When developing your org - how do you delineate between marketing ops talent and rev ops? Do they belong in one team or separately? If separate, how do they best work together?

Distinguishing between Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations talent is an interesting topic because it's essential to understand that RevOps is not merely a rebranding of SalesOps. Both Marketing Ops and SalesOps talent are vital components of RevOps, but they possess distinct skill sets and areas of expertise.

Marketing Ops talent differs from Sales Ops talent in that they are specialists in the entire marketing funnel. Much like Sales Ops, their objective is to ensure that their stakeholders' strategies and operations are data-driven, efficient, and customer-centric. However, Marketing Ops professionals bring specific skills to the table:

• Funnel Expertise: Go-to authority on all things related to the marketing funnel, applying deep knowledge to maximize the reach, impact and value of marketing programs.

• Database Mastery: Diligent management of the marketable database, ensuring its deliverability and maintaining stringent data governance, health, and accuracy. Also ensure compliance with all relevant regulations and best practices.

• Segmentation and Profiling: Continuously refine segmentation and profiling capabilities to better understand and target the audience, thereby refining and enhancing the impact of messaging.

• Campaign Operations Excellence: Provide best in class campaign operations, focusing on the architecture, activation, attribution, and execution of each campaign to ensure its success.

• Marketing Technology Strategy: Responsible for the careful selection, effective implementation, seamless integration, and robust infrastructure of the marketing technology used across the organization.

Regarding the integration of Marketing Ops alongside SalesOps, CSOps and Enablement - there's a case for both options. Some organizations consolidate them into a unified RevOps team, while others maintain separate teams. The decision should align with the organization's unique needs and priorities.

Some arguments for that decision:

• Unified RevOps Team: Bringing Marketing Ops under the single RevOps umbrella can foster collaboration and alignment between marketing, sales and customer success more proactively. It ensures a holistic view of revenue generation, breaks down silos, and enhances efficiency.

• Shared Metrics: RevOps can more effectively shepherd the conversations that establishes common language for the business that reflect the entire revenue generation process.

• Technology Integration: Ensure marketing, sales and customer success technologies are integrated to provide a seamless customer journey.

Marketing Ops teams are typically focused on executing and optimizing marketing campaigns. This includes marketing technology system management, data analysis, and campaign planning. Revenue Ops teams are focused on optimizing revenue generation and the customer experience across all go-to-market teams and channels – including sales, marketing, and customer success. 

Revenue Ops, without marketing housed within it, is more similar to a Sales Ops team than the concept of a RevOps team, which is meant to unify ops across the org.

Whether to structure them into one team or separate teams depends on the organization and the needs of the business. I wrote a blog article about this recently: https://zapier.com/blog/revops-best-practices/

Marketing Ops and Revenue Ops professionals have similar skill sets, and in my experience, I’ve seen a lot of benefits of centralizing them onto one team. 

Here are some reasons why it’s worked well at Zapier:

• Our RevOps team is able to facilitate alignment across marketing, sales and customer success. For example, we record “deal reviews” where we walk through the details of a deal and share them with marketing and product teams.
• Having a centralized RevOps function allows us to pinpoint areas of opportunity across both acquisition and expansion as well as gaps in the customer experience. This helps leaders weigh investments on things ranging from lead performance to sales rep performance.
• Operations professionals have a wide range of specializations—analytics, technology, automation, the list goes on. Having them in one function allows you to utilize the best of all those specializations to build a high-performing team. A RevOps structure fosters more opportunities to learn from each other and collaborate on solutions.

If they are separate teams, the key to success is to ensure that both Marketing Ops and Rev Ops have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and are aligned with the broader goals of the organization.