How to pivot to a career in RevOps

Are you good with numbers but capable of seeing the big picture? A data nerd who can riff on strategy?

RevOps just might be for you. Of course, just like seemingly every other profession, AI is changing the nature of the day-to-day responsibilities—but RevOps is an in-demand and potentially lucrative career path. So how do you pivot from, say, marketing or sales?

“It’s super possible to come into a RevOps career from any sort of discipline across finance, sales, marketing, customer success, anything like that,” Toby Carrington, chief business officer at sales enablement platform Seismic, told Revenue Brew. “As long as you have an appreciation for the bigger picture, an appreciation for the system that you’re trying to scale, I think anybody can do it.”

Career path

RevOps sits at the intersection of sales, marketing, and customer success, and is responsible for creating a unified revenue engine. While there’s no universal pathway into RevOps, sales ops and marketing ops are two of the most common ones.

The career ladder typically starts with analysts and specialists, who after several years in the role may be qualified for manager and administrator roles overseeing specific functions and platforms. Advancement from there might look like a senior or director-level role in which strategy is key. CRO or VP of RevOps are the top titles.

Entry-level responsibilities might include CRM administration, dashboard creation, supporting sales enablement, and preliminary data analysis, according to Daniel Saks, CEO of AI GTM platform Landbase. Proficiency with CRM platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot is a must, as is know-how with Excel or Google Sheets and data visualization tools like Tableau.

CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot offer online certifications that can help bolster résumés.

RevOps employees typically act as something of a right hand to the CRO, taking charge of consolidating data from multiple sources into global sales forecasts, according to Chris Selland, founder and CEO of research and advisory firm Differential Factor. But equally as important as the technical aspects of the job are the business skills; managing the sales pipeline, for example, is often a key responsibility.

For analysts looking to move up in their career, according to Saks, “tThe key promotion trigger is demonstrating ‘systems thinking beyond tasks’—showing the ability to understand how individual processes fit into the broader revenue strategy.”

Consolidating functions

While sales ops, marketing ops, and other adjacent functions used to operate separately, those roles are being consolidated.

“Most organizations have discovered that having separate sales ops and marketing ops, for instance, doesn’t really make sense,” Selland said. “It makes sense to link those roles, because the whole point of go-to-market in most organizations is to get those functions working together. And RevOps is really about both managing the systems, but managing the metrics and the numbers and the goals and then plugging back into: What are the strategies we need to do? If our pipeline is too light, what do we need to do about it?”

Selland also noted the importance of understanding customer economics, including metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and net revenue retention (NRR)/net dollar retention (NDR).

The consolidation trend is one reason why Sara McNamara, revenue operations and GTM strategy lead at Vector, pivoted into RevOps after starting in marketing ops and gaining experience in sales ops.

“A lot of my peers in marketing ops are also making the move into broader revenue operations, and a lot of companies, especially in tech…are moving towards a more centralized operations group,” she told us. It’s now common to have a CRO or COO with marketing ops, customer success ops, and sales ops reporting directly to them—and meanwhile, senior-level roles in marketing and sales ops are disappearing.

“The teams can be aligned,” McNamara said, “and it can help with getting those different leaders pointed in the same direction, instead of building kingdoms for each department.”

Big picture

In the last few years, AI has rendered some of the more technical and administrative responsibilities of RevOps less relevant.

Experience with Salesforce, for example, would have been a nonnegotiable skill

for a RevOps position three years ago, according to McNamara, as would proficiency with data tools like SQL and Python. It’s still important to understand the fundamentals, she said, but it’s easier to get caught up to speed with AI.

“Your success is going to be more tied to stakeholder management, building relationships, and thinking big picture about the business,” she said. “It’s good to know Salesforce. You need to know how CRMs work. You need to know how marketing automation platforms work, commission platforms. But it’s much more about the strategy at this stage, and the stakeholder management, than it is about the tooling.”

And it’s not enough to be good at working with data; you have to be able to translate it into a legible narrative.

“If you just show the data, you’re easy to replace,” McNamara said. “But if you can interpret it and think about the business strategy and the implications, that’s where you’re really going to bring value.”

Carrington agreed that many of the basic skills required for a career in RevOps have changed since his days in the field, which he pivoted into after working in finance and earning an executive MBA.

“The most successful RevOps professionals in the future are going to be those that can architect the entire system,” he said.

As for Carrington’s ascent to a C-suite role, he gained more responsibility by having a seat at the table—something it’s possible for RevOps employees to do if they’re good at the strategic aspects of the job.

“That’s the opportunity that people moving into RevOps have,” he said. “They are at the intersection of so many different disciplines, and so [they] are a very useful senior leader that then can earn a seat at the executive table.”