Any business leader will tell you that increasing revenues and profits in today’s economic environment isn’t easy.

They’ll also tell you that, practically speaking, you can only do so much in the face of difficult macroeconomic conditions.

That means growing a business in 2024 largely depends on mastering the micro: expanding your market, converting more leads, increasing individual and team productivity, etc.

Finding room for improvement in these activities is always based on one key input: data.

The importance of data – and thus the need for top specialists who can get it, interpret it, and effectively use it – is why we’ve been seeing a big increase in operations. 

Here, we want to compare two operational roles: revenue operations vs. sales operations.

By showing their similarities and differences, we’ll hopefully help you decide which path you should take today in order to quickly have a positive impact on your company.

Revenue Operations vs. Sales Operations

First, we should note that operational roles often have significant overlaps.

Because operations are always focused on how to leverage data in order to improve key metrics, the data automation tools used by sales ops, marketing ops, go-to-market ops, revenue ops, etc. will often be the same.

The differences come at a slightly higher level, namely what metrics should your operations functions be tracking, and why?

What are Sales Operations?

Sales Ops is the team in charge of building and maintaining the machine that seamlessly delivers the information sales teams need, when they need it.

That means their top priority is having flawless CRM hygiene, including data that’s both actionable and consistently up-to-date.

Sales Ops is there to ensure that salespeople aren’t wasting any time dealing with or worrying about leads; all of their efforts go into building and maintaining relationships with potential customers. 

A great relationship starts with both parties being eager participants, which is why Sales Ops places a lot of emphasis on finding buying intents, those little signals that a potential customer is faced with your problem and thus would be open to your solution. 

A good Sales Ops team hunts for those buying signals; a great Sales Ops team will find them thanks to automated data processes.

Specifically, Sales Ops is responsible for scoring leads, supervising the CRM, analyzing results and improving day-to-day sales processes.

Efficiency is more important than ever because salespeople can’t simply send out email blasts anymore – trying to boost sales by sending a mass message to every “Head of Engineering” in “France, Spain, Belgium, UK” just doesn’t work.

There’s too much noise in the system, and poor targeting and/or poor messaging quickly becomes a reputation killer.

Instead, salespeople need to open real conversations with real people, treating them as the individuals they are.

That requires understanding those people’s current needs and willingness to buy. Sales Ops should be developing the data machine that continually finds those buying intents and sends them to the sales team along with any other necessary information – the right contact info, company details, etc. – at the right moment.

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(Bonus: What’s the difference between sales operations vs. sales management? Management is also responsible for the performance of the sales team, but at a much more holistic level: most managers aren’t diving into the details of how to get the right data into their sales team’s hands. Sales Ops is laser-focused on how data can be used to optimize performance, while sales management is focused on how to optimize performance overall via headcounts, overseeing talent, budget oversight, etc.)

What are Revenue Operations?

Rev Ops creates bridges between the various departments and makes sure everyone is aligned on targets and strategy, with the goal of maximizing company revenue.

Its starting point is that every operational task in the company should be viewed through the specific perspective of how it interacts with others to ultimately impact revenue.

This could seem obvious, but if we look closer, it really isn’t.

For example, Sales Ops could be relatively happy this month because they’ve found a new data lever that increased their response rate by 3x.

They’ll naturally assume that the result is boosting the company’s revenues... 

But is it? What if those increased response rates are resulting in faster churn and creating high costs in customer support, to the point where the company is actually losing money?

By functioning as the company’s central data facilitator, Rev Ops is tasked with ensuring the various departments are truly functioning as a profitable whole.

As such, many of the big KPIs for Rev Ops are the classics of building a successful business: customer acquisition cost (CAC), annual/monthly run rate (ARR and MRR), LTV, churn…

The complications come when trying to optimize these KPIs by leveraging data related to sales, product, marketing, customer success, etc.

Rev Ops also plays a crucial role in where the company will head next.

By having a holistic view of data from across the company, Rev Ops should be able to both predict future growth and identify areas – such as different geographies or verticals – where new growth can be found.

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Now that you’ve – hopefully! – got a bit of clarity on how to think about revenue operations vs. sales operations, you might want to go further on how automated data operations can help boost your business. Well, Captain’s got you covered! Download our free ebook, The Rise of Operations, right here.