Excerpt from Chapter 1: Why does RevOps have different definitions?
Not only can we not agree on what RevOps is, there is also debate about what to call it. Other terms include Growth Ops, GTM (go-to-market) ops, operational excellence, and more.
Andy Mowat, Vice President of Growth Marketing & GTM Operations at Culture Amp, prefers the term GTM operations. In his interview response, he said, “RevOps is often just a sexier name for Sales Ops. GTM Ops is much broader.” On his blog, he elaborated: “GTM Operations is sometimes referred to as Revenue Operations but because that term can refer just to Sales Operations (or in some cases to Collections;) I prefer the GTM Operations term which clearly includes all Operations teams that optimize customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, customer success, support).”
Growth Ops is the term Melissa McCready prefers, as a GrowthOps Advisor, Founder, CEO at Navigate Consulting and President of the Growth Ops Community. She said, “RevOps has been so revenue-focused and hasn't been growth-focused. Growth is a different thing. You've got internal growth and external growth, and you're looking across stakeholders in a business. You're not just looking at sales, marketing, and customer success. You're taking into consideration your employees, your vendors, and your partners, and operationalizing. The issue today is that a CRO is typically a head of sales, they just gave them a fancier name. And people have stumbled with it. They haven't really understood [the term] Chief Revenue Officer, what does that mean? A salesperson is where it goes each time. And when you say growth, people [understand] that's different. They ask, ‘What's the difference between growth and revenue?’ [I say] because revenue is an element of growth. Growth is what you're doing. Revenue is what you're getting. So you don't get growth, it's something that you have to plan towards and operationalize in order to set the foundation. Revenue operations is all about the money, which we need. But it's not the big picture of it all.”
Melissa continued, “So revenue operations, the definition of it and the actual practitioner are two different things. So when it came online, the idea was revenue operations was operations for sales, marketing, and customer success. There are those who have subcategories to them, but it was taking those things and orchestrating operations around anything customer-facing. So I think you can call it customer-facing operations with a heavy focus on revenue growth. As a practitioner, Revenue Ops means more sales ops. Out in the general market space, if you type in RevOps, you're gonna find sales ops, you don't find marketing Ops, you have to actually type in marketing ops.”
I have noticed the RevOps spaces online, the majority of people talking about it are sales-focused people, which is why I chose to interview a variety of people with different backgrounds to speak about it.
Melissa also explained the impact on career… growth… resulting from using a more understood term in titles. “Today, we have people who are in operations that will never move into a COO position because a traditional definition is those people are legal/finance people… So there's all of us operations folks to this (growth operations) has really been our primary, and we've done it for a while. It seems like there's no seat at the table with the executive team. And in comes growth operations. So we can be Chief Growth Officers, which also transforms marketing a little bit as well, because the CMO role seems to be going away…”
Another fan of the term Growth Ops is Mike Rizzo, Manager of Community and Loyalty Programs at Mavenlink and founder of the MO Pros community. He said, “To me, RevOps is focused on sales and revenue generation. It's pretty self-serving to a business, versus … growth ops as a term. And so when you start thinking about the differences between RevOps and growth ops and marketing ops, I think marketing operations has focused on the marketing funnel. It's been an internal role, it typically can serve other departments, and that's where it starts to bleed into things like sales ops enablement and RevOps. But again, those are all kind of self-serving.”
“And now there's [tools] like Gainsight out there and they've formalized client success and success operations, CS ops. And I think that's what Melissa McCready is working on, what she's thinking about in terms of growth ops. I think it is a really nice way to wrap things together, because it really thinks about growth as a success factor, from internal to external. We need to focus on revenue, but you get revenue through happy clients, which means we need to think about client success and how do we enable them to have success,” he said.
“So I like where that's headed, I don't know if that's the right term for it or not. Maybe it gets confused with growth hacking, the operations of growth hacking. But I like where it starts thinking a little bit more about the whole picture. I think RevOps is the closest thing we have to that today. But it's trying to look at the whole body of ‘how does a business really run an operation, that's effective, efficient, and scalable,’ Mike said.
Mike continued, “I think regardless of whatever you want to call that, I think that's the end game for businesses that are maturing. They're looking for a way to create an efficient, effective scalable process. Whether you're in RevOps, CS ops, marketing ops or whatever, as you mature in that role and as the organization starts to mature, those are the things that you're looking for all the time. ‘Is this going to make us more effective, more efficient, more scalable?’ Those kinds of things don't mean you run a leaner team, it just means you can scale more quickly. And I think those are kind of things that people are looking for, no matter what you call it.”
These experts have excellent arguments. They are logical, with great supporting points. However, if we want to come to an agreement on what it is these professionals and departments are doing and help elevate the roles and the work, we do need to agree on what to call it. The way to do that with the least amount of friction is to use the term that is already most commonly adopted. Even if the term is currently not used in a consistent way across companies, it may be easier to educate the public on the term’s shared definition than introduce a lesser-known term and also a definition at the same time.
As someone who focuses on clear communication (and has a vendetta against jargon), I would say the words ‘Growth’ and ‘GTM’ are jargon in themselves that are hard to describe clearly. Adding the abbreviation of ‘ops’ onto these terms could be more confusing to people outside the inner circle of industry experts. Though the term RevOps is also jargon, the word ‘revenue’ can be more clearly explained to the public, even if it doesn’t accurately describe every part of this job.
Getting a clear definition of the work of these people and departments may be a better first action or goal, aligning everyone on the common goals of the work, before trying to change the name. A simple name change would be easier later on, compared to educating the public about a new way of working and the importance of bringing in all these types of work under one department. For this book, we’ll use ‘RevOps’ as the term and we’ll focus on aligning the public on a shared definition.
