Marketing Ops vs Revenue Ops: What Are They & Why Are They Important?

Both Marketing Ops and RevOps leverage communication, data, and technology to create efficiencies, increase revenue, and bolster interdepartmental alignment. That said, they do have different focuses.

RevOps focuses on high-level metrics to strengthen integration on an organizational level. The goal is to create consistent, overall profitability by focusing on all aspects of the buyer journey,  making the process as smooth and frictionless as possible.

More narrowly focused, Marketing Ops is one aspect of RevOps, concerning itself with the systems that underlay the marketing department. Marketing Ops seeks to optimize lead conversion by focusing closely on the marketing funnel.

Let's dive in and explore both. 

What Is Marketing Ops?

Marketing Operations, or Marketing Ops, is responsible for implementing and refining all the processes, infrastructure, best practices, and metrics that combine to form an organization’s marketing department. Good Marketing Ops creates a smooth marketing funnel and optimizes lead conversion.

The job of a Marketing Ops specialist is to use data to provide clarity and visibility to all aspects of the marketing process and constantly improve it. By tightly aligning with the sales team, Marketing Ops ensures that contact is made with the right audience at the right time with the correct frequency to keep customers moving through the funnel.

Marketing Ops is both the machinery that drives results in a marketing department and the process of fine-tuning that machinery for peak performance.

What Does Marketing Ops Do?

Because Marketing Ops refers to both a job and a process, visualizing what it entails on a practical, day-to-day level can be difficult. The exact parameters of a Marketing Ops job can and will vary based on the organization's needs. However, the ultimate goal of a Marketing Ops manager or team is to facilitate communication and create efficiencies.

Some of the everyday responsibilities of Marketing Ops include:

• Planning and managing projects
• Maintaining consistent and frequent customer communication across platforms 
• Collecting and analyzing data
• Eliminating silos
• Monitoring performance
• Streamlining processes
• Overseeing the adoption and integration of technology
• Monitoring brand compliance

By empowering a marketing team to meet their goals efficiently and effectively, Marketing Ops can be essential to scalable, sustainable growth.

Benefits of Marketing Ops

Strong Marketing Ops adds value to an organization in many ways, both tangible and intangible. Some key benefits include the following:

• Increased marketing revenue: When all the people, processes, technology, and data in the marketing department are pulling in the same direction, it creates transparency. This transparency allows a greater sense of how the department affects the pipeline, leading to more accurate revenue forecasting.
• Greater insight into customer needs: The more efficient collection and application of data within the department allow for creating new and better strategies to reach leads and transform them into customers.
• Stronger alignment with other departments: The tight alignment between sales and marketing teams created by strong Marketing Ops makes three-year revenue and three-year profit growth 24% and 27% faster, respectively, in B2B organizations.

When an organization can deploy Marketing Ops effectively, it creates a ripple effect that positively impacts an ever-widening circle of people. Team members, other departments, and customers all benefit from the improvements.

What Is RevOps?

In its simplest definition, Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is a central authority responsible for facilitating the relationship between an organization’s marketing, sales, and customer service departments. RevOps holds these three departments accountable to shared goals and metrics to optimize the customer life cycle and generate increased revenue.

RevOps is also the collection of practices and processes that bind together all aspects of an organization’s customer lifecycle. It is the sum of the people, processes, and technology used to capture and implement data on an organizational level.

However it’s defined, RevOps is growing in importance and popularity. According to LeanData, 35% of businesses already have a RevOps team or are working to build one.

What Are RevOps Best Practices?

Historically, sales, marketing, and customer service departments have worked separately, leading to inefficiencies, missing data, and duplicate work. RevOps methodologies work to reduce inefficiencies, increase communication, and optimize revenue generation.

Common RevOps strategies include:

• Facilitating communication throughout the organization to eliminate siloes 
• Integrating and standardizing tools and technology across departments
• Managing operations and resources 
• Enabling sales operations to increase revenue by aligning marketing and customer service operations for more significant support
• Standardizing data collection and analysis to provide high-level, big-picture insights to all departments

When RevOps works, it works hard, providing organizations with the cohesion and automation they need to scale sustainably.

Benefits of RevOps

RevOps provides a suite of benefits when deployed strategically:

• Predictable/scalable growth: RevOps can help organizations set and meet long-term growth goals. More reliable data leads to better measurements, more accurate predictions, and an increased ability to analyze and adjust strategies for optimal performance.
• Increased adaptability: Whenever a business grows, its challenges grow with it. RevOps frameworks focus on communication, training, and resource management, creating room for internal pivots without sacrificing efficiency.
• Greater alignment across teams: With tight alignment and integration across departments, it becomes easier to meet organizational-level goals, make changes, and assign ownership of tasks.

RevOps has many moving parts, and getting started can be daunting, but the rewards are significant.

Do You Need a Marketing or Revenue Ops Team?

Yes and no. Consider this: No one needs a top-of-the-line water bottle. But everyone needs to stay hydrated — and having the right equipment makes that easier.

In the same vein, companies need to grow to stay relevant. Studies have shown that companies with solid revenue operations and tight alignment between departments grow 12 to 15 times faster than competitors and are 34% more profitable.

Building a Marketing Ops or RevOps team from the ground up can be intimidating, but resources are available. Outsourcing to a company that supports businesses looking to develop operations systems is also an option.

Build an Integrated, Efficient, and Profitable Business

While Marketing Ops and RevOps aren’t the same, they both grew out of the need for tighter integration and improved efficiency. The growth of technology in the workplace and the changing nature of the workplace itself to a physically distant model means that need is here to stay.

Strong operations teams make for more robust, flexible, and customer-centered businesses. They create a scalable growth culture where shared KPIs (key performance indicators) unite all teams and departments, and technology works to drive communication and synergy to fresh heights.