Revenue Operations Functional coverage - a summary

By Ethan White, published January 30, 2025

 

This Article's Purpose

 

Revenue Operations, or RevOps, has emerged as a critical function in modern businesses, but many organizations struggle to understand its scope and implementation. My purpose with this article is to break down the RevOps framework into its core components - the Three Pillars and Five Levers - and provide a practical guide for how these elements work together to drive revenue growth. Whether you're just starting to build your RevOps function or looking to optimize your existing operations, my goal is to help you understand the key responsibilities, metrics, and cross-functional activities that will enable you to maximize the benefits of implementing RevOps in your business.

 

 

Three Pillars

 

RevOps is a strategic function that integrates operations across sales, marketing, and customer success or account management. These teams serve as the operational backbone of modern businesses, breaking down silos, orchestrating the technical and procedural frameworks that enable revenue generation and optimization. We generally separate subfunctions of RevOps into Marketing Operations, Sales Operations, and Customer Operations.

 

Marketing Operations focuses on demand generation efficiency and lead quality optimization, tracking metrics like marketing qualified lead conversion rates and campaign ROI.

 

Sales Operations drives sales productivity and pipeline management, monitoring metrics such as sales cycle length and win rates.

 

Customer Operations ensures customer retention and growth, tracking customer health scores and expansion revenue.

 

 

Five Levers

Across the three pillars of RevOps, I always say that RevOps can pull 5 levers - people, process, policy, tech,and data. Let’s define the levers a bit further.

 

  • People: What capabilities and team structures support our goals, and how do we build those capabilities and structures? Full-cycle AE vs. SDR + AE model, SDRs reporting to Sales vs. Marketing, account targeting for account-based marketing (ABM), list building, contract prep, churn prevention, all fall into example capabilities and structures.
     
  • Process: What are the workflows and procedures we need to implement in order to establish capabilities and outcomes? Everything from the process for claiming a lead to bringing in a solutions engineer to the contract review or deal desk process.
     
  • Policy: What policies do we need to implement or eliminate to provide appropriate guidelines and governance? From comp plans to territories to marketing service level agreements (SLAs), a lot is wrapped up in policy.
     
  • Tech: Tools and systems, and orchestrating them to work together effectively and enhance the user and customer experience. Includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP), Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and more.
     
  • Data: Extracting insights from the available sources to make decisions, and providing data governance. Can include day-to-day operational metrics as well as ad hoc analysis.
     

By aligning the 5 levers across the 3 pillars, we eliminate traditional silos and create a unified view of the customer journey, improving revenue efficiency metrics and driving consistent customer experiences, accurate forecasting, and efficient resource allocation across the entire customer lifecycle.
 

 

Diving into the Functions

We'll look at each function's typical tasks, key metrics they monitor and drive to improve, typical technology and tools they use, and cross-functional tasks they take up within a RevOps paradigm.

 

 

Marketing Ops

 

Tasks

  • Managing and optimizing the Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)
  • Lead scoring and routing
  • Campaign performance tracking and attribution 
  • General marketing tech stack admin
  • Data quality management and enrichment
  • Marketing analytics support and infrastructure management

 

Key Metrics

  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) conversion rates
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Marketing ROI by channel
  • Lead velocity rate
  • Campaign performance metrics
  • Website conversion rates

 

Common Tech

  • MAP

  • Data Analytics Tools

  • Data Enrichment

  • ABM Platforms

  • Email Marketing

 

Cross-functional Tasks within RevOps

  • Collaborates with Sales Ops on lead scoring, routing, and Marketing Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
  • Works with Customer Success Ops on customer marketing initiatives
  • Aligns with both teams on account-based marketing programs

 

 

Sales Ops

 

Tasks

  • Sales process optimization and standardization

  • Territory planning and account assignments

  • Quote and proposal automation

  • Sales forecasting and pipeline management

  • Sales compensation planning

  • Sales enablement and training programs

 

Key Metrics

  • Sales cycle length
  • Win rates
  • Sales velocity
  • Sales productivity metrics
  • Quota attainment
  • Forecast accuracy

 

Common Tech

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM_
  • Sales Engagement
  • Contract Management
  • Sales Intelligence
  • Pipeline Analytics

 

Cross-functional Tasks within RevOps

  • Partners with Marketing Ops on lead management and scoring, including SLAs
  • Coordinates with Customer Success Ops on handoff processes
  • Collaborates on account planning and expansion strategies

 

 

Customer Ops

 

Tasks

  • Customer onboarding workflow optimization
  • Health score model development and monitoring
  • Renewal and expansion process management
  • Customer feedback and survey programs
  • Customer analytics and reporting
  • Churn prediction and prevention systems

 

Key Metrics

  • Revenue Retention (Gross and Net)
  • Customer Health Score
  • Time to Value (TTV)
  • Customer Satisfaction metrics (CSAT/NPS)
  • Logo churn rate
  • Expansion revenue
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)

 

Common Tech

  • Customer Success Platforms
  • Support Tools / Helpdesk
  • Survey Platforms
  • Product Analytics
  • Customer Communication

 

Cross-functional Tasks within RevOps

  • Works with Marketing Ops on customer marketing and advocacy
  • Partners with Sales Ops on upgrade and expansion opportunities
  • Collaborates on customer journey mapping and optimization

 

 

RevOps

 

Tasks

  • Overseeing activity of functional ops
  • Ensuring handoffs between teams go according to plan
  • Being a point of escalation on cross-functional matters
  • Providing executive support and insight into the function areas
  • Providing FP&A with revenue and sales guidance

 

Key Metrics

 

All subfunction metrics, as well as 

  • Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
  • LTV/CAC
  • CAC Payback Period

 

Common Tech

  • Generally uses the tools of the functional areas, though some RevOps-specific software tools are emerging.

 

Cross-functional Tasks within RevOps

  • Coordinating cross-functional efforts of marketing, sales, and customer ops.

 

 

How Does RevOps Fit Into My Org?

 

While all organizations can benefit from RevOps practices, how you implement those practices depends on a host of factors such as company size, industry, customer profile(s), business model, and overall organizational maturity. As with any change, I recommend working with an expert and taking a crawl-walk-run approach to implementing changes across the organization. See my work on The RevOps Charter as well as Customer Journey Mapping to get a better idea of how you can leverage some of these paradigms.

 

RevOps executed well results in greater revenue for your business and frees up resources to focus on their tasks, from the newest SDR to the C-Suite.
 

grow faster with rev ops - contact us today

Email info@waylandventures.co with your preferred contact info, let us know what you need, and we'll reach out ASAP