Excerpt from Chapter 1: Why does RevOps have different definitions?
When and how did RevOps begin?
Not only can we not agree on the definition of RevOps, but there is also no consensus yet about how it came into existence. Attempting to untangle the history of RevOps could give us insights into why it currently has so many different definitions. Perhaps the different paths to its evolution created different understandings of what is involved in revenue operations.
A question about history and exact dates was not part of the questions in the expert interviews for this book, but there were a few responses that contained pieces of the story of how and when RevOps came to exist.
Highlighting four different viewpoints could help create a well-rounded explanation of when and how RevOps began:
- A research firm leader
- A SaaS C-Suite leader
- A top consultant
- An expert recruiter
First-hand history from a research firm leader
Dana Therrien, Research Practice Leader, Sales Operations Strategies
Timeline:
- Doing sales operations work since 2001, before it was a recognized profession
- In 2015, he presented predictions related to the possible consolidation of marketing ops, sales, ops, and customer ops during his job interview at SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) for a role to help understand sales operations best practices
- In 2017, his clients, who were top software vendors, were creating cross-departmental solutions across the entire customer journey, and he saw companies start to have these different ops groups report up to one leader
- In 2018 he pulled data from LinkedIn and over the next 18 months saw the number of people calling themselves revenue operations leaders increase by ~186%...and the number of CROs had started to exceed the number of CSOs
- Before he left in 2019, he started to see a groundswell of interest and demand for the topic of RevOps from companies and the press
Relevant details:
In addition to the helpful timeline, Dana’s story introduces a second tech-related reason why or how RevOps was invented. The commonly cited tech-related reason RevOps emerged was that companies now needed to manage the explosion of the sheer number of tools employees were using, partly due to the ability to put lower-budget monthly charges on a credit card instead of a huge annual fee that would have to go through multiple departmental approvals. Dana’s expertise revealed that the tool companies themselves started to encourage cross-functional work in their new features and in the marketing of their products, ignoring departmental silos to position their tool to serve more people within each company. This marketing positioning of the software companies providing cross-departmental solutions was a big reason for the emergence and increasing visibility of RevOps from 2017 to the present day. This drive from tool companies also explains why there is a perception that RevOps is only about tools – which is a topic we’ll continue on later in the book.
Historical perspective from the SaaS C-Suite
Anonymous (for now) former executive at a SaaS company
Timeline:
- Sales ops seemed to have existed 10-15 years ago
- Left that SaaS executive role in 2018, when the company was already starting to make a multi-million dollar investment into the combined functions that became known as RevOps, a topic which the company started talking about in 2020
Relevant details:
- The increasing availability, affordability, and accessibility of tools was moving away from executive decision
- The industry started having an increasing focus on the entire customer lifecycle and retention, not just one-time transactional acquisition of new customers like the past, not focused on working in silos
- The desire for more companies to scale faster was part of the adoption or invention of RevOps
Expert consulting side of the story
Melissa McCready, CEO at Navigate Consulting
Timeline:
- She’s been doing sales ops work since around 2010, before marketing operations really existed (with a name to it)
- She started building the foundations of what would become known as RevOps in 2016 at a few companies she worked with, where vendors and partners were curious about what they were doing
Relevant details:
Melissa’s experience confirms one reason why RevOps content and talk at the moment is so sales-heavy and sales-ops focused: Sales ops has existed longer, or at least has been recognized as a “thing” with a name for a longer amount of time. It is more mature, meaning there are more defined pieces of it that everyone agrees on, compared to agreeing on what’s involved in marketing ops, customer ops, all the other pieces of RevOps.
It also explains another reason why the software companies, whose tools help RevOps professionals, are also very loud in the RevOps content conversation, which is why many people think RevOps is ALL about tools. The tool companies were wanting to adopt RevOps internally for their own companies, in addition to selling the idea of RevOps to potential customer to better sell their tools. For example, LeanData was mentioned by several interviewed experts who were working with them in the past 5 years, at the time of this research, LeanData and its executives produced a large amount of the RevOps content online in the early days of RevOps.
Highly specialized recruiting perspective
Jerry Bonura of RevOps recruiting firm TwentyPines
Timeline:
- The shift from sales ops to the more all-encompassing RevOps started in 2017 at this recruiting firm which found relevant candidates for companies seeking talent in this field
Relevant details:
Many people with the titles of sales ops may have been actually doing RevOps their whole career, working on the entire customer journey, it just didn’t have a name other than sales ops.
The introduction of RevOps has opened up more career paths and greater leadership involvement and possibilities, compared to only having sales ops. In the past, a sales ops manager job was mostly about managing Salesforce and other systems. The Director and VP of Sales Ops then RevOps titles started becoming more common, as the candidates the firm was hired to find.
