This blog featured the answers to the research question: Who does your RevOps team report to, or roll into? Or who SHOULD it report to?
This person or role is responsible for providing a RevOps department with the resources it needs to be successful, helping communicate team contributions and success to other leaders, aiding in setting achievable goals, and assisting with collaboration when there are blockers in any of the many departments RevOps works with. This reporting structure can make or break the success of a RevOps department.
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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.
Who does your RevOps team report to, or roll into? Or who SHOULD it report to?
Note that this question could have been misread/interpreted as 'What is the highest level in RevOps?' instead of its intention of asking who the leader of the RevOps department reports to. This question was usually followed up with a “Should” question, if the expert felt their company wasn’t set up ideally, then who should RevOps department report to?
Out of about 35 experts interviewed, the answers included:
- Chief Revenue Officer (CRO): 13 people
- Chief Executive Officer (CEO): 4 people
- Chief Operating Officer (COO): 4 people
- Chief Financial Officer (CFO): 2 people
Other answers included:
- Head of Sales
- VP of Ops
- SVP of Marketing
- Chief Customer Officer (CCO)
- Accounting
- Business operations
- President
- Managing operating partner
- Chief of staff
The highest level RevOps titles mentioned:
- VP or EVP of RevOps
- Go-to-market (GTM) COO that reports to CRO
- Director of RevOps
A few of the common themes mentioned in people’s answers related to this reporting structure as key to a department's success:
- Agreeing on the reporting structure before starting RevOps is important
- Alternately, as a step between having siloed departments and having a centralized RevOps team, unofficially forming a RevOps alliance with cross-functional members and then creating an official reporting structure
- Having dotted line reporting and not an official team is a good start, but it causes issues when they don’t all report to one leader with unified metrics if each of the leaders has competing priorities and does not have shared definitions of everything
- Reporting to a neutral leader with authority, like a CEO or COO, is preferred compared to reporting to a siloed sales, marketing, or customer team leader.
Reporting to the CRO
Though the CRO was a common answer, the caveat mentioned often was to make sure the CRO knew about and was in charge of more than just the sales team. If a former sales leader is hired as CRO, make sure they also care about, know about, and are responsible for ops, marketing, and customer service or success.
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, talked about how, similar to RevOps, the title 'CRO' means different things at different companies. “I've seen CROs only manage the marketing and the sales side, or they only manage the sales and kind of post-sales side, and there's still a CMO. So I think depending on that structure, you may see RevOps sort of split, where some of it reports into the CMO [with] maybe this dotted line, some reports into the CRO, or even into a Chief Customer Officer if you have more of a customer success leader…[I’m] even seeing RevOps reporting into finance…. But I think it would normally report to the CRO,” Rosalyn said.
Jerry Bonura, Senior Principal at TwentyPine, saw a lot of reporting structures when recruiting for RevOps roles. He said if the company has a CRO, having RevOps report to the CRO is the most common structure. The second most common would be reporting into finance or a CEO. “If it reports to a VP of sales and they don't have a CRO like a true RevOps team, [then] they might be pulled in more of the direction of helping the sales team. Whereas the head of marketing might need some things done and like, and [then] the RevOps team might not prioritize it. So I think if the CRO is a true head of sales and marketing and customer success, then I would say that's best practice. I also know really good RevOps teams where marketing ops is a separate function from revenue, [revenue is sales and customer success in their definition]. They work very closely together, but sometimes they're a little separate. So the ideal structure is if you have had a RevOps [leader] and then under them, you have a separate sales, marketing, and customer success ops person,” Jerry said.
Mike Ewing, Senior Team Manager of Renewal Management EMEA at HubSpot, said you need to have a Chief Revenue Officer that sits at the top of everything, and then you have VPs that have people directors and system directors that report into the VPs. “Ultimately, there is a go-to-market team that all the different departments roll up into,” Mike said.
Karen Steele, Founder and Advisor at Alloy, also talked about this CRO debate. “I'm going to ultimately say, I think it should report to the CRO. If you have a CRO that truly owns the revenue and go-to-market for the business, that's what you report to. At LeanData, when we initially consolidated all the silos and put [RevOps] into place, we didn't have a CRO, we had a VP of Sales. And we had myself; I was the CMO. And so we actually put [RevOps] under finance, we put it under the CFO, and I've seen some companies do that. But I would say if you have a CRO in your company, it should be under the CRO,” Karen said.
Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage, mentioned that CRO responsibilities vary from company to company, with quite a few teams reporting into the CRO, not only the new business teams, but also renewals teams. Both the direct and indirect teams, he said. “It [includes], on occasion, marketing, although that's normally broken out under the CMO position. You can have implementations and customer success also piping into the CRO. Now the reason why I'm mentioning all this is that there is a case to be made that you can have all the strings as functions. Within the RevOps piece there are operations, version of marketing ops, sales ops, customer success ops,” Jonathan said.
Reporting to the CEO
Sylvain Giuliani, Head of Growth at Census, said you see RevOps reporting to many different organizations within a company. “I think ideally, you want that person, that organization, to [report] up to a neutral person in the revenue world. Ideally, the CEO is usually very good because that legitimizes the revenue function right now….[it] gives you credibility. Also, it makes you basically the Switzerland of the company, between the sales and marketing teams. Because I always hated the fact that sales ops reports to the VP of sales and sales ops is in charge of measuring and setting quotas, for example. It feels very biased when your boss says, ‘do it like this,’ [because] they can easily influence things that they themselves get paid for.... And if you put RevOps in sales, your marketing team cannot be blind to that …Like why should [marketing] trust them [RevOps]? I think having to be Switzerland is very good,” Sylvain said.
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, said that at GoNimbly RevOps reports to the CEO. “That's just particular to our company, with a leader like Jason... I've only met two CEOs that have a kind of profile to see the [entire] business…. With our clients, this is controversial, and that's why we're gonna deliver a new data report because ideally, you want your entire ops teams, your go-to-market teams reporting to the CRO. That creates controversy because then, for example, what happens to the CMO? Me?...” Lorena said.
Reporting to the COO
Briana Okyere, Community and Events Lead at Tonkean, said reporting to a COO is ideal. “A Chief of Staff is also a nice role for [RevOps] to report to. I like the idea of there being a [C-level executive] on the exact team that is the voice of operations as a whole, as opposed to, there's an ops person assigned to each team. And then that person is speaking to the manager of that team and then that manager is on the exec team...So, operations need to be its own area of the business. It should not be siloed and dispersed throughout other areas of the business because that way, you actually have operations initiatives sent up the chain, as opposed to, ‘here's what's happening in sales,’ and then ops as an afterthought, because we have one ops person on the sales team,” Briana said.
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, said that RevOps reports to the COO. “We are not jeopardizing ourselves to be in favor of a specific department. So this is how we keep it clean. At other companies I was in as revenue operations, I was under the CEO,” Leore said.
Reporting to other titles
Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, said they have a GTM (go-to-market) ops group that reports to the President, and the executive level basically represents each of the functional groups. They also have a head of GTM operations like an SVP. “It's a three-legged stool, so marketing and customer and sales operations report up there him, but at a level above, then you've got sea levels all reporting in, including a product team,” Lauren said.
An anonymous executive said it is the Chief Customer Officer who has responsibility for revenue. ”I don't think that's a good idea if it's the chief customer officer that owns both sales and service, AKA support or customer success, but it has to be someone who is responsible to the business to generate revenue,” they said.
Melanie Foreman’s team at Slack rolls into accounting, "...Which I think is really interesting, that's new for me. Previously I was under a business operations team. And I'm noticing there were parts of my roles that were essentially done for me. The business case, for example, I've never really had to type up a compelling business case, I've only ever had to talk to other operations people that get it. And here, rolling into accounting, it's been really interesting because it's pushed me to build better business cases and help manage change in ways that I've never had to do before. And that accounting side is so critical to understanding the impact that your process can have on a business. And without great data, or timely data at that, you can't really say that something is successful, so I've enjoyed accounting a lot,” Melanie said.
When asked about the history of why RevOps reported to accounting, Melanie said, “I think one thing that Slack does a great job of is keeping the people that they know will be best for the job and making it work. So the structure of the organization is unique in many different ways, it’s one of the most capable and intelligent group of people that I've worked with. So I think the structure has kind of been secondary to just the people aspect of the company.”
This sounds like another win for the people side of business, a theme throughout this book.
The title doesn’t matter as long as they aren’t partial to one group
Many experts expressed that it doesn't really matter which title RevOps reports to as long as the executive isn’t biased or partial to one part of the company.
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2, spoke about this view. “I think RevOps should report to someone who gets sales and marketing operations at a minimum, someone who does have an operational background, and someone who really knows how to articulate the goals of the business of the teams and the revenue-generating teams, and how to decide where to put it… I don't think that this should be a CRO because the CRO, most of the time, is someone who's just worked in sales, and they don't know anything about operations, in my opinion, so I hate that. I hate when that happens, and I've even seen a head of revenue operations report directly to a head of sales, and sometimes even not even the head of sales, but like a head of American sales. That makes no sense to me, it's too skewed into sales…[then] marketing ops should separate themselves because all this stuff that they're trying to do is never gonna get prioritized…so I think having someone with an operational mindset is really good … reporting to someone who understands that whole revenue ops function to me makes the most sense,” Crissy said.
In conclusion, choosing the best person for RevOps to report to can be a big factor in achieving RevOps department success. If you choose someone who does not have the knowledge, responsibility, or care about all areas of the customer journey across the business, it will be very hard to be successful.
Other questions that will be answered in this department success chapter (and in blogs) include:
- What do you think is the most important factor in determining RevOps success?
- How do you measure RevOps success?
- What functions or components are considered part of the RevOps team?
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