What are the differences between Marketing Operations vs. Revenue Operations? According to SiriusDecisions, B2B organizations with tightly integrated marketing and sales operations see 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth. But converging your marketing, sales and customer success departments isn’t easy.
There are a few ways to ensure your marketing team is supporting business goals; two popular methods are Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations.
In this article, we’ll break down everything you need to know about Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations, including how they’re different and how they work together to boost business growth.
What Is Marketing Operations?
Marketing Operations is responsible for reinforcing marketing metrics, processes, infrastructure and best practices within an organization. It involves setting strategies, optimizing marketing systems, monitoring quality assurance, reporting and automating processes to create a smooth marketing funnel. In a nutshell, Marketing Operations is everything that happens behind the scenes to deliver the right messages to your target audience.
Marketing Operations offers much-needed visibility into your data, processes and marketing activities. Without marketing ops, it can be challenging to target the right clients and understand where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey. Think of marketing ops as the engine that drives results in a marketing department.
Marketing Operations Responsibilities
A Marketing Operations team is typically responsible for the following:
- Marketing Project Planning: Project and program managers develop new marketing strategies and manage projects across silos (email, SEO, paid, etc.) to ensure every department is working together toward clearly defined success metrics.
- Creative Process Management: Marketing Operations professionals create standard operating procedures for each marketing team in the organization. They hold teams accountable and ensure they can execute tasks efficiently.
- Marketing Technology and Integrations Management: Marketing Operations teams also manage integrations between various software and systems, including the website, content management system and CRM. They oversee tools like analytics platforms, Google Ads, ecommerce platforms and A/B testing software to ensure all systems work together.
- Technology Adoption: Not only do Marketing Operations teams manage and integrate software – they’re also responsible for making sure people use the tools correctly. Operations professionals set standards for adopting software and often train the rest of the marketing team to ensure they’re leveraging tools the right way.
- Data Analysis: Data analysts and admins are responsible for gleaning insight from data to build high-performing campaigns. They consistently monitor analytics and reporting dashboards to see how channels are performing and monitor the performance of the overall marketing program.
- Brand Compliance Monitoring: In highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare, the Marketing Operations team may be responsible for reviewing and approving marketing materials to ensure compliance.
Benefits of Marketing Operations
Marketing Operations brings a ton of value to marketing departments. Here are a few key benefits:
- Greater Marketing Revenue: By merging technology, data, marketing and analytics, marketing teams gain more transparency into how their efforts are impacting the pipeline. A CMO who can produce credible revenue numbers and forecasts is frequently supported by a capable Marketing Operations team.
- Deeper Customer Insights: With access to more efficient systems that gather customer data, you can better understand your customers and create strategies that reach them in every stage of the marketing funnel.
- Better Alignment With Sales: With greater visibility into real-time customer information, marketing can pass insights to the sales team to help them be more competitive and win more deals. When sales productivity improves, revenue goes up – and marketing and sales can enjoy a more synergistic relationship.
What Is Revenue Operations?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a centralized unit that bridges the gap between marketing, sales and customer service departments and holds them accountable to common metrics. It brings credibility and trust to three departments who historically operated in silos and resisted the idea of working together.
Growing business technology has played a major role in the rise of RevOps. The average enterprise today uses 27 cloud products. Many of these tools accomplish the same tasks but in different ways or formats. Employees from different departments may end up repeating work or setting goals that don’t align with other core departments. On top of that, customer data can end up spread across various devices and systems, leading to errors and disparities.
RevOps emerged as a way to consolidate technology across sales, marketing and customer success and drive full accountability across the customer journey. Today, 35% of companies either already have a RevOps team in place or are in the process of creating one.
Revenue Operations Responsibilities
RevOps teams are responsible for the following:
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- Operations Management: Operations people manage resources to ensure every outcome aligns with the business’s needs. Activities in this wheelhouse include business process innovation, cross-functional collaboration and sales planning.
- Sales Enablement: In RevOps, the enablement team brings sales best practices to marketing and customer success departments so they can better support the sales team and boost revenue.
- Insights: The RevOps team standardizes data methods and delivers valuable insights to every department.
- Tool Integration: Software developers and system admins oversee all technology used by sales, marketing and customer success. They evaluate and procure the ideal tech stack, which should be integrated between all three departments.
Benefits of Revenue Operations
There are a few key benefits of implementing RevOps in your business.
- Predictable Business Growth: RevOps allows you to take accurate and consistent measurements to predict growth. It also allows you to quickly see whether certain strategies are working, so you can adjust as needed to reach long-term growth goals.
- Adaptability: Growing a business always requires major changes. Whether you’re upgrading your CRM or launching a new product, you need support from your team to make it happen. RevOps places a heavy focus on training, communication and project management, allowing you to make seamless internal pivots without having to worry about lost business or wasted time.
- Better Team Alignment: RevOps brings together three departments that are traditionally held separately. With everyone working toward common goals, you can more easily assign ownership of metrics and tasks and implement change.
How Are Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations Different?
Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations are both directly tied to revenue. But there are still some key differences between the two areas.
Marketing Operations focuses on managing processes and systems within the marketing department. It’s all about creating efficiency and standardization across the marketing funnel, which means it can be part of RevOps or exist on its own. Marketing Operations teams focus on engagement, growth and revenue metrics that directly correlate with marketing activities.
RevOps works across the entire go-to-market business to create cross-departmental efficiency. RevOps teams focus on high-level metrics that reflect on all departments, such as customer acquisition, annual recurring revenue, customer churn, customer satisfaction, net new revenue and gross profit.
Final Thoughts
A well-oiled marketing and sales funnel is an absolute necessity for any business focused on growth. Marketing Operations and revenue Operations exist for the same reason – to unite teams around common KPIs and ensure technology is working for you, not against you.
Even if you don’t have the need or budget for a full Marketing Operations or RevOps team, you can take the core principles and apply them to your business. By standardizing software, encouraging smooth processes and creating a culture of accountability, you can give every staff member a role to play in preparing your business for growth.
