Chapter 1
When I was beginning this research in the summer of 2020, I wrote a blog post called, you guessed it, ‘What is RevOps?’ This gave me a chance to take a first dive into finding everything online describing RevOps. I discovered a LOT of conflicting information online. (This led me to seek out experts to ask, and the decision to combine that research into another life goal: writing a book! Back to our story...) The best definition I could come up with at the time resembles some of the 20-minute verbal definitions I received when asking people about their definition of RevOps ... [chapter continues]
Chapter 2
Creating a proposed definition of RevOps from expert research
Still wondering...what is RevOps?
So now that we know a bit of history about what led to its creation of different definitions, we can better define WHAT it is.
Going back to the ~35 expert interviews, here are some commonalities to guide us:
Top words or phrases used when responding to the question, “What is RevOps?”
- 16 people said processes as part of their definition
- 12 people said GTM (go-to-market) or commercial function
- 11 said alignment
- 10 said sales ops, marketing ops, and customer service/success ops
- 8 said full/entire customer lifecycle/journey
- 8 mentioned efficiency or operational efficiencies
- 7 said data was part of the definition
- 7 included something about optimizing for revenue growth/engine, or operations as the engine
While noting what was mentioned the most, we should also note what was mentioned the least (though it was implied, or discussed thoroughly later on in their explanation…)
One thing missing from a lot of definitions was the word: people.
Later in the interviews, this subject was mentioned a lot, just not specifically called out in the definitions.
This is very telling.
The missing human element or people element was also related to a trend I saw in the content online in 2020 about RevOps, which was heavy on tech and tools questions and advice (a result of the tool vendors being the main source of RevOps content that was optimized for SEO).
A lot of my interview questions were focused on what I called the human side of RevOps, to try to learn the information from experts that wasn’t making its way into written, searchable content online. So while people aspects were discussed in other parts of the interview for different questions, the lack of people in most definitions could be causing some of the disconnect and disagreement on what RevOps is.
Spoiler alert: people are included in a proposed universal definition of RevOps... [chapter continues]
