed in 2020, when RevOps was a newly-named discipline, many of these issues still exist in 2025 when this book is being edited. Some companies have hopefully solved some of the issues as they each increase their RevOps maturity, but other companies may not have even tried to adopt RevOps yet and will face many of these same issues.
The questions analyzed for this industry/overall/community success chapter:
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Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
Some of the experts’ answers included:
Perception problems
Knowledge breadth problems
Focus or discipline problems
Political or internal organizational problems
Technology problems
A lot of the answers above can fit into several categories, such as the high cost to hire good RevOps leaders or the first RevOps hire, people who are knowledgeable about all areas of RevOps, since RevOps is so broad and made up of previously siloed departments with separate leaders. These answers are categorized broadly and will be discussed more in the next section with specific examples from the experts.
Many people included multiple problems in their answers to this question, so you may see the experts appear several times.
Answers related to the perception of RevOps, due to the lack of understanding about what it is and what value it could bring to each company, are at the top of the list of problems in RevOps.
Mallory Lee, Senior Director of Operations at Terminus, succinctly described this issue. ”I think people encounter problems with RevOps when their executive team doesn’t place adequate importance on it. This department must be a true partner to the exec team,” Mallory said.
Similarly, Michael Ewing, Senior Team Manager of Renewal Management EMEA at HubSpot, spoke about issues with company leadership. “I think the biggest challenge is to get top-level management to first recognize the pain and challenges that they're facing. And then see the alignment of their departments as a way to solve it,” Michael said.
Gianluca Pucacco, Revenue Operations at Stripe, also spoke about the problems caused by many people’s perception of operations. “Ops always has a bit of a negative connection, especially when people solely associate Ops with repetitive tasks. That’s only a piece of the pie. RevOps leadership plays a critical role in depicting the WHY we need a senior Ops function,” Gianluca said.
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, talked about the perception that RevOps is only tactical support for other departments’ requests. “The problem is that usually management thinks that we are a hands-on position. And this is too much because we cannot handle everything and execute everything in the short term. And second, I think some companies or managers think that RevOps is a more technical position when it's [actually] a strategy and processes position, building, developing, establishing strategies and processes,” Leore said.
Similarly, Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack, spoke about how good RevOps can make the work appear easily to people outside the department because non-RevOps people don’t understand the work. “I think people see what is actually very hard work as ‘you just follow these steps, you get to that output, and thank you very much for making that burger.’ No one's ever looked in the back of the kitchen though and said, ‘Wow that looks really easy and fun,’" Melanie said.
The tactical vs. strategic topics earlier in this book appeared again in this problem discussion.
Matthew Solomon, Sales Operations Manager at Mainsail Partners, said, “Organizations see RevOps as a tactical role, and instead of hiring functional owners of the different tools and having a RevOps manager oversee them and be mostly focused on strategic design and execution planning.”
Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, said, “I’d say one challenge the world faces today is that ops professionals are totally misunderstood, underfunded, and underwater in their current roles. Operations is an afterthought for most companies, and most teams are set up to be reactive, not proactive, stakeholders in the business. When something’s broken, you call ops. But this is precisely why RevOps is so important — because it will move ops from fixing broken processes to the frontline of the customer experience and empower teams to create a scalable strategy with frictionless systems and processes.”
The lack of standardization in what RevOps looks like, perceiving it as a completely different subject at each company, was discussed in several ways.
Matthew Volm, CEO and Co-Founder at Funnel IQ and Co-Founder of the RevOps Co-op community, directly spoke about this lack of formula for RevOps. “No playbooks exist - everyone is just figuring stuff out as they go...having a dedicated RevOps team sounds great in theory, but it’s nearly impossible to execute on today [in 2020],” Matthew said.
The difference in the needs of companies depending on their size and the need for a universal RevOps formula for success was a topic Nicole Pereira, Founder and CEO at Remotish, spoke on. “RevOps is a big company luxury, but a small company necessity. The small companies really need it, because they have to be more efficient with what resources they have. So finding a way to build a baseline formula [for RevOps], I think is important in this industry. [The formula would show] no matter what tool you use, no matter how you view it, this is what you need to do to build a successful RevOps function in your organization. And there's no formula right now,” Nicole said.
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, spoke about the maturity journey every company will go through adopting RevOps, and the differences that appear as RevOps exists longer at each company. “The start [of RevOps] is going to look very similar at any every company. But as you move on, and as you become more and more [of a] RevOps professional, or practitioner, that's going to be different. So I think that's the main problem right now,” Lorena said.
This lack of understanding and standardization of what RevOps does also finds its way into problems with job descriptions. An anonymous executive spoke about how they read recently that if you look at LinkedIn, the word RevOps is in some of the most popular job postings right now, such as a RevOps specialist. But when you read the job description, not only do the descriptions vary wildly, but sometimes it actually sounds like a sales ops job just with the word revenue in place of sales.
This perception and lack of understanding of RevOps’ value can cause issues with gaining hiring budget and other resources for RevOps people. Julia Herman, VP, Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, said, “In that way, that's very difficult sometimes for sales leaders or for finance to justify the cost of sales operations. Because they think, ‘Hey, just having five more salespeople, we can actually create more revenue than having five more sales operations people.’”
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, also spoke about the perception problem causing hiring and bandwidth issues. “The other challenge [for] any ops leader is just resources and bandwidth because… You're really expecting a lot from the operations team. They really are project managers, they're system integrators, they're process people, they're comp (compensation) people, they're forecasting, they have to cover so many different areas that are considered operations. I'm on a strategy [mission], and we talked about enablement a little bit, but if you think about all the communication, the events, the meetings, the operating cadence, how do things flow, being that Chief of Staff, there are so many things that really do fall under operations in most companies. Sometimes, they're split up into different areas. But even if they are in different areas, the ops person is sort of that glue, or the ops function is the glue that has to work cross-functionally to keep everything in sync and marching to the same beat. So I would say probably the biggest challenge with that is just not enough resources,” Rosalyn said.
Finally, Melissa McCready, Founder and CEO at Navigate Consulting, summed it up well. “I think that a big problem still is that in operations, it's like you're the night cleaning crew; you're cleaning up a concert hall. After all these people have been there and spilled their beers and drinks and just made messes everywhere. You come in, and the next day, everything's ready to go again. And nobody really understands how much work goes into it until they have to do it themselves. And then then it's fun to grab the popcorn and watch [them]. Because it's not easy to do operations…People still need education on what it means to be in operations, what value we bring, how we need to be paid... we've got a ways to go,” Melissa said.
Closely related and overlapping to the problems of perception of RevOps, the following expert answers focus on the vast and broad amount of knowledge needed for a RevOps department and RevOps leaders to have. This is especially tough as this is a new area of work that combines many previous silos, which lacks the many formal education options that marketing and sales professionals have had for many years. The rare amount of people with knowledge and experience in every area of the customer journey can make RevOps talent expensive to hire, compared to hiring people in one specialty area of ops (i.e. marketing ops) or hiring general marketing, sales, or customer success talent.
The problem really comes to a head when the perception of the lack of value of RevOps leads to only allocating resources to hire a team of one, and having knowledge and experience of every potential task in RevOps is near impossible for one person, not to mention having the time to complete all the work. This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg situation to identify if the problem is the lack of understanding that RevOps can be one person, the incorrect assumption that one person can have all this knowledge and experience, and that not many people with this vast broad knowledge exist yet at the salary levels these companies are looking for.
Rosalyn Santa Elena spoke about this challenge. “I've actually had this conversation a couple of times with individuals who are looking for a new role. They are interviewing, and they have told me, ‘They're expecting me to have really deep expertise in marketing automation and demand generation and marketing programs, but then I'm also supposed to have really deep expertise in retention and churn and metrics around that.’ I've actually had the flip conversation with a couple of sales leaders and CROs around ‘Hey if you're expecting somebody to have 5 years experience… it's unlikely that you're going to find somebody who's going to have deep expertise across the entire revenue cycle because it takes a couple of years to build up your sales ops knowledge, and even sales ops is so broad that it covers so many things, You may have some general knowledge of all these different areas but having really deep expertise takes time,” Rosalyn said.
Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, spoke about the consequences of companies expecting each RevOps person to know and do everything possible in RevOps, leading to a lack of specialized deep knowledge. Jenna said the problems in Revops include “making sure that RevOps isn’t breeding a bunch of generalists who become a 'jack of all trades, master of none.'”
Nicole Pereira spoke about the lack of RevOps knowledge causing problems when a less-than-knowledgable person is put in charge of RevOps for political or other internal company reasons. “[A problem is] people who are not very organized being put in charge of [RevOps] or people who are not experienced enough who are in charge of the strategy. I think individual contributors, people who can do one portion of the bigger picture, are easy to pick up. But I think the leadership who can see the whole strategy and build the RevOps department and engine...There are so few people who've taken the time to sit on every side of the fence. I think they're rare. So they're expensive,” Nicole said.
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, spoke about the expectation of professionals having knowledge of every area of RevOps, leading to a shortage of talent for the roles available and the need for coaching for these people to gain the knowledge. “To be fair, I don't think we as an industry have truly defined the common standard definition of what RevOps is and what it means to different industries. When you have an emergent category, I always think the best jobs of tomorrow have not been created yet. RevOps is now one of those jobs. People have been doing it in pieces with different titles and some folks will say this has always been around, and some folks will say, and it hasn't been around, it's brand new to me. That's…water under the bridge. But I am starting with one thing that is universal, which is that every set of responsibilities and knowledge placed under the roof of RevOps professionals today is incredible. I mean, the person today versus 10 years ago probably has maybe three x, four x, of the skill sets needed as a minimum baseline just to get into the role. So to me finding talent is my number one priority, [and] how they can be coached [so] the talent of tomorrow [can] step into these roles.”
Related to not having a common definition of RevOps, it can be hard to contain or focus the RevOps work when companies are giving a wide variety of topics and tasks to these workers. RevOps professionals need to use their prioritization and organizing skills to give their work more focus and discipline, and the art of saying no needs to be an everyday skill. With limited resources for hiring and difficulties finding talent, ruthlessly focusing on only what matters to the company is more necessary for RevOps than in many other departments where executives already understand value.
Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, spoke about the task-taker perception of RevOps, which overlaps with this focus problem when other departments ask RevOps to work on their ideas. “I think a lot of companies want to go from an idea to execution. And I love that, but an idea actually needs to be a strategy, then have a plan, and then execute. And so I'm always cautious of someone who will say, ‘Oh, I had a great idea this morning, can you go and make this happen,’ and it's like, you don't even have one day [create] a strategy and a plan. And I think there's a lot of that happening with the pace of innovation… There are a lot of other departments that rely on your sales ops team for questions: marketing, finance, deal desk, privacy, security, and compliance. They're answering questions all day from the center of the business…So I think that's the other piece is just set equity of the staff to what they really need to do,” Hilary said.
Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, said, “In the past, we really struggled with understanding the structure. Did we have a strategy as a company? And over the last two years of the leadership that we've had, they have been very clear on establishing a clear strategy and staying focused on defining how we are going to achieve and put goals around achieving this path and strategy. Every QBR, we literally tracked how we were doing against those goals. I guess where I would see things failing is trying to do too much and not having accountability. Not having focus. The more I've seen [us] define key objectives and then execute against those key objectives…that's why I think we have been so successful the last couple of years. Where I saw us failing before, is that we didn't have that level of focus. And now that we have it, seeing that [difference] is night and day… I think it gives the entire company, not just Ops, the ability to all win. Going back to paddling in the same boat in the same direction, which gives everybody the ability to play that role.”
Jenna Hanington said a problem in RevOps is “Maintaining alignment with so many teams and so many priorities. RevOps can occasionally feel like a tug-of-war between teams competing for your bandwidth. Especially at larger companies, making sure you have the right number of resources with deep enough subject matter expertise to execute on behalf of your internal customers is key, otherwise RevOps will become a bottleneck.”
A lack of focus on strategy also relates to the admin or task-taker perception discussed earlier. Julia Herman said, “A problem in general, I think it is always seen more of a cost center. And also [thought of] in terms of having people who are just almost like admins for sales. I think it all depends on where you are and how its positioned. But a lot of people I've noticed…they're not as strategic as they can be, they’re more of just [doing] whatever sales [asks for], they don't really have that bigger picture of how can I actually move sales? How can I impact sales?”
Adam Tesan, CRO of Chargebee, spoke about the lack of defined or focused responsibilities, which combines this topic as well as perception and political internal issues. “One of the big problems is areas of responsibility. What's in the span of control [and what] is not? Where does their world stop and say, corporate ops’ or IT’s world starts. In centralized ops, I think that's probably harder to define. And in more mature companies… I could imagine you would have a lot of ownership issues between corporate ops, RevOps, and central IT… people get a little weird. And so there are going to be some just challenges in getting stuff done…” Adam said.
Adam continued to discuss issues when the RevOps responsibilities were not clearly defined. “There's a lot of interdependencies with marketing and finance. And so I think that's where some of the problems happen, especially if you've got separate operational functions. Managing each of those, doing things in silos and not talking to each other, can get you into a lot of trouble,” Adam said.
Political and internal organizational problems are a topic that is also highlighted in the next chapter section about why companies wouldn’t want to introduce RevOps, related to the difficulties in change management, perceptions, power struggles of ownership, and more.
Karen Steele, Founder and Advisor at Alloy, talked about this as one of the main challenges in RevOps. ”I think it's people and politics. I think one of the biggest challenges of bringing silos together and creating a team is people feel like they're losing responsibility or power. So I think the internal alignment is the biggest hurdle for companies…. I remember when I was at Marketo, and we got bought out by private equity, and so with that, came a whole new leadership team. And I remember the CEO saying to me, ‘What is the deal? We've got 25 odd people with ops titles sprinkled all over the company, shouldn't we just roll them all up into the COO?’ And I wasn't thinking about revenue ops back then. But of course, that sort of was what he was saying, why wouldn't we just take all these ops people, they've all got different tools and data, and they're all doing things differently, why wouldn't we just roll it up under one? And, yeah, it sounds like a great idea. And you kind of nod your head, and we all did. But at the end of the day, we didn't make any changes; we kept it all siloed. Because you're at a larger company that has established people and protocol, and you're breaking things to fix things. And so I think it's the people, politics, the organizational angst around change.” Organizational angst is an excellent term for this struggle.
Jenna Hanington said one of the problems in RevOps is “Consistently ensuring that surrounding teams are comfortable with RevOps having a hand in their process and execution, especially when RevOps may not sit on their team.”
Navigating dependencies on other departments was something Julia Herman spoke about. “It's so interconnected, and we depend on so many other resources. So we're constantly dependent on IT, or product, or finance. I think that's just something that you always have to navigate and you always have to play the middleman balancing in between all those,” Julia said.
Matthew Volm also spoke about issues with organizational charts and reporting structures, which will lead to not seeing the most value from RevOps. ”Some people just retitle Sales Ops to RevOps but still have [RevOps] report to the VP of Sales...this does nothing for your organization,” Matthew said.
Nicole Pereira said one of the problems of ReOps is when “people are put in charge of this function who are loyal to one department more than another. This means they're not really trying to reduce the friction all around. They're really just trying to hit numbers for that [department]. And that's the hard part of assigning a KPI that's only stuck in one silo. And I think that's a big one.”
Spencer Parikh, founder of ioAudio, spoke about the skills needed to navigate this internal political environment. “Learning to have difficult conversations, because now you're getting this view, you're getting this insight of understanding of what's going on, some of the challenges. Not everybody on the team might be suited for it. And they might not be up for that change. So, just having the ability to have difficult conversations or present data that's so contrary to how things are being done or the view of how things should be done is a tricky one. I think that's one of the problems right now with RevOps is if they're coming from sales ops, and they have the relationship with sales, they might be challenging marketing and might be telling sales… there's a different way to do this, which can be tricky and challenging. I think it's that unicorn role that can have the difficult conversations, and express things in terms of various inflection points, so many different inflection points that an organization goes through, from a million to 5 million, 5 million to 10, 10 to 25, and 25 to 100, whatever it is, and you go public, I mean, there's all these different things that happen,” Spencer said.
Sylvain Guiliani, Head of Growth at Census, spoke about the difficulties of individual contributor RevOps professionals expected to make change happen across other departments. “When I talk to [customers, they say] yeah, we need to do better alignment, but then quickly at that point, you're trying to do change management. As an IC (independent contributor) it is very difficult to manage up and make that change happen. Usually, the marketing ops persona is a one-person team that [knows] we need to be better, and they go talk to the manager, which can be head of sales, VP of marketing, something like that, or middle management. And good luck going from this place to [say] 'Yeah, let's go all the way to the top' to get down to change management. It is very difficult to do that, and a lot of communication in organizations is even worse because you have to convince your peers; if you're marking ops, you have to convince the sales ops that it's a good idea to become one team,” Sylvain said.
We read in a previous chapter a story from Dana Therrien, Senior Sales Specialist, Sales Performance Management at Anaplan, about the politics surrounding the category creation of RevOps at a research firm. The short version that he included for this question is, “The biggest obstacle is obviously politics. I can see that marketing isn’t going to give up their marketing operations people.”
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2 Marketing, said a problem in RevOps is “When companies aren't ready for it, when there's not a defined reporting structure that makes sense. Don't [have RevOps] report into a salesperson or a CRO. And also when…revenue ops teams are mainly made out of sales ops people and then they…just throw the marketing person under this…I never find that those people are very happy, and they always end up doing a dotted line back to the CMO …. they might as well just still report to that person. But just have those teams work closely with each other. And I think that's what people wanted RevOps to be. They wanted there to be a way to align all those teams because their systems are so joint that everything they do impacts each other. But it doesn't always have to mean that they need to all report to the same person, so that's why reporting structure, I think, is the main [problem] there for me.”
Crissy continued to discuss another political-related problem, “When it's too much red tape. When the RevOps team just makes it literally impossible for certain teams to do something. Sometimes there's a lot of politics behind that, too. A whole release schedule for Salesforce can be defined by one person, and they may work closely with sales or be more comfortable with sales stuff and not marketing stuff. So some of the marketing [projects] get delayed. I had that with a project this year…we literally started scoping out and gave the requirements to their team in June, and they just executed it in November. So that's what I was saying about red tape and also just politics that define what gets prioritized and what's not.”
The tech stack mess, one of the causes of the birth of RevOps, can be so extreme that it takes all of a RevOps pro’s time to solve tech issues and that leaves no time for the bigger, strategic people and processes issues. This is due to the previously discussed problem of a lack of understanding of RevOps’ value and the lack of resources to hire enough people. It also contributes to the perception that RevOps is a tactical support function centered around working inside tools.
Adam Tesan spoke about this issue in RevOps. “Messy tech stocks are a common problem across organizations. Everybody's using and buying tools and the way tools are being brought into the business now is so different than a while ago. [Previously, if] you wanted to bring something onto the network and use IT, there was this whole hoopla which was stupid and stopped innovation and speed. But now everybody and anybody [can sign up to buy tools]. And there are 15 different tools being used for the same function, even within the same department, never mind across the businesses. So I think that's a challenge,” Adam said.
Crissy Saunders spoke about a similar issue of technical or technology debt, where extra work is now required to fix issues caused by shortcuts taken during development. “If there's too much technical debt, but no one's on the same page to fix it. A lot of pointing to different people. Who's gonna fix it? But none of it actually gets addressed. And then, if there's too much off-shore resource use …sometimes there's a disconnect between doing work and then doing what makes sense. I've also seen RevOps teams [say they will] get all these engineers in India or in different places, and they'll do all their sales ops work for us. They still try to manage all those people, but I just feel like, in some ways, it's mismanaged or doesn't really get managed well. And that leads to a lot of technical debt, too, because the people who are executing maybe don't know all of the strategy behind it really well. So whoever is developing the strategy on the team needs to work closely with the people executing on that strategy.”
Dana Therrien also spoke about technology in the answer to the question about problems in RevOps. “If anything, I would say it's probably smoothing out the processes in the technologies that have previously independently existed from one another. So the marketing automation platform, and then the CRM, and then if you're using a customer success application like Gainsight, and building the integrations between those and making sure that the handoffs are completely seamless,” Dana said.
Virinchi Duvvuri, Senior VP of Sales and Revenue Operations at UST Global, spoke about how the tech needs have shifted from the need to gather data to the need for tech to deliver insights from the data, which can be much more difficult.
General limitations with the major tools used in RevOps were also mentioned in the discussions of the problems.
In conclusion, identifying these problems and solving them will help with overall success for RevOps as a field, elevating it, making it easier to hire well, making career paths, earning higher salaries, and more.
As Richard Dunkel, Global Head of Field Enablement at Celonis, said in his response to this question, “The challenges we face are not structural per se but are more a result of our lack of maturity and growing pains.”
Hopefully, by the time this book is published, some growing pains will have ended, and those companies and individuals who have solved some of these issues will be sharing their knowledge with other companies who are newer in their RevOps journey to shorten the learning curve and rid the future RevOps professionals of these challenges.
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