1. Where does your interest in revenue ops come from? Are you a cynic or a supporter of the concept?
My interest in revenue operations very much stems from the potential future it represents for marketing operations. While marketing, sales and customer success operations have their distinct areas of focus, there is also considerable crossover, which represents the opportunity to improve synergy and alignment. I’m certainly a supporter of the concept, although,I suspect it’s more talked about than practised right now.
2. Do we need ‘revenue operations’ as a concept, discipline or function? Is it helpful, relevant or necessary?
As suggested, revenue operations certainly has a place. Bringing together the key customer facing operations functions and enabling them to work together more efficiently is undoubtedly helpful and relevant in organisations where this interaction is an issue. Whether it’s necessary though depends on the existing state of alignment and working relations; where these are already strong between existing functions, there may well be no need (and it could even be detrimental) to combine them.
3. What was your expectation about the understanding or alignment with revenue ops prior to seeing the data for this survey? Were you surprised by what you saw?
It was somewhat surprising to see the extent of alignment that respondents asserted, as this tends to be a much greater challenge in my experience. The current limited prevalence of CROs and indeed a single executive responsible for sales, marketing and customer success was less unexpected. As intimated above, these are relatively new concepts, especially in the UK.
4. To be effective, does revenue ops require a chief revenue officer?
Every organisation has its own specific drivers and characteristics that determine reporting lines and executive positions, with no right or wrong answers. A key determinant for the success of revenue operations is the relationship it has with frontline sales and marketing leadership. Whether this is a single individual, dotted reporting lines or even peers, it’s crucial that the functions work effectively together.
5. Is there a hard and fast definition of ‘revenue operations’ that is universally applicable in all scenarios, or should it be open to interpretation by different organisations?
Similarly, as with the arrangement of the organisation itself, the precise responsibilities of revenue operations are likely to vary from business to business. There may be a different emphasis on go-to-market support, analytics or customer strategy, for instance, which is entirely reasonable. That said, should a ‘revenue operations’ function lack a critical mass of its constituent components, it could be questioned whether the term is really applicable.
6. Many B2B marketing leaders that I know are relatively early in their deployment of marketing operations… revenue ops may seem too advanced a concept, or even completely out of sight right now. But is it inevitable that a successful marketing ops function is a necessary stepping-stone on the route to revenue ops?
As has been noted elsewhere, Africa is tending to skip the development of fixed-line telephony and conventional payments in favour of mobile communications and payments. In the same way, there’s no reason why an organisation could not pull the components of revenue operations into a single function without having initially created separate sales, marketing and customer success teams. As discussed, every organisation is different and so it’s important to consider what’s right in individual circumstances.
7. Is revenue ops just another land grab by the sales function seeking to subjugate the marketing function?
It seems unlikely that sales would really be interested in grabbing control of the very top-of-funnel activities that marketing operations would normally cover (such as marketing automation). More realistic would be for sales to over-assert itself in respect of things like market planning and attribution analytics. Marketing should resist this and ensure its involvement, if not ownership, in order to remain a part of these strategic considerations.
8. What one piece of advice would you offer to B2B marketers looking at implementing a revenue ops function, or considering a career in revenue ops?
As mentioned, one of the key aspects to implementing a true revenue operations function is that it genuinely encompasses all of the constituent elements and has the right relationships across the organisation. A successful career in revenue operations will require a good cross section of experience, particularly in the areas that would normally fall outside marketing operations, such as territory planning, compensation plans and account development strategy.
