Unraveling RevOps vs. SalesOps in 2023

I. Introduction

SaaS companies are deploying revenue operations function to improve the customer experience and unlock new revenue opportunities. RevOps unites people, processes, and data from various departments in an organization around the goal of sustained revenue growth. Sales operations, a subset of RevOps, supports the B2B sales process.

Both SalesOps and RevOps work towards enhancing revenue generation by optimizing processes and generating data-driven insights. While SalesOps focuses primarily on empowering the sales team, RevOps takes a holistic approach, aligning sales, marketing, finance, and customer success teams around a common revenue strategy.

II. Defining Revenue Operations (RevOps)

A. Overview of RevOps and Its Key Objectives

RevOps is the strategic alignment of various departments in an organization to eliminate procedural inefficiencies and bottlenecks hampering growth. Its key objectives are to optimize pricing to boost conversions, improve revenue forecasting, and plug revenue leaks. Forrester notes improved revenue growth, enhanced customer satisfaction, and increased profitability as the top three impacts of RevOps.

B. Role of RevOps in Revenue Optimization

The RevOps function automates workflows, implements data-driven processes and analytics, and creates alignment and transparency between departments to support the entire customer life cycle. It unlocks new revenue generation opportunities, boosts retention, and maximizes the organization’s revenue potential.

III. Defining Sales Operations (SalesOps)

A. Overview of SalesOps and Its Key Functions

SalesOps focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales team’s processes, activities, and systems. Its key functions are:

- Sales process management

- Sales forecasting

- Sales enablement

- Territory and quota management

- Sales data analysis and reporting

B. Significance of SalesOps in Sales Effectiveness

SalesOps achieves sales effectiveness in various ways. It streamlines sales processes, ensures more effective onboarding, improves recruiting and hiring practices, and implements strategic territory planning and sales coverage models. By enabling smoother operations management, SalesOps allows sales reps to focus on selling.

IV. Key Differences between RevOps and SalesOps

A. Focus and Objectives

RevOps leaders’ focus is on breaking down departmental silos and leveraging technology to streamline processes, create a single source of truth, and improve coordination between teams to drive the revenue strategy. SalesOps is concerned with the sales operations of the business, increasing efficiency, reducing sales cycle length, and optimizing individual and team performance.

B. Scope of Responsibilities

The RevOps function is responsible for deploying the RevOps tech stack and data-driven processes and analytics. It aligns multiple departments around a unified revenue strategy. SalesOps supports sales teams, reduces friction in existing sales processes, implements automation and analytics software, and creates new pipeline processes.

C. Cross-Functional Collaboration

The revenue operations team works closely with departments like sales, marketing, and customer success to align processes, strategies, and goals. SalesOps focuses entirely on the sales team’s processes, systems, and activities. That said, sales enablement requires synergies between multiple revenue teams of the organization.

V. The Similarities between RevOps and SalesOps

A. Collaborative Revenue Planning and Strategy

The SalesOps function harnesses data and analytics to enable winning sales strategies and improve sales funnel efficiency, which helps achieve the revenue goal. As companies transition to the RevOps model, sales operations teams spend most of their time on client-facing functions such as supply chain, enterprise analytics, and IT.

RevOps enables the entire revenue-generating arm of a business to drive revenue. RevOps does what SalesOps does but on a larger scale and with a broader scope of responsibilities.

B. Data Alignment and Integration

Connecting data across all teams is essential to identify revenue-generating opportunities and plugging revenue leaks. This is possible by integrating systems and tools, and ensuring visibility into data that can boost understanding, collaboration, and coordination across teams.

C. Process Optimization and Efficiency Gains

Both RevOps and SalesOps are involved in improving process efficiency and eliminating waste. They implement automation to decrease the time and resources required to complete repetitive tasks and cut back on tools or add new ones to create the desired efficiencies.

D. Revenue Metrics and Performance Measurement

Sales Ops and RevOps sets and tracks metrics that evaluate how well sales, customer success, support, and marketing teams perform. As the ultimate goal of both functions is to drive the company’s revenue goal, they align to certain standard metrics, including customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, conversion rate, win rate, and churn rate. RevOps uses additional metrics like sales forecasting accuracy, average deal size, and time to close, among others.

VI. Leveraging RevOps and SalesOps for Revenue Optimization

A. Aligning Goals and Objectives

SalesOps and RevOps teams unite on common goals such as finding new revenue generation opportunities, maximizing customer conversions, and identifying revenue leakages and fixing them. It is a crucial first step to align teams, processes, and strategies.

B. Implementing Integrated Technology Stack

An integrated approach to managing the revenue cycle from end to end requires every department to use a common tech stack integrated into the company’s existing systems. So, if you were implementing a system that automates subscription management and revenue recognition, it would integrate into your Salesforce sales cloud, Zoho CRM, MailChimp software, and Sage Intacct financial management system, to give some examples.

C. Streamlining Sales Processes and Workflows

RevOps and SalesOps typically leverage automation to streamline task management and completion and automate document and approval flows. They integrate various technologies such as CRM, marketing automation, and customer success tools to streamline and optimize revenue operations.

VII. Best Practices for Successful RevOps and SalesOps Collaboration

The communication plan must outline objectives, expectations, and feedback loops. Clear and open communication is essential to bring everyone on the same page and drive cross-functional alignment.

SalesOps and RevOps share a common set of metrics that guide and measure their efforts. The KPIs should be communicated clearly and incentivized suitably.

VIII. Conclusion

The sales team is crucial to a company’s revenue-generating wheel. SalesOps is the function that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales team. RevOps activates improvements across an organization’s revenue-generating arm. It includes ensuring the sales team has what it needs to succeed. RevOps and SalesOps teams that work together are able to execute their respective goals better and contribute to a successful organization.

Companies should empower their SalesOps teams to have a direct line of communication with RevOps leaders. The executive bench should support  the executive team to work closely with all departments that contribute to revenue generation.