Revenue Operations Vs Sales Operations: Common Aspects and Key Differences

Introduction

As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, one of the goals of my blog is to clarify misconceptions and terminological inaccuracies that sometimes muddle the fields of sales and enablement.

I did it for concepts such as sales methodologies vs sales process, sales training vs sales coaching, and sales enablement vs revenue enablement, just to name a few. 

Today, the focus is on revenue operations vs sales operations, two concepts that are often misunderstood (especially when theory starts to turn into practice) and sometimes even mistaken for one another. 

In this article, we will examine this “pair” from a few different points of view in order to give you a clear understanding of the two concepts:

• Definitions

• Common objectives

• Crucial differences and focus areas

• Interactions

• “Upgrading” from sales operations to revenue operations

Like always, we‘ll start from the top.

Defining revenue operations and sales operations

In order to even start exploring the whole revenue operations vs sales operations topic, we need to make sure we’re all on the same page. To do so, the best course of action is to agree on the definitions of these two disciplines. 

What is sales operations?

As a strategic function, sales operations (SalesOps) has been around for a while, taking responsibility for and ownership of optimising sales processes, tools, and performance to drive efficiency and effectiveness within the sales function. 

This entails designing, implementing, and improving sales processes, managing CRM systems, providing sales analytics and reporting, and supporting sales teams with additional resources, often in collaboration with sales enablement.

The primary objective of SalesOps is to help salespeople focus more on the art of selling while it handles the behind-the-scenes operations.

We will be talking more about the specific focus areas and objectives of sales operations later in the article.

What is revenue operations?

While SalesOps is focused solely on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales organisation, revenue operations (RevOps) do the same for the entire commercial team of a given organisation, most commonly including sales, marketing, and customer success. 

RevOps is not confined to a single department or function; rather, it serves as a connective tissue that binds together various operational elements of the business.

It encompasses process optimisation and standardisation, data analysis, and technology integration, with the aim of driving revenue growth and maximising customer lifetime value.

Perhaps the best way to define and illustrate RevOps is visually:

This visual was borrowed from the Six & Flow’s webinar with Guy Rubin from Ebsta, a revenue intelligence platform.

It should be pointed out that RevOps is not introduced as a superior or subordinate function to sales, marketing, and customer success.

Instead, the ideal structure is one where the VP of RevOps is equal to VPs of sales, marketing and customer success, unburdening them from responsibilities that take them away from focusing on the actual work of their departments. 

Once again, I will borrow a visual from the aforementioned webinar.

Put simply, revenue operations unites the various operations functions, breaking down silos and establishing an operational environment where the commercial teams are, for all intents and purposes, considered a single unit.

Common objectives of revenue operations and sales operations

Continuing our exploration of RevOps and SalesOps, we now turn our attention to their shared goals and objectives.

While these disciplines may have distinct areas of focus and scope, they are united by a common purpose: driving revenue growth and operational excellence within an organisation. 

Revenue growth

At the heart of both revenue operations and sales operations lies a shared commitment to driving revenue growth. 

SalesOps does this by supporting the sales teams in terms of processes, data, technology, as well as a whole slew of additional activities such as:

• Sales forecasting

• Territory planning

• Account assignment and sales team design

• Deal routing

• Quota setting for sales reps

• Proposal, quoting, and contract management

• Contract governance

RevOps focuses on the processes, data, and technology shared by commercial teams while leaving the details to their individual operations teams.

That being said, by unifying data, synchronising the tech stack, and ensuring that the processes employed by marketing, sales, and customer success are aligned, RevOps also sees revenue growth as its main objective.

In fact, due to its influence on marketing and customer success, as well as sales, its impact on various revenue channels is arguably bigger than that of SalesOps.

Customer experience

Modern sales teams, especially those selling complex products, do everything in their power to be as buyer-centric as possible, whether they do this by simply aligning their sales process with the buyer journey or by adopting one of the more buyer-centric sales methodologies, such as consultative or customer-centric selling.

More often than not, the sales operations team is involved or even leading these efforts (depending on their collaboration with sales enablement), especially when it comes to setting up and refining the sales process.

RevOps takes customer-centricity to another level by taking into consideration the entire customer experience, from the phase where the prospect is unaware that a product is even available to account management and customer success efforts.

In other words, the revenue operations team takes a more comprehensive approach to customer experience, observing, analysing, and perfecting the customer journey from the very start to the very end.

In addition, RevOps, especially in collaboration with enablement, solidifies unified messaging towards the customer and helps all of the commercial teams build congruent, naturally evolving relationships with the customers.

Operational efficiency 

Efficiency is paramount for both RevOps and SalesOps. This is achieved by these two functions acting as stewards for the processes, data, and technology used by the respective teams in their purview. 

For SalesOps, this means constantly evaluating and enhancing sales processes, managing CRM, sales intelligence, and other types of software, and making sure salespeople have all the data they need as quickly as possible. 

Once again, RevOps does the same but across sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Besides finding the balance that all teams will find beneficial, RevOps also encourages knowledge-sharing between the different teams.

For instance, if the marketing team starts using a particularly effective tool, the RevOps team will investigate the possibility of its use by the two other teams and reach out to the marketing or marketing ops team to share their best practices.

Data-driven decision-making

One area where both SalesOps and RevOps truly show their strengths is in the management and utilisation of data.  

SalesOps focuses on the data accumulated, built, and ultimately used by the sales organisation.

The function also ensures the data is up-to-date and standardised across the sales tech stack, the sales teams, and territories.

While this can and does have tremendous positive effects on the results achieved by sales teams, the true power of data is unleashed when combined with data coming from other go-to-market teams. 

This is where RevOps comes in, pulling in, unifying, refining, and managing data coming from the entire commercial team and all of the tools that they are using.

By standardising all of this data, RevOps makes sure that there is a single source of truth that everyone can refer to when the need arises. 

We will talk more about how this opens new avenues for generating revenue later in the article.

Crucial differences between revenue operations and sales operations

Even as we’ve been investigating the common objectives shared by the two disciplines, we cannot overlook the differences that make these two disciplines unique

Arguably, the best way to make sure we cover everything is to take the most commonly agreed-upon pillars of RevOps and see how they relate to what SalesOps as a function usually does.

This will allow us to see where RevOps will lean heavily on SalesOps and where it will either work in isolation or in collaboration with other teams.

RevOps and the mountain of data

We’ve already reflected on data and how both SalesOps and RevOps enable their respective departments to standardise data in order to make it usable in decision-making. 

The biggest difference between the two in terms of data is that revenue ops has to tackle data from far more sources that had historically been siloed.

Siloed data can be problematic for organisations. It leads to duplicated, incomplete and/or inconsistent data, which, in turn, can lead to a whole range of negative outcomes. 

Among other things, it can lead to issues with attributing revenue as the different teams feel like they were instrumental in bringing in certain accounts.

Furthermore, the disjointed data can lead to an inferior customer experience as the teams approach the same account in a discordant way.

Arguably, the most detrimental effect of siloed data, however, is the inefficient use of data, which could otherwise help teams generate additional revenue.

Just as an example, the customer success team of a SaaS tool might record a note indicating that one of their customers considered upgrading from a single team to the entire company, though one of the decision-makers remains hesitant.

This type of information is incredibly valuable to both marketing and sales departments, particularly sales.

It wouldn’t be too difficult to devise strategies using this information to persuade the reluctant decision-maker to possibly reconsider the upgrade.

Moreover, it’s important to realise that this sort of valuable information often goes unused across GTM teams simply because they are not even aware of its existence.

This is where revenue operations teams can have a significant impact, bringing data from all of the GTM units into one place and under the same “administrator”.

RevOps must navigate through the myriad data sources and repositories to refine data by removing duplicates and ensuring that all teams have access to the same data, use consistent nomenclature across different data types, and more.

This is a herculean task, but the rewards are tremendous. Among the greatest benefits is ensuring that no useful information goes to waste or remains underutilised.

Unifying the GTM processes

The wide scope of RevOps that extends beyond sales means that it will be dealing with more than just the sales process.

Marketing and customer success will have their own processes, and while all three departments will be the primary “owners” of their respective processes, RevOps can play an essential role in aligning those processes.

By conducting a detailed analysis of existing processes, their respective phases, required actions, and criteria for progressing prospects to the next phase, RevOps can identify inconsistencies, bottlenecks, and potential leakages that often arise when processes are entirely separate.

This can be particularly useful in “hand-off” scenarios where the marketing team forwards the lead to the sales team or when the sales team does the same with a signed account to the customer success team. 

Having an umbrella function that oversees the processes reduces the chances of mistakes that can lead to a poor customer experience. 

KPIs in focus and reporting

The majority of people who have ever worked in any capacity within any of the commercial teams have experienced the negative effects of KPIs’ discrepancies and siloed reports that all paint different pictures. 

I personally have had a number of conversations with salespeople, marketers, and customer success people alike who said that their company couldn’t even agree on the exact customer acquisition cost (CAC).

The lack of uniformity of KPIs and reporting practices leads to a lot of tense discussions, passing on the blame, and more. 

RevOps can be the function that will, in collaboration with other departments, provide final, standardised definitions of the different KPIs that will be used, the GTM-level metrics to track, as well as the reporting structure – what gets reported when, to whom, and in what format. 

This brings a new level of transparency and accountability to the entire GTM unit while also unearthing opportunities for improvement. 

As for the RevOps function itself, Guy Rubin suggests RevOps teams (especially new ones) focus on three specific KPIs:

• Customer churn: High customer churn can have a catastrophic effect on revenue, and by drilling down to the causes of churn, the RevOps team can discover more than by analysing any other KPI. 

• Revenue per employee: As Guy mentions, this KPI becomes particularly important for scaling companies, which should always strive to maintain a certain level of revenue per employee as they grow. This provides invaluable insights into whether the processes are scalable and truly data-driven.

• Account relationship score: This KPI gives insight into which relationships are healthy and which might require more attention, regardless of the phase of the relationship.

You can see them highlighted in this screenshot from the previously mentioned webinar, in which you can also notice KPIs traditionally associated with marketing, customer success, and sales teams. 

Refining and spearheading a value-adding tech stack

Not a day passes without someone mentioning how modern companies have hundreds of tools in their tech stacks.

It is an educated assumption that the tools within the GTM units make up a relatively sizeable portion of that stack. 

The obvious difference between SalesOps and RevOps when it comes to technology is that the former is only responsible for sales tech, while the latter evaluates, acquires, implements, and administrates tech that will be used by the entire GTM organisation. 

Of course, there will be exceptions, as some tools will inherently be more useful to, for instance, the customer success team than the marketing team, but the RevOps team should always strive to ensure that the adoption of technology is as cross-functional as possible. 

One thing that RevOps can guarantee through smart practice is that insights obtained from a tool that might be heavily CS-focused are not wasted if they can be used by the marketing or the sales team. 

I am always reminded of a friend who played a versatile role in GTM efforts for an emerging project management tool, contributing to content marketing and even handling some outbound sales.

He shared with me that it was only when he assisted the customer success team for a few months that he discovered the wealth of insights they had. 

He realised that his previous understanding of what customers appreciated about the tool, how they used it, and their dislikes was rather limited.

This revelation transformed his approach to both marketing and selling the tool, leading to significant improvements.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has brought a bit of clarity to the whole revenue operations vs sales operations dichotomy. 

In short, sales operations focuses on optimising sales processes, data, and tools to enhance sales team efficiency and effectiveness.

RevOps embraces a broader perspective, championing unified operational frameworks and data-driven decision-making across commercial teams.

RevOps can play a pivotal role in unifying GTM processes, standardising KPIs and reporting practices, spearheading the adoption of a tech stack that brings value to every team, and avoiding that useful data gets misplaced or underutilised.

I’d suggest checking out my article on sales operations challenges, where both salesops and revops leaders shared their insights and this will give you added context for some of the differences.