This blog featured the answers to the research question: What functions or components are considered part of the RevOps team at your company or in your opinion? For example, is Lead Generation or Enablement in RevOps?
This question is related to both the definition of RevOps, what’s included in it as a field or area, as well as related to department success. It would be hard to be successful if the necessary components for RevOps success were not considered part of the RevOps team at that company. That structure would require even more collaboration with people outside the team, or the common operations practice of doing the work without an operations title or in a department, which could make it more difficult to be successful achieving goals or seen as successful.
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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.
What functions or components are considered part of the RevOps team at your company or in your opinion?
As a reminder, these interviews were completed in late 2020 and the companies may have changed their RevOps department structure since then.
Common answers out of the 35 people questioned:
- Sales Ops: 14 people
- Marketing Ops: 13 people
- Customer Success Ops: 11 people
- Enablement: 11 people
- Product Insights, Data Analysis, or Business Insights: 4 people
- Partner program or partner ops: 3 people
- Sales solution engineering or Salesforce development: 3 people
- Channel Ops: 3 people
- Lead Optimization or Business Development operations: 2 people
- Data infrastructure: 2 people
- Strategy: 2 people
As you can see, sales operations was the most popular answer, with a slight margin over marketing ops and customer ops. Combined, these top three answers match the majority of experts’ agreement in previous questions about RevOps owning the entire customer lifecycle or journey and how RevOps should include at least three areas of operations: marketing, sales, and customer success.
Sylvain Giuliani, Head of Growth at Census, talked about these responsibilities of RevOps departments in a previous answer. “How do you treat each account? How do you score those things, all those processes? How do you manage the opportunity lifecycle in sales, for example? How do you create nurture campaigns, customer journeys, things like that…I think that's very much down to RevOps to formalize those things and implement and track them. The customer journey should be a collaborative effort. It's not just [the customer success] person doing this, and keeping it from sales and marketing… the downstream team. Important reporting… sales quotas, marketing goals, daily active users, all those things, I think should be owned by RevOps.”
Related to RevOps department success, even though it’s #1 in the answers, the experts warn you not to just rename the sales ops department as RevOps because you think revenue operations sounds trendy or you see your competitors have RevOps so you want to look like you have it, too. You’ll need to restructure the teams and align around the entire customer journey to create real RevOps and receive the benefits of a successful RevOps department.
Also relevant to company maturity, a newer company may often start with sales operations for a number of reasons related to complexity, the size of the sales team compared to the size of other revenue teams, and the leaders’ familiarity of sales ops itself as a more established field of work compared to the newer fields of marketing operations and customer success operations. Though other operations activities are happening related to the rest of the customer journey, people at those companies may be doing the marketing and customer ops work without the operations titles or official departments until the company is larger.
Also note that the most common answer of Sales Ops was still only given by less than half the experts interviewed, not by a majority. This may be also part of the maturity journey between first bringing the marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops teams together under a centralized RevOps team and then possibly restructuring RevOps to have specialists in charge of topics such as “insights” or “systems” across all revenue teams. The experts who believe that ideally RevOps should be run in this way would not divide the work into specifically marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops in their answers, which would be reflected by the numbers above. We’ll discuss that view and other themes below.
Dividing the work into full journey topics vs. one journey area depending on maturity
Some of the RevOps teams were split into different types of work areas across the entire customer journey instead of dividing roles by the part of the customer journey they help. For example, this means RevOps people were in charge of ‘insights' or ‘systems’ across all of marketing, sales, and customer success combined instead of having RevOps teams divided into marketing ops people, sales ops people, or customer ops specializations. This may also be described as departmental vs. functional alignment, where departmental means the sub-departments are sales ops, marketing ops, and customer ops.
Experts said that this type of structure may be a more mature version of RevOps for companies that have been performing structured RevOps longer or for larger companies whose revenue and operations teams were already working well together before combining them into RevOps. There are pros and cons to both approaches, which you can see in Pavilion’s Advanced RevOps class, designed by Rosalyn Santa Elena, for more details outside these research interviews.
A few examples of answers that reflected full journey work vs. specializing in one part of the customer journey:
- Operations, strategy, insights, tech – Adam Tesan, CRO of ChargeBee
- Tech stack, go-to-market systems, full-funnel reporting, analytics, full-funnel processes – Matt Volm, CEO and Co-Founder at Funnel IQ and Co-Founder of the RevOps Co-op community
- Systems, data, analytics, ops, strategy – Andy Mowat, Vice President of Growth Marketing & GTM Operations at Culture Amp
Note that transitioning from separated and siled ops across the customer journey into a centralized RevOps team could take time, so a staged approach could be wise, especially in larger companies where change is slow. First, bring the operations teams together, then work on changing roles to include the entire journey, which may require upskilling the formerly siloed people to gain expertise in other parts of the customer journey, or combining into sub-teams of people for ‘insights’ under the RevOps team (for example) to combine expertise for the full journey, or hiring people with experience across the entire customer journey. All of these options will take time, and depend on the company size and stage of the company’s growth.
One caveat to this department structure that was discussed is if the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) was only in charge of sales at your company (not a true CRO responsible for marketing, sales, and customer success), then having the RevOps department structured into marketing ops, sales ops, and success ops may be preferred. This question about the success of the department hinging on who the department reports to is covered in the next section of this chapter.
Changing structure as RevOps teams increase in size
For smaller companies, there is often a step before the maturity journey described above, where the RevOps department is only one person covering the jobs of many people. Marketing ops, sales ops, success ops….strategy, insights, tools…no matter which way you slice it, these people are doing the jobs of several people, so centralizing or combining roles into a team is not yet the problem. This department-of-one has other problems to deal with to achieve success, such as an often impossible workload and expectations.
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, talked about these challenges of being a department of one and a structure to grow into. Leore said, “This is a great question because a lot of people ask me it. Usually, when we are a one person department, we do a job of five people. For example, it's the head of marketing operations, sales operations, business development operations, customer success operations, partnership operations, support operations…and most companies think, [even when] we are the revenue leadership, it doesn't matter if you're a VP … or even an executive, they think that [RevOps is] a hands-on position. I think this is wrong. When I joined [this company], I told them that in order for me to be successful, and in order for me to be a great executer, I have to hire a Salesforce developer or an admin… as long as we grow, I would also have a dedicated sales operations or customer success operations to manage the specific projects of each department. Because as you grow, you'll have the teams grow, and the projects of each team are growing, as well. Also, I work with the BI (business intelligence) team, but I think … I will have another hire as part of my team for a business analyst. But… BI analysts usually can be two things, either customer interface and business intelligence analysts or business analysts, which are two different things…I think companies right now understand how essential it is to have it as part of their revenue operations. Because on a daily basis, we have to analyze trends, cohorts, funnel conversion rates, etc., and it's a day-to-day job.”
Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite, talked about how the function of the RevOps team will shift as the go-to-market strategy and the customer retention strategy shift, and the people needed to be successful with these types of ongoing changes. “I do think the functional ownership will adjust towards the operational maturity of the team. So I think it's challenging for me to say the pure functions we do right now. There's lead optimization, sales operations, data infrastructure, customer success operations, and product insights. Those are the main functional areas in which we're guiding right now. I think when we're operationally more mature, those function areas will shift based on the business needs. So that's exciting. Also, I think this is indicative of the kind of folks that gravitate toward RevOps. They enjoy this sort of challenge, they enjoy tinkering and building and they are able to navigate in ambiguous environments very well,” Alana said.
The enablement debate
Enablement is perhaps one of the trickiest categories of work to categorize and decide which team should own it. Does it belong in RevOps, or not?
You can tell by the data gathered that just as many people think enablement belongs in RevOps as the number of people who believe customer success ops belongs in RevOps, that is a big vote in favor of RevOps owning enablement for marketing, sales, and success teams. Enablement for the entire company may be housed under HR or people ops, which could be why over half of the people asked did not mention enablement by name.
Another reason why some people did not mention enablement could be because it is most common to see sales enablement but not enablement for other revenue teams. One reason for this is when the size of the sales team may exceed the number of people on the marketing team or customer success team, which may create more need for enablement to assist with consistency and success with departmental processes. Another reason may be related to sales enablement being more well-known and established as a field, compared to enabling other revenue teams, so a sales enablement department or responsibility is seen more often at companies where leaders are repeating what they did at previous companies. For examples of these structures, one expert said enablement is currently owned by sales management at his company, inferring that only the sales team receives enablement support. Another discussed how the RevOps team has sales ops and service ops together, then marketing ops is in the marketing department, and sales enablement is a different team that also reports directly to the CRO.
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2, made a good point about the differences in the definition of enablement, which could lead to the responsibility falling underneath different teams.
Briana Okyere, Community and Events Lead at Tonkean, said if the enablement is specifically sales enablement, it’s a joint effort between RevOps and Demand Generation teams.
Enablement’s important role in scaling or growing companies and the need for alignment across many teams to create and continue to manage enablement materials and processes are some of the reasons some companies include it in RevOps. RevOps’ multiple cross-functional responsibilities can make it a good choice for owning this area of work.
Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, said, “Enablement is absolutely part of RevOps. When a company moves from a growth stage to a scale stage like HubSpot is doing right now, it needs to find ways to break linear growth -- the traditional model of growing as fast as you can hire -- and achieve scale that is both exponential and sustainable. We use metrics like “time to ramp” TTR and “productivity per rep” PPR to track our efforts. RevOps is also home to our GTM (go-to-market) ops teams and our partner ops team, enablement team, and GTM strategy Team.”
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, talked about having enablement under the operations umbrella. “The marketing operations team, the customer success renewal ops, and channel ops are multiple teams that are revenue-facing or customer-facing, and I see that as all part of RevOps. I like enablement to sit in operations just because there's such a tight alignment between the teams. But I think if the teams, regardless of who they report into or who their manager is, I think more importantly is that they're aligned in terms of their goals and how process flows and aligned in terms of all the different areas. And that they have great partnership and collaboration. … having said that, oftentimes it is easier to align everybody when you have one leader, and everything's under the same umbrella, then it's a little bit easier to drive consistency,” Rosalyn said.
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, said his company had marketing ops, sales ops, and enablement reporting to him as the RevOps leader. “I like that structure at the stage of a company that I'm at now, which is under 100 people Series B, or a far larger company I would personally carve it out. Just because, you know, if you have a very systems-oriented operations function, I think you're going to miss the human aspect of enablement,” Jeff said.
In a previous answer, Jeff talked about the operational aspects of training, including methodically measuring everything from the ground up, such as how quickly does a rep take to finish their onboarding and bootcamp, how long does it take for them to set their first meeting or first deal with quota, and looking at those leading indicators so they can shorten those times and create revenue and success sooner.
One more note about enablement was discussed earlier in this chapter by Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage. Jonathan talked about how when you don’t have enablement, there is an iceberg beneath the surface, and the inefficiencies that will come up to the surface and cause problems later on that will be hard to catch up and solve.
It may be more important to first ensure your company has enablement roles, duties, and support and later debate the best place for those responsibilities to report under.
Deal desk
The deal desk is another area debated about whether or not it should be part of the RevOps team. The Revenue Operations Alliance defines a deal desk as a team that helps manage complex sales deals by liaising across departments such as sales, finance, and legal to ensure that unusual or complex contracts are approved and managed promptly. This area of work is also sometimes called a contract management team, deal strategy, commercial management, global deal management, sales success, and other terms. It may be more common in companies with larger teams and/or more complex deals.
Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design, said sales enablement and training, deal desk, systems and technology, process, and data analysis should all sit within RevOps. “These functions generally have close partnerships with other functions of the business. For example, the deal desk is a crucial function (especially as a company is rapidly growing) in which it really acts as the liaison between sales and finance. Enablement should sit with RevOps because GTM (go-to-market) teams are the general audience; however, partnerships will be built with the product team and people team, for example, to ensure we’re delivering the right content in the right way at the right time,” Nicole said.
Julia Herman, VP Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, talked about having essentially true sales operations, which includes the deal desk duties. “In terms of sales operations, and Salesforce support, and tool support, we have a deal desk right now…It's very different in terms of where that should fall. It definitely makes sense right now, just because it's the tail end of the sales process, we need to make sure we're filling and fulfilling our orders. And enablement, I think is another crucial part because having the tools and everything is one part. But you actually have to enable the sales team how to use it. Sales analytics is also another crucial component. And that needs to be sitting in sales operations as well,” Julia said.
Jonathan Fianu also talked about the deal desk belonging to RevOps. “I see a big part of RevOps being a deal desk. [Solving and preventing] complex problems, different situations that have come up in forming the deal desk, so that those problems actually don't start…it's being worked on and triaged and becoming a smooth part of the company process. But, in order to do that, you need to make sure all the other areas are functioning well, [and] that marketing is well-supported,” Jonathan said.
On the other side of the debate, Sylvain Guiliani talked about financial responsibilities that shouldn't be completely owned by RevOps. “The only thing that shouldn't really be owned by us, but I've seen that happen, is finance … payment reconciliation, P&L (profit and loss), balance sheets, reporting for the board. It [should be] split at that point, [otherwise] RevOps is basically a finance department, like deal desk and things like that,” Sylvain said.
If a company has a deal desk, it sounds like many experts think RevOps should be involved in that team or responsibility, but whether or not RevOps owns the deal desk could depend on a variety of factors.
Additional responsibilities sometimes included in RevOps departments
For companies with a large part of revenue coming from partners or similar channels, partner operations or channel operations is often included inside of RevOps. One such company is HubSpot, well-known for its solutions partner program as a major contributor to revenue. Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager of Operations at HubSpot, spoke about HubSpot’s RevOps team, which includes marketing ops, sales ops and strategy, customer ops and strategy, go-to-market strategy, flywheel enablement, and then the partner program. “So the big news here is recently [in 2020] we moved sales ops, customer success ops, and marketing ops, under a RevOps umbrella. And these individual teams remain deeply embedded and understand the full context of their function. And they'll continue to support their function, but they'll also step in to improve alignment across these teams. So that we can just spin the flywheel faster,” Maggie said
Compensation was another topic mentioned that some experts believe should or should not be owned by RevOps departments. For example, Karen Steele, Founder and Advisor at Alloy, said, “I was gonna say, like a compensation analyst, but that probably sits in finance, but the function of sales compensation is in RevOps as well.”
Operations related to branding and product marketing were also discussed in response to this question. Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, said this is another tough question to answer and includes the marketing topics of branding and product marketing as related to RevOps, perhaps the operational side of these topics, or knowledge and collaboration with these teams. “People like to do it differently, but I think RevOps is [both sales ops and marketing ops.] Those must be part of the revenue operations team, then some or all, again depending on the organization, of the GTM functions... Branding is something that our revenue ops leaders should care about and should breathe and live every single day, and of course Product Marketing,” Lorena said.
Reasons marketing ops is sometimes not included in RevOps
Though our shared definition of RevOps in previous chapters includes marketing operations responsibilities, a few of the experts explained why their current company did not include marketing ops in RevOps. The most common reason discussed in communities and in forums is when the company was renaming sales ops as RevOps without changing team structures or responsibilities, and these experts shared some details about the structure at their own companies.
Mallory Lee’s RevOps team at Terminus includes half of marketing operations, it doesn’t own marketing automation automation, which is an interesting distinction. Their RevOps team also includes Sales Operations, Customer Success Operations, Business Intelligence, and Salesforce Development.
Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, said they don't have marketing ops under the RevOps umbrella, but they have direct sales solutions engineering and Zoom phone specialists, so there is operations overlap there. And they have had channel operations under that, “but we were carrying the operational debt … how fast do they need to grow, can we get more headcount if they're not under one person, versus not [under one person], which is always a challenge in operations. So today, channel ops, Customer Success ops, and customer support ops are separate silos or separate groups, but under our CRO.”
In the maturity journey previously discussed, this dotted line reporting of different operations teams related to customers, revenue, or go-to-market can work during the early stages of centralizing RevOps – if all these operations teams report to the same leader, which is the next topic of this chapter.
In conclusion, for this topic of which types of work should be included in RevOps, while we can’t yet agree on all included topics, we could potentially make guidelines for different sizes and types of companies to help achieve department success.
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?
- Who does your RevOps team report to? Or who SHOULD it report to?
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