What Is The Difference Between RevOps And SalesOps?

DEFINITION
RevOps or revenue operations is a revenue growth strategy that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success operations to drive operational efficiency. On the other hand, SalesOps or sales operations aim to maximize optimization and efficiency in the sales process only.

💡Understanding RevOps And SalesOps 

Aligning all the departments of an organization towards a focused goal is fast becoming a recipe for success. 

Marketing and sales are two of the most crucial ingredients of this recipe. Coupled with customer success operations, they have the potential to supercharge your operations and set the stage for sustainable revenue acceleration.

This is the single-minded goal of RevOps or revenue operations. Breaking down the barriers between the core revenue-focused departments in the organization can bring unprecedented visibility to the sales cycle and access to data that existed in silos. 

This not only eliminates the roadblocks limiting organizational performance but also unearths new and unexplored ways to achieve that performance, energizing the entire workforce. 

SalesOps also has the singular goal of operational efficiency at its core. It aims to optimize sales elements like sales automation, lead management, sales training, sales process optimization, and more to achieve maximum sales efficiency. 

While both RevOps and SalesOps might employ similar operational levers, they differ in their scope and intent. SalesOps focuses on sales efficiency, while RevOps takes a holistic view toward revenue maximization that cuts across all revenue-focused departments.

🖋 Takeaway

RevOps places a single-minded focus on revenue growth through operational efficiency. It aims to achieve optimum productivity across key departments driving revenue: sales, marketing, and customer success operations.

While RevOps takes a high-level view of the major revenue-focused departments of the organization to make them function at peak performance, SalesOps limits itself to making the sales team more efficient through data & analytics, workflow optimization, and technology. 

This is why the two shouldn’t replace each other. SalesOps is a part of the wider RevOps, and to drive sustainable growth you need both to work towards the same goal.

What Is RevOps?

The road to unbridled revenue growth hinges on a simple philosophy–bring marketing, sales, and customer success in sync with a holistic strategy aimed at minimizing waste and maximizing productivity. 

This core philosophy of RevOps dictates the strategic roadmap of an organization and any tactical decisions it takes as a result.

Organizations are fast realizing the game-changing growth potential RevOps promises and onboarding people with skillsets uniquely suited to implement it. Forrester’s 2019 survey showed that companies successfully implementing RevOps grew almost thrice as fast as those who didn’t. 

What Is SalesOps?

SalesOps is a sales enhancement approach with the goal of making sales more efficient by optimizing every aspect of it. 

You might have heard of sales enablement and are probably wondering how SalesOps is different. 

Sales enablement works on a more tactical level, operationalizing the changes and strategic directives recommended by data-driven SalesOps. You can consider sales enablement as a subset of SalesOps.

SalesOps brings under its ambit onboarding and training, inter-departmental communication, and leveraging technology, among many other tasks.

Difference Between RevOps And SalesOps

RevOps drives revenue growth aided by organization-wide visibility and operational efficiency and a shared focus on a single goal. But how is this different from SalesOps, which also depends on operational efficiency as its core tenet?

The difference lies in the approach these concepts have towards revenue growth.

While SalesOps is laser-focused on the sales department, RevOps takes a high-level view of the entire organizational setup and aligns sales with marketing and customer success to implement an integrated push toward growth.

RevOps adds customer success to the mix of sales and marketing to impart a 360-degree flavor to the entire revenue growth mindset. Although they are similar to an extent, RevOps and SalesOps should never be clubbed together. They each serve different purposes.

Which One Do You Need?

The answer depends more on the challenges you’re facing currently than anything else. For example, if you’re facing bottlenecks in growing beyond a certain number and your marketing, sales, and customer success department are unaware of each other’s roles, RevOps is necessary for you.

But if you’ve always been a product-led organization and are introducing sales as a new department, employing SalesOps will streamline the sales processes and help you avoid potential challenges.

The bottom line: both serve a different goal and depend on your needs.

Schedule regular sync-ups with your C-suite executives and field personnel as well to get the full picture of your departmental performance. Then decide whether sales need your urgent attention or a full-scale RevOps initiative is more your speed.

Harness the power of your data and analytics systems to quantify the leakages you’re facing in areas like your sales cycle, marketing performance, and customer satisfaction. And then put together an all-star team led by data-driven processes across sales, marketing, and operations. 

Breadcrumbs empowers your sales and revenue teams by organizing data and uncovering potential revenue growth areas.