Many businesses are adopting the Revenue Operations role. But what exactly is RevOps? How is success measured and who do they report to? How does a company know the right time to bring on the new position?
Mallory Lee, Revenue Operations at Terminus, and Mark Znutas, Vice President of GTM Strategy and Operations at HubSpot, discuss the intricacies of RevOps and why it’s so revolutionary.
What we discuss:
- The biggest myths of RevOps
- How the RevOps position is measured & transitioned into
- When is a company ready to invest in RevOps?
- The go-to-market and RevOps connection
The Biggest Myths of Revops
As RevOps’ popularity and adoption among businesses continues to rise, many preconceived notions about the position have bubbled to the surface. In an effort to understand the role and its unique benefits to a business, the following are some common myths:
- It’s more than Salesforce admin: Creating campaigns, providing Excel spreadsheets or reports, and cleaning up data are important parts of the RevOps role but, in no way, the entire position.
- RevOps is not that different from other operations: Compared to sales operations or marketing operations, many have made the assumption that RevOps is an entirely foreign concept. With this in mind, businesses should focus on aligning RevOps with other operations; otherwise risk RevOps becoming siloed.
- RevOps doesn’t mean the death of other operations: Similar to the myth above, RevOps does not take away the importance of marketing and sales. Rather, it helps embolden other operations as long as all roles are aligned.
”It’s more about aligning those teams and having a cohesive view of that end-to-end customer experience; and that’s really the value of RevOps.” – Mark Znutas
How the Revops Position Is Measured & Transitioned Into
Employees that transition into the RevOps role come from a variety of internal backgrounds: marketing, finance, and sales.
Because of the professional differences, it can be difficult to measure the success of the RevOps role — an employee with a marketing background might measure success differently than someone in sales.
Ways to Measure Success
How success is measured still differs from business to business, but some key areas of interest are as follows:
- Creating tight forecasts
- Having good predictability
- Suing data metrics of new business vs. terminated business
- Enabling and aligning internal operations
When Is a Company Ready to Invest in Revops?
It can be difficult to gauge when a company is ready to take on RevOps: transitioning a large company requires retraining many employees whereas training a brand new company might not utilize RevOps as much as they could if they were bigger.
With so much grey area, Mallory Lee shares a good place to start:
“It happens when you start to feel the pain of being disconnected; or you start to feel
the pain of having silos and people using different metrics to judge success.”
So, while there might always be some regret on not integrating RevOps earlier, a business can take comfort in knowing that refusing to take on RevOps ever is infinitely more damaging.
The Go-to-Market and Revops Connection
The question of how go-to-market and RevOps are connected is tricky and will continue to change over time: Does RevOps answer to the go-to-market team or is it the other way around?
Why Not Both?
The connection between the two varies from business to business and ultimately depends on how much importance has been given to RevOps. The question might also be tough to answer because the two roles seem to be merging.
“I think they’re just so connected, that they’re almost the same thing.” – Mallory Lee
Time will tell what RevOps will look like in the near future; but what can be counted on is RevOps’ ability to continually align a business — acting as the engine to a business model.
To continue the conversation, visit www.linkedin.com/in/mallorylee/ or www.linkedin.com/in/markznutas/.
This is based on an episode of the #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.
