What’s the difference between Revenue Operations and RevOps?

Revenue Operations is still a new term, and as it gets regularly contracted to RevOps it can start to mean different things to different people.

In my mind they are two different sides to the same coin so let me break down how I see it.

Revenue Operations is the strategy of driving revenue growth by aligning marketing, sales and customer success.

This is a top level strategic initiative for a company.

Revenue Operations is driven from the CEO downwards and often has the role of CRO (or Chief Commercial Officer or other CxO title) with overall responsibility.

The leader of a Revenue Operations strategy has ownership of the entire go-to-market function including:

• The Go To Market strategy - where we sell, how we sell, who we sell to.

• The buyer’s end to end experience from first contact to ongoing renewals

• The partner programmes we use to widen our access to the market

• The events programmes we use to raise awareness in potential buyers

• The customer community we run to build deeper relationships with our customers

• The testimonials and referrals we drive from our customers.

Within that overarching Revenue Operations strategy is a subset of internal operational tasks which fall under the RevOps domain:

• Locating, centralising and analysing data across all marketing, sales and customer success applications

• Procuring, administering and integrating a tech stack across all three functions

• Enabling sellers through content, training and coaching

• Forecasting revenue and other key metrics up to leadership

• Defining and owning the end to end sales process and methodology

I visualise RevOps as a subset of Revenue Operations

Why is it important to define them?

In my conversations with clients when I discuss Revenue Operations, many will think immediately of RevOps, and of a more tactical and internally focused role.

“Ah - I need someone that previously would have been called SalesOps. Someone to manage my data and systems and tell me if we are going to hit target”

When for many companies what they really need is someone that can help define a Revenue Operations Strategy.

“Ah, we actually need someone that can help us look from the buyer’s perspective - to work with our customers and define a new buying experience. To help define the partnerships we need to build and the external testimonials and events we need to develop.”

This is a very different skillset.

You can map out the different skills as aligning to different roles

A couple of easy traps to fall into include:

1. Renaming the VP Sales as CRO, but not changing that executive’s knowledge and responsibility to cover the end to end buyer experience

2. Renaming the head of SalesOps to a head of RevOps but not giving them responsibility for Marketing or Customer Operations

The Revenue Acceleration Flywheel

I walk clients around the Revenue Acceleration Flywheel - a set of external and internal activities that a company needs to iterate on to develop a Revenue Operations Strategy.

It quickly becomes clear that what many companies define as “RevOps” sits below the line - internally focused, when what really drives revenue growth sits above the line - customer and partner focused.

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Get started

Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.

1. Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.

2. RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.