If you’re anything like me, odds are the first time you stumbled on the term RevOps you probably gave it little thought and moved on about your day. Maybe the third or fourth time you rolled your eyes a bit. 🙄 More jargon? Who needs it? But at some point, it warranted a few clicks to see what people were talking about. And here we are. At least that’s my story, and let’s face it…you are here reading it now.
From my point of view, RevOps is common sense
It turns out that RevOps is short for revenue operations, and revenue operations align marketing, sales, and service across the entire customer lifecycle with revenue as the point of unification. While that sounds rather simple and logical, if you’ve ever worked in a business you know that is seldom how most companies actually work. Meanwhile, most people would agree that it probably should work that way. And that’s why this is interesting, and worth exploring if you want your company to grow.
Our company had been evolving how we work with our clients to help them achieve this alignment and generate more revenue, and now we had a more succinct way to say it. RevOps.
So where did RevOps come from? Who gets to define what it is?
According to our research people started using the term as far back as 2004, and although a few people have claimed to coin the phrase or pioneer its concepts, it’s more likely that RevOps is simply a quicker way to say revenue operations and the name might piggyback to the term DevOps that has been used by software developers for some time.
We decided to do our own study and ask people working in the field how they define RevOps as we felt that was the best way to get a clear, accurate, and data-driven definition. In the coming months, we’ll release the findings of all of our research, but we thought we’d share this definition now since it’s so foundational to understanding RevOps. This was the question:
How do you define RevOps?
According to RevOps professionals, it encompasses a lot of things. We created a word cloud of their responses so you can visualize the data.
My best summary of the responses we received is this:
RevOps is a revenue-first approach to business that aligns marketing, sales, and customer success with connected data, systems, and processes.
Our research is ongoing
If you are a professional who works in RevOps and you have not participated in our study, we welcome your participation. If you are interested in the results of this research you may sign up here to receive the report when our research is complete.
