RevOps is not a methodology. Or, as Matt Bolian, Co-Founder and Head of Growth at RevPartners, likes to put it, RevOps ain’t a methodology.
Most RevOps advice is too heady and theoretical, and it doesn’t actually give businesses a framework for how to make decisions. There’s no way to connect a strategy with tactics, which means you aren’t able to successfully prioritize goals—or reach and repeat them.
While we’ve really only heard about RevOps in the last five years or so, the reality is that it’s always been around. There were plenty of companies that were making plenty of insane levels of profit before RevOps became popular, but now it’s a core competitive advantage.
So what the heck is RevOps anyways?
Matt Bolian shared his definition of what RevOps is (and isn’t) during Hot Takes Live:
If you Google this question, there’s a bunch of paid ads— brands are literally paying to tell you what it is. Then you’ll see a lot of SaaS companies with ultimate guides. All the definitions look similar, defining RevOps as something like the joint effort of sales, marketing, and customer success to improve the customer lifecycle.
You’re defining this by the end state. That’s a problem. You don’t define a soccer or football game by scoring points; there are rules, regulations, teams, and plays that go into the art of the game itself.
So what is it not?
It’s not new (even though more data and online interfaces have allowed for new focuses within the RevOps field), a “mindset” or way of thinking, something that can be started or stopped, or “alignment.”
And here’s what it is:
- The science of sustainable revenue growth that allows you to replicate and repeat revenue growth
- A process that revenue teams can teach, measure, repeat, improve, and apply using growth strategies throughout the full revenue cycle
- Collecting, synthesizing, and disseminating revenue data
We repeat again: This is NOT a methodology. It’s a highly specific and nearly scientific practice.
And when put in practice correctly, your RevOps efforts can actually pay off and lead to real results.
RevOps can be highly successful with the right framing, ingredients, and processes in place. You need to have specific ingredients in a certain order, with the potential for repeatable results and it must be in common language.
Ingredients in RevOps can include understanding the business model, GTM model, data model, mathematic model, growth model, tech stack, and sales processes.
RevOps today is faster moving with more data, and more competitive than ever. Having the right processes in place is essential— so the question is, are your processes clear, in order, and repeatable?