Leadership Structures
A successful RevOps strategy starts with the right leadership structure.
RevOps starts with the CEO and flows down - if it doesn’t old siloes will continue to exist and teams will diverge from the central mission.
Here are three leadership structures that work, and two that are unlikely to.
In this structure a central individual is responsible for the entire Go To Market function.
I have listed a CRO, but this might be a Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Customer Officer or any other title.
The key is that Marketing, Sales and Customer Success role up into this single executive.
The CMO may have a dotted line into the CRO as their responsibilities are often wider than pure revenue functions.
In the trio, existing reporting lines are maintained with the three main executives continuing to report into the CEO.
For the trio to work well these three need to act as one person. They should plan together, present to each others teams, be able to do each others jobs.
They should spend time together outside of work and trust each other implicitly.
“The Trio” is less effective than “The Top” because when more than one person is accountable, no-one is accountable.
The Team is a common first step for companies - aligning their marketing, sales and service operations teams into a single RevOps team.
But as I say regularly - RevOps is a strategy not a team, and the risk with this model is that whilst the operational team is aligned, the senior executives are still pulling in their own direction.
“The Team” is likely to have aligned processes and may even successfully integrate systems and data, but needs to ensure the goals they are set by leadership are aligned.
And two that are less likely to work
This structure often appears in larger matrixed organisations where the business already has multiple business units or regional divisions.
In an effort to simplify the RevOps model a separate hierarchy is created - maybe under a Chief Commercial Officer or Chief Operating Officer.
The teams under this leader find themselves lacking the power to put their strategy in place across the different business units - able to just provide ‘recommendations’ rather than ‘instructions’
A second model that struggles to implement its ideas is The Silo, whereby one of the existing operations teams, in this example Marketing Operations, becomes the owners of the RevOps strategy.
They don’t own the responsibility for the other functions, and don’t report up into the leaders of the other functions, quickly reverting back to their original role and goals - becoming a silo.
When assessing your structure ask yourself the question:
“What happens when I look up?”
If an individual doesn’t have a cross-functional revenue role somewhere above them, then you have not implemented a RevOps leadership structure.
In both of the poor structures above the RevOps team or leadership is off to the side, and multiple teams are able to look up without seeing them in their heirarchy.