Why You Don’t Truly Have a RevOps Function if Marketing Ops Is Within Marketing

If you’ve ever ordered fish and chips and received just the fish, you know something’s missing. Sure, fish can be paired with other sides—salad, vegetables, or even rice—but it’s just not fish and chips without the chips. This same concept applies to Revenue Operations (RevOps)—if your Marketing Ops lives within the marketing team, you don’t truly have a complete RevOps function. Just like how fish and chips belong together, so do marketing operations, sales operations, and customer success operations within a unified RevOps team.

RevOps is designed to break down silos and provide cross-functional alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success. When Marketing Ops sits within the marketing team, it can create marketing bias and prevent the broader alignment needed to maximise efficiency and revenue.

In this article, we’ll explore why RevOps should include Marketing Ops, the risks of leaving it in marketing, and the benefits of leaning into a true RevOps motion with a fully realised team.

Marketing Ops in Marketing: A Recipe for Misalignment

While many marketing leaders prefer to keep their Marketing Ops team within marketing for alignment, this often leads to a marketing-first approach that can limit collaboration with sales and customer success. In a siloed structure, Marketing Ops tends to focus on marketing-specific metrics, campaigns, and tools, without considering how those efforts align with the broader revenue cycle.

Here’s why keeping Marketing Ops in marketing creates challenges:

• Marketing Bias - When Marketing Ops reports directly to the marketing team, the focus often shifts toward marketing priorities, such as campaign performance, lead generation, and brand awareness. While these are important, they don’t provide a complete picture of the revenue cycle. As a result, sales and customer success teams may struggle to get the insights and support they need to convert leads into customers and ensure long-term retention.

• Misaligned Goals - Each department—sales, marketing, and customer success—has its own objectives. When Marketing Ops sits outside of RevOps, it can result in misaligned goals, where marketing is focused on top-of-funnel metrics while sales is measured on closed deals and customer success is concerned with retention. Without a unified strategy, these teams may pursue conflicting objectives, leading to inefficiencies and missed revenue opportunities.

• Inefficient Tech Stacks - When Marketing Ops functions independently from RevOps, there’s a greater risk of creating tech stack bloat. Marketing teams often invest in tools that cater specifically to their needs without considering how they integrate with the sales and customer success tech stacks. This can lead to data silos, duplicate systems, and inefficiencies across the revenue cycle.

In short, Marketing Ops without RevOps is like fish without chips—it might work with other meals, but it defeats the point if you want a cohesive experience.

The Benefits of a Fully Realized RevOps Team

Leaning into a true RevOps motion—where Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, and Customer Success Ops are all integrated into a single, cohesive team—offers numerous benefits for your organization. Here’s why a fully realized RevOps team is the best approach for aligning your go-to-market strategy and driving revenue growth.

Holistic Alignment Across the Revenue Cycle

One of the core principles of RevOps is aligning sales, marketing, and customer success to create a seamless experience across the entire revenue cycle. By bringing Marketing Ops into the RevOps team, you ensure that all departments are working toward the same goals and using consistent processes.

In a fully realised RevOps function, marketing no longer operates in a vacuum, and all activities are tied back to revenue generation. This means that lead generation efforts are aligned with sales enablement, and both teams are held accountable for outcomes like pipeline growth, deal velocity, and customer retention.

Improved Data Transparency and Insights

In a RevOps model, data transparency is paramount. When Marketing Ops is integrated with Sales Ops and Customer Success Ops, the entire team has access to unified data that provides a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This cross-functional data sharing helps teams identify bottlenecks, track key metrics, and make data-driven decisions to optimize the entire funnel.

For example, instead of focusing solely on top-of-funnel marketing metrics like leads or click-through rates, the RevOps team can track how leads are progressing through the pipeline, where they are converting (or dropping off), and what actions are driving revenue. This level of visibility allows teams to work together more effectively and make real-time adjustments to improve performance.

Consistent Processes and Workflows

When Marketing Ops is part of RevOps, all revenue-facing teams follow consistent processes and workflows, ensuring that the customer journey is seamless from start to finish. This consistency helps eliminate handoff issues between teams and ensures that no leads fall through the cracks.

For example, the handoff between marketing and sales can often be a point of friction, with marketing claiming they’ve delivered enough leads while sales argues the leads aren’t high-quality. In a RevOps model, the entire team uses agreed-upon definitions for lead qualification, deal stages, and customer success metrics, leading to greater accountability and smoother transitions between departments.

Streamlined Tech Stack

When RevOps owns the entire tech stack—including marketing automation platforms, CRM systems, and customer success tools—there’s no longer a need for each department to build and manage its own stack. This streamlined approach reduces tech bloat, eliminates data silos, and ensures that all teams are working with integrated systems.

A unified tech stack allows teams to track customer interactions across every touchpoint, from the first marketing email to post-sale customer support. This integrated view of customer data allows for better reporting, more personalized experiences, and more efficient operations across the board.

Better Accountability and Goal Setting

RevOps creates a single source of accountability for all revenue-generating activities. Instead of marketing, sales, and customer success setting their own independent goals, RevOps establishes a unified set of metrics that align with the company’s overall revenue targets. This ensures that all teams are working toward the same outcomes and are accountable for their contribution to revenue growth.

For example, rather than marketing being measured solely on lead volume, they’re also held accountable for pipeline quality and deal progression—metrics that tie directly to revenue. This alignment ensures that marketing efforts are focused on driving measurable impact throughout the funnel, not just filling the top of the funnel with leads.

Why Some Marketing Leaders Resist RevOps Integration

So why do some marketing leaders resist the idea of integrating Marketing Ops into RevOps? Often, it’s because they feel that keeping Marketing Ops within their team gives them greater control over campaign execution, tools, and reporting. They want their ops team to prioritize marketing-specific goals without interference from sales or customer success.

While this approach might feel more comfortable for marketing leaders, it ultimately reinforces silos and limits the company’s ability to achieve true revenue alignment. In a fully realized RevOps function, marketing still gets the support it needs—but in a way that’s aligned with the broader revenue strategy.

Go All In on RevOps

If your Marketing Ops is still sitting within the marketing department, you don’t have a true RevOps function—you have fish, but no chips. It’s time to go all in on RevOps and bring your marketing, sales, and customer success operations together under one roof.

By fully integrating Marketing Ops into RevOps, you’ll achieve holistic alignment across the entire revenue cycle, gain better insights into your data, and streamline processes for greater efficiency.

At Simplified Revenue Operations, we help businesses build cohesive RevOps teams that drive measurable revenue growth. If you’re ready to take the next step and fully realise your RevOps potential, get in touch with us today.