Sales Operations vs. Revenue Operations
Turning Functional Silos into a Strategic Game Changer
“Want a thriving company with a great culture? Prioritize people over numbers.”
Evan Sommerland, Sales and Marketing Enthusiast
Over the past two decades, the business landscape has witnessed remarkable changes driven by technological advancements and evolving customer expectations. One area that has undergone a significant transformation is the role of sales and later revenue operations.
Twenty years ago, in my early days as a sales leader, the operations role was primarily focused on sales, managing the sales processes, and ensuring the smooth functioning of sales teams. It involved activities such as sales forecasting, territory management, and pipeline analysis, all based on a first-generation CRM. As businesses started relying more on data-driven decision-making, the role expanded to include analytics, technology, and cross-functional collaboration.
Today, sales and revenue operations professionals play a critical role in aligning sales, marketing, customer success, and finance departments. They leverage advanced technology and data analysis tools to optimize the entire revenue generation process.
Most companies consider establishing an operations position when they face specific challenges or opportunities that require a more comprehensive and strategic approach:
Scaling the business
Missing alignment between departments
Technology integration
Data-driven decision-making
“You will know it is time to build an Ops function when you need to a.) answer questions about the attributes of growth such as, ‘Where are we performing well with our customer experiences & why are these experiences better than others?’ and b.) gain answers quickly to learn where to prioritize time and resource investment to support next steps.
In the iterative discovery process of an early go-to-market strategy, outputs from initial actions are the change inputs used for the development and refinement of the following marketing and sales actions.
Sales operations (SalesOps) is usually the first area where these various engagement artifacts are collected, curated, and developed into early insights as recurring feedback informing sales, product, and marketing resources. As more customer and prospect behaviors are recorded, these insight operations expand beyond the sales function into scalable marketing and customer success functions, becoming holistic revenue operations (RevOps) supporting the emerging tech stack & processes aligned to revenue generation and retention as caretakers of the archive.”
John Williams, SaaS Growth Advisor / Fractional CRO
In short, Sales Operations focuses specifically on sales processes and sales team enablement; Revenue Operations takes a more comprehensive approach, encompassing sales, marketing, customer success, and finance, and focuses on optimizing the entire revenue generation process. Revenue Operations has a broader scope and strategic impact on the organization as a whole.
I have asked a number of other subject matter experts for their thoughts:
“Revenue Operations primarily differs from Sales Operations in that it has a broader scope across all revenue teams, including marketing, sales, and customer success. Sales Operations is a subset of a full Revenue Operations team and is focused on supporting the sales team and related efficiencies but doesn’t take into account processes and data insights that impact the pre- and post-transaction customer experience.
The main goal of Revenue Operations is to align all revenue teams to an efficient and effective customer journey by using data, technology, incentives, and processes to accelerate and improve the impact of all revenue teams.”
Paul Wittemann, Owner and CRO, Balanced Revenue Services
“The Revenue Operations (RevOps) function continues to grow in importance to organizations. Investors and executives gain vital insights into a business's performance from the reporting that comes from the RevOps team. At the same time, organizations need to guard against pulling back on their sales operations (SalesOps) investment.
Too many times, I hear organizations say, ‘We will just roll SalesOps into RevOp and save money by having a single team.’ While there is overlap between the teams, it is crucial to recognize the different constituents that each team supports. Continue to invest in both teams. The improvements across the organization will provide the ROI.”
Luis B. Curet, CRO / Board Member / Advisor
“In the SaaS industry, Sales Operations (SalesOps) and Revenue Operations (RevOps) are two distinct roles that share the goal of increasing revenue but achieve this by taking different approaches.
SalesOps focuses primarily on optimizing the Opportunity-To-Close sales process by ensuring the sales teams have all the necessary tools and resources to close deals to achieve their targets consistently. This includes managing and analyzing sales performance data, creating sales strategies, and improving sales processes with playbooks, training, and coaching tools. SalesOps also manages sales pipeline, territory management, and sales forecasting processes.
RevOps takes a more holistic approach to revenue growth and focuses on aligning all revenue-generating departments, including marketing, sales, customer success, and operations. RevOps attempts to create a customer-centric, seamless customer journey by minimizing departmental silos to execute a unified revenue strategy across all the company's Go-To-Market models.”
Pablo Grodnitzky, Scale & Growth Stage SaaS GTM Strategy
“Your Sales Team may be made up of Account Executives, Account Managers, and Customer Success professionals. They may be responsible for acquiring initial customers and growing those customers. Alternatively, you may define your sales team as the team focused on initial customer acquisition, and that's where it stops. Your definition of sales ops will be driven through the lens of impacting the "sales team" – it doesn't stop there, though.
RevOps, considers the entire ecosystem. Customer, business, and approach at an individual level. RevOps helps you create clarity and consistency when communicating across functional teams and your customers. It helps operationalize interactions, conversions, data, and insight.
Sales Ops focuses on getting water (revenue) from the main line in your neighborhood into your house. It may route water from that point to other rooms, depending on the complexity of your house or apartment.
Rev Ops looks at the plumbing from the main water station, throughout the entire house, and to the point that it comes out of the right faucet. If you are wondering where your leaks are at the entry point in the house – look at sales ops. If you are wondering where your opportunities are before sales, after sales, and across the house – look at Rev Ops.”
Mike Simmons, Fractional Leader / Advisor / Coach
“Organizations have been optimizing within functional silos like sales, marketing, or service for decades. At some point of scale or complexity, organizations need to take a more holistic perspective to optimize revenue growth and customer-centricity.
Sales Operations focus is within the Sales function – driving the strategy, processes, learning, and tools to help sales professionals be more efficient and effective in driving revenue. Revenue Operations has evolved as a strategy and execution element of the business and works to align across key functions like Sales, Marketing and Customer Service/Success.
The integration of these key functions around common goals, metrics, and data helps to break down silos. An age-old adage is that the biggest losses in value (leaks) are at the seams of functions (or processes) where hand-offs occur, like between sales and marketing or sales and service, for example. A well-functioning Revenue Ops function creates leverage and acceleration and a truly holistic view of the customer.”
Rich Spitzer, Chief Sales Officer
Talk to us about the results that Fractional Revenue Operation leaders have delivered.
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