Revenue Operations vs. Sales Operations

Revenue operations encompasses your business’s customer-facing and revenue-driving elements: marketing, customer service, key financial responsibilities, and, yes, even sales. But simply because sales operations falls under the umbrella of revenue operations doesn’t mean that your SalesOps team doesn’t need its tools or won’t interact with data very differently from RevOps.

Understanding the critical differences in RevOps vs. SalesOps—their core functions, how they approach data, and their daily interactions with data—will pave the way toward developing the right tech stack and ecosystem for driving the most value and revenue. In this guide, we’ll look at the following:

• Both RevOps and SalesOps and the unique value each branch brings to the table
• How RevOps and SalesOps relate to each other
• How their data needs will differ
• Why data integrity and automation is so essential for bridging all of these differences

What Is Revenue Operations?

RevOps is a holistic approach to organizing and managing the revenue-generating arms of your business: mainly sales, marketing, and customer support (as well as critical financial functions like billing and forecasting). Traditionally, all of these departments were wholly separate and even adversarial groups. The purpose of a RevOps structure is to dismantle those silos or (in newer organizations) prevent their formation in the first place. 

RevOps focuses on the entire lifecycle of customers rather than a relatively minor component, such as prospecting and lead stages (marketing) or post-purchase stages (customer support). Through this lens, RevOps teams prioritize revenue growth. As a result, its core framework includes:

• Monitoring and improving customer churn
• Retention strategies
• Forecasting marketing and sales quotas
• New customer acquisitions and upsells
• Customer satisfaction

Key Business Benefits of Building the Right Tech Stack for Your Revenue Operations

Those business-critical functions make all the difference between growing your business and becoming stagnant (or even shrinking). As a result, using the right tech stack that can power all of these responsibilities are just as business-critical. 

Related: How Financial Service Orgs Should be Thinking About RevOps Strategies for 2023

Your RevOps team needs high-quality modeling software, communication tools, CRM access, and data management platforms, just to name a few. Since the goal of RevOps is to generate revenue—and ultimately, profit—spending extra time and attention on a tech stack might not seem like a priority. But here are the significant benefits of doing so:

• Your RevOps team can use well-integrated tools to find patterns and actionable strategies to address churn or low customer acquisition levels.
• They can ensure that all the arms of your revenue teams are using the same data and providing data across accessible channels.
• Your teams can act immediately on emerging trends.
• They can create more detailed action plans with the specifics you need to target prospective markets, current customers, and different aspects of your products and services to gain more traction.
• There are no duplicate accounts, conflicting data, or teammates operating with out-of-date or incomplete information.

What Is Sales Operations?

Sales operations are a sub-focus within RevOps, but it’s a distinct part of business operations. SalesOps supports reps to act more strategically, quickly, and efficiently. Sales operations teams focus on generating and assessing sales strategies, lead generation, using the tech stack that facilitates sales, measuring and improving performance, and other operational tasks (such as contracts, sales enablement and training, and hiring). 

Maintain this critical perspective when considering RevOps vs. SalesOps: RevOps focuses on optimizing the experience and behavior of customers, while SalesOps focuses on conversion. 

Key Business Benefits of Building the Right Tech Stack for Your Sales Operations

Like RevOps, SalesOps needs a tech stack that helps it fulfill its core functions. While overlap may exist between the CRM, communication tools, and knowledge repositories, SalesOps will need tools that RevOps may not regularly access, such as sales training software. When you build the right tech stack, your business sees:

• A steady inflow of customer data that can reach marketing, support, and RevOps teams through shared platforms and automatic data processes
• More granular data based on sales rep actions, rep and customer interactions, and movement throughout the pipeline
• Sales teams that benefit from prospect data collected and shared by marketing teams, as well as opportunities for upsells and cross-sells collected by support

RevOps vs. SalesOps: What Each Team Needs From Their Data

RevOps and SalesOps ultimately share a common goal: increasing sales’ value, efficiency, and frequency. Some of the ways they achieve this goal are also shared. They use data to make forecasts, assess current processes, and ensure that frontline employees have the tools and insights they need to do the job. However, this goal and the associated tasks comprise the bulk of SalesOps functions, while they are only a small subset of RevOps functions. 

Similarly, the tech stack for SalesOps and sales professionals is just a subset of the broader RevOps environment, enclosed entirely within the envelope of RevOps. Because of that, the data they each use follows a similar pattern. SalesOps needs a very granular view of just a portion of the data, covering these and other pieces of information:

• Profiles of MQLs based on collected insights and the campaigns that attracted them
• Organizational knowledge and numerous points of contact for B2B leads
• Insights into which tactics and changes generate the most considerable increase in sales

RevOps needs a much bigger view that encompasses all of that, as well as topics salespeople may have no direct interest in, such as marketing attribution models, increased downtime measured by an uptick in customer support tickets, and the marketing budget constraints for the next quarter. However, both teams need high-quality, highly accurate data to make their engines run smoothly. 

Related: How to Accelerate Sales with HubSpot Integrations

They also need data from each other. SalesOps can’t generate information about MQL profiles themselves; that would bulk up the conversion timeline and frustrate the leads who feel they weren’t acknowledged the first time. Similarly, RevOps needs the data directly entered into a CRM by salespeople and the passive data generated by interaction and sales productivity.

The Key Is Automated Data Integrity

How do the different teams get that data if they predominantly focus on distinct platforms within the tech stack? 

Behind the scenes, your organization needs a way to automatically share gathered data and insights in real time without relying on each team to share that data themselves manually. When a sales rep enters a new point of contact into their key account management profile, that information should be available to other departments. That includes marketers designing campaigns, analytics professionals tracking closed-won ratios, and customer service departments who benefit from the knowledge in future customer communication.

That’s just one piece of data. The dozens of data points sales teams generate should flow to the other arms of revenue operations. Similarly, the dozens of various data points those arms yield should be available to sales teams so they can act more decisively and accurately. The more you can automate this process with a specific automation solution that cleans the data and ensures every tool in your tech stack has as accurate data as possible, the better.

Choose Vertify for Data Automation and Integration That Supports Both RevOps and SalesOps

It’s not enough to organize your teams to break down silos. You also need the tech stack and data management solutions to break down informational silos. At Vertify, we provide businesses with a data integration and automation solution that shares data and allows optimal alignment and growth. See how we can partner with you to create a connective tissue of data that flows throughout your technology and, through that, your organization—request a demo to get started.