RevOps as Tactical Business Growth Structure

If you look at the search engine, data searches for the term revenue operations have doubled over the past couple of years, revenue operations is hot as a term. It's hot as a function inside of more and more businesses.

And so to understand revenue operations, please click here to read our previous article about Revenue Operations Definitions and explanation to get a better understanding of it.

There's a big push among revenue operations specialists and consultants and software providers to have revenue operations have a seat at the management table. Revenue Operations is the fuel behind having your business operate smoothly and being able to make accurate decisions based on data that you trust and have processes that people can follow.

When you move forward with a clear understanding and appreciation for the value of revenue operations as a tactical business strategy, fitting this function into your current business model becomes of utmost importance. 

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is not a strategic business growth function.

It's more of a tactical business growth structure. Now We are going to share with you kind of what might be an unpopular opinion among the revenue operations, the RevOps community, and that is that revenue operations should not have a seat at the management table.

RevOps are not business strategists.

They are systems strategists and data strategists and adoption strategists, but they're not business strategists. They need to be the people standing behind the business strategists at the management table who can fully internalize what the business strategy is.

Come up with a plan to execute it across all departments and all systems from a system and data perspective and process and adoption perspective, but they don't need to be the ones making the decision. They need to understand what the decision is, they need to give feedback.

There are a lot of times they're also the crystal ball in the organization that says, “Hey, if you guys make this, this part of the decision, then it's going to cause problems in nine months when this other thing happens or it's not going to play well with one of our existing systems.”

So after the business decisions and the business strategy is laid out, which isn't done by the revenue operations team, then they need to turn to the revenue operations team and say, “Does this make sense to you?,” or “What is the most efficient, long-term way to implement this strategy?”

Your RevOps partner or specialist should then give the thumbs up, adjust it, tweak it, and/or make recommendations. But they don't need to be at the executive table, making the decisions for how to steer and grow your business.

So the bottom line is no business strategy gets approved or executed without the revenue operations team, but they're not the people developing the business strategy.