Tough Talks Made Easy: Moving From MOPs to RevOps? Here's What To Tell Your Team

Tough Talks Made Easy: Moving From MOPs to RevOps? Here's What To Tell Your Team

Written by Manasi Gaje

TLDR: Revenue Operations unites the three teams responsible for engineering the customer journey: Marketing Operations, Sales Operations, and Customer Success. In response to the pressures of customer churn, technical debt, and siloed working, RevOps as a structure helps people in these three teams collaborate and align on strategy. RevOps professionals can expect to calculate the impact of business practices across the tech stack, sales processes, and customer interactions to win and retain business in the most efficient ways. 

Marketing Operations as a discipline grew from necessity. Businesses needed people who understand marketing automation to master the tools and processes that make Marketing teams succeed. As the field continues to evolve, an emerging next step in terms of organizational structure is for MOPs teams to transition to Revenue Operations—a move that calls for a more holistic understanding of the whole customer cycle.

If you’re a MOPs leader managing a shift to RevOps, anticipate the changes in team structure and role demands to elicit some anxiety. Your MOPs team will want to know why the shift RevOps is happening and what it means for their jobs. As people question their place in the new order of business, how do you inspire confidence in the team?

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to present an encouraging vision for the move to RevOps. This is a shift that can help people in MOPs to remedy historic challenges and make bigger, better contributions to the business—convey this, and you can get people excited about the opportunities ahead.

RevOps in context

Multiple teams play a role in the customer journey. MOPs’ contributions—campaign creation, data analysis, lead scoring and handover—kick off the cycle. After MOPs brings good leads to Sales Operations, SOPs creates efficient lead management processes to help Sales win business. From there, Customer Success teams work to retain customers and prevent churn. 

MOPs, SOPs, and Customer Success are responsible for engineering different stages of the funnel—Revenue Operations unites these teams to optimize the entire customer cycle. Essentially, it means bringing all three teams under one roof to ask the same questions: How do we improve the customer experience through our tech stack, sales processes, and interactions?

Shifting business dynamics in recent years make the integration of these three teams urgent. The rise of SaaS and subscription models have made businesses more vulnerable to churn—if customers can pay for your products and services on a rolling, short-term basis, retention needs constant work to maintain. Hence, the growth of Customer Success.

Meanwhile, the explosion of workplace tech has caused companies to go all-in on tool adoption. As people leave roles and take their expertise, MOPs and SOPs teams are increasingly strained by technical debt and dysfunctional tech stacks. A hard-learned truth: tools are only as good as the people who use them.

Remote working, now commonplace, has heightened the risks of siloes. Consider how connected MOPs, SOPs, and Customer Success are in the customer journey, and it’s clear these teams can’t work effectively when fragmented. 

Someone in your MOPs team will recognize this one: without access to Salesforce, fixing a dataflow means pulling in someone from SOPs. When teams are disconnected, they get protective (“why are these people making changes in our tools?”). Collaboration becomes difficult as a result, even between teams that share the same goals.

So, here’s what RevOps offers: MOPs, SOPs, and Customer Success all exist to support revenue generators. Integrating these teams under one banner helps people align on strategy, collaborate, and share their knowledge. Instead of technical debt and division, you create opportunities for MOPs and SOPs to coalesce around a selection of tools and technical processes. No longer working in isolation or with ambiguous impact, MOPs gains visibility with Customer Success and Sales—from the very start of projects, they can work together to set goals and make improvements to processes that translate across the whole customer cycle. 

MOPs to RevOps

At this point, the logic of RevOps should make sense—but what does a RevOps role mean in practice? The field is still new and fluid, but there are some guiding characteristics you can share with colleagues wondering how their roles could change. 

RevOps moves away from granular tool ownership and data management towards calculating the impact of practices across MOPs, SOPs, and Customer Success. With more emphasis on visualizing these insights to leadership, RevOps provides opportunities to make holistic connections, identify the impact on revenue and productivity, and present these findings at high levels.

The key ingredients: tool knowledge, business acumen, strategic thinking, grasp of Customer Success and SOPs. This presents a challenging learning curve for MOPs professionals, but it’s a chance for inquisitive people to get in on a nascent movement, develop a variety of new skills, and take ownership both for finding problems and figuring out solutions.

Vision and change

RevOps is a team about the constant, integrated optimization of customer journey practices; it’s proactive, planned, and dedicated to winning and retaining business in the most efficient ways. The shift from MOPs to RevOps responds to new business dynamics and demands, but it also helps MOPs people to improve how they collaborate and align with SOPs and Customer Success. Visibility, interconnectedness, a proactive role in optimizing the customer journey—MOPs professionals can gain new skills and make a greater strategic impact in a RevOps team. Invest in building a uniform experience that solves the challenges of siloes, and your MOPs team will want in on the journey.

Want to know more about RevOps? Get in touch for a chat.