Revenue Operations has never been more critical—or scrutinized.  

With businesses facing economic headwinds, evolving go-to-market motions, and increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI from each initiative, RevOps leaders are expected to do more than just keep the engine running. You're being called on to drive efficiency, orchestrate cross-functional alignment, and turn data into decisive action.  

But how can you position RevOps as the strategic backbone of go-to-market rather than operational support?

This is what we tackled in an insightful session from our virtual conference, RevOps Kickoff 2025.

In our expert panel—featuring revenue and marketing ops leaders Olga Traskova from Birdeye, Jessica Kao (ex-Cloudflare), Alana Kadden Ballon from Sprout Social, Matthew Volm founder of RevOps Co-op, and Erin O’Leary at Bottom Line—we explored the ways today's RevOps teams need to stay ahead.

With decades of combined experience leading RevOps at some of the most recognized global SaaS companies, these leaders unpacked how you can shape GTM execution, improve cross-functional collaboration, and proactively influence revenue outcomes.

Whether you’re looking for a quick rundown of takeaways or want to dive into the full session, you’re in the right place.

Read on—or download the full session replay to hear it all straight from the source.

Mastering alignment: Why balancing tension—not eliminating it—is key

In revenue operations, alignment isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a core function of the role. RevOps leaders sit at the intersection of Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Product, each with distinct (and sometimes conflicting) priorities. The challenge? Ensuring that these teams operate cohesively without forcing artificial agreement.

As any experienced RevOps leader knows, tension between departments is inevitable. But as Matthew Volm pointed out, the goal isn’t to remove this tension—it’s to balance it in a way that drives business outcomes.

So how do you strike this balance?

Our experts emphasized the importance of positioning RevOps as the neutral orchestrator—an objective function that helps teams recognize their shared revenue goals while ensuring every department remains accountable to the bigger picture.

Jessica underscored this role, stating:

“RevOps can play a powerful role in unifying the insights that come out from both sales and marketing, because we’re all (really) just one funnel... RevOps is an unbiased party and the end goal is the company’s growth.

Get clear on how these [insights] translate to each department. [This] ensures that at the end of the day, we focus on the end game.”

‍RevOps is moving from tactical to strategic

RevOps was traditionally seen as a tactical department—a way for businesses to find short-term plays that increased revenue. However, our experts each notice RevOps is evolving to become even more of a strategic role.

“I’m seeing RevOps actually owning the entire customer journey and becoming this adjusted unifier as well as the arbitrator across all of the go-to-market motions,”
— Olga Traskova, VP, Revenue Operations, Birdeye

She likens the progression to customer success.  

Just a few years ago, customer success was a junior function. It was rare for success execs to have a seat at the table. But then SaaS companies transformed the space and took a tactical approach. Now, you’d be hard pressed to find a C-suite that doesn’t cover customer success. Olga predicts RevOps will experience the same evolution.

“We’re evolving from just being data managers who implement a CRM [for example], to taking a bigger stage at the executive level....”
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— Olga Traskova, VP, Revenue Operations, Birdeye

Bridging business priorities across functions: A RevOps imperative

For RevOps to reach its full potential, success isn’t just about understanding business operations and processes—it’s about aligning them with the company’s top-level priorities, both short- and long-term. Alana emphasized that RevOps leaders must bridge these strategic goals across functions to ensure real business impact.

At Sprout Social, her team’s focus on multi-product expansion required RevOps to break down high-level company initiatives into function-specific execution plans. By ensuring departments were in sync, they transformed how teams celebrated wins and diagnosed misses—tying outcomes directly to contributors across the organization.

Here’s how that alignment translated into action:

• Market penetration through data-driven segmentation and geo-specific campaigns to drive adoption of different products.

• Tighter collaboration with Marketing and Product on upcoming launches to maximize impact.

This connective approach proved invaluable.

“It paid dividends because there were a lot of projects on the list that sounded important, but weren’t really in service to our broader goals,” Alana says. “[things that] didn’t remove tech debt or make reps more productive.”  

Now, her team asks: How do we ensure nothing stands in the way of Sales and Customer Success achieving our broader goals?

Prioritize creating a unified data strategy connecting GTM teams to shared metrics

It’s not unusual for companies to have different teams working with their own data sets. Finance has one; marketing has another. But our experts agreed all functions need to be working from the same foundation with a unified data strategy.

As Olga put it:  

“The key point of transforming revenue operations from tactical to strategic is ensuring we’re all aligned in the sets of metrics that we’re going after, from the very top.”

Alana’s team at Sprout Social puts this into practice with a shared set of KPIs that include:

• Pipeline health,

• Trending conversion rates by source, segment, and geography, and

• Resources—(whether there’s enough people in seats to create pipeline).

Further, she's always inspecting the activities across the business:

"Even if we’re having a great quarter or month, I’m constantly looking at all of the behaviors across that chain, including activity, to where I think we have potential early warning signs that we want to get on top of with new campaigns.”
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— Alana Kadden Ballon, VP, Revenue Operations, Sprout Social

Ultimately, regardless of what you find, don’t be afraid to dive deeper into your data proactively. Slice the watermelon to uncover areas of your business that are a little bit weaker and consider the software that might support you to extract insights faster than humanly possible with the emergence of AI.  

Reshuffling RevOps reporting structures

Another key trend discussed in this session was where RevOps should sit within an organization.  

In the case of Sprout Social, Alana reports directly to the CRO team who own sales and success. However, she notes an interesting trend to move RevOps under finance—a move that can result in cost savings but could diminish performance enhancement.

It takes a unique CFO for those tensions to disappear. Sales compensation plans usually end up aligned to cost savings rather than rep performance when RevOps reports into finance.

“I like finance to be a check on revenue, but I think that if you put RevOps within finance, you miss some of the big strategic unlock potential,” Alana adds.

The general consensus? Reporting structures should reflect the interests of the RevOps team.

An organization in which RevOps reports up to head of marketing, for example, will primarily have a marketing ops function.  

Like many things, the answer for where enablement sits alongside RevOps depends on a multitude of factors, notably:

• The maturity of the GTM organization

• The organization and its objectives

• Your enablement objectives and scope  

Erin views RevOps and enablement as two sides of the same coin. In fact, Bottom Line has recently hired a new leader for sales enablement who was thrilled to have access to data to inform her strategy.  

Olga agrees and adds that next year, Birdeye will have a bigger focus on cross-selling into existing accounts. Most of its sales team are divided into specialist teams based on which product they’re most comfortable selling. RevOps has tried to transition these people into solution sellers—for which they need support from both product and enablement. “We can’t just give them a quota and a territory and expect they’re going to hit it,” she says.  

Olga’s team are beginning to incorporate some enablement and activity metrics to see how this translates into the funnel—and to serve as a leading indicator.

Embrace RevOps as a growth architect for customer retention

Acquiring new customers isn’t the only way to grow revenue. Today RevOps teams are looking full-funnel to orchestrate retention; they're engineering recurring, predictable revenue.

Erin explained in an example of correcting misalignment that at Cloudflare, customer service teams were historically responsible for renewals and any associated uplifts, leaving the sales team hunting for net new business.

However, when its RevOps team underwent a recent S&Ops planning, data from a RevOps analysis indicated there were not only many strategic renewals upcoming, but in certain verticals, the contracting requirements for those strategic renewals was also quite complex. This led to a plan for analyzing team capacity:

Erin and team:

• Tactically analyzed sales team capacity. “We shuffled the deck to shift territory assignments and free up capacity without adding cost or additional sellers, so that we could assign these strategic renewals to the sales team and take it out of customer success,” Erin explained.

• Aligning quota and compensation plans. This ensured that sellers weren’t incentivized to do new business versus renewals, and they weren’t reliant upon CS teams to open the door to those conversations. Erin gave new OTE estimations and compared the uplift for each rep, and “everything fell into place from there.”

• Extending sales training and coaching. Erin began working with HR to refine its organizational construct and provide customer success agents with training and enablement. The goal? To upskill theCS team to broaden capacity for the following fiscal.  

Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress

Finally, while it can feel like your job as a RevOps leader is never done, our experts agree that it’s not always big sweeping changes that move the needle; it’s a series of gradual improvements.

The saying “Done is better than perfect” springs to mind.  

Jessica explains, you can demonstrate a quick win in your first 30, 60, or 90 days by showing progress to stakeholders—proving out the value of RevOps early on.

Is your data just 10% cleaner than last quarter? That’s a win. Have you improved quota attainment by 5% through strategically designed incentive and compensation plans? Also a win.

How do you actually make those gradual improvements and convince your team to do the same?

Matthew Volm shares he asks two simple questions to achieve this type of agility:

1. How can I solve this today? And

2. What can I do in the three hours before the end of the day?

“Incremental progress gets you part of the way there,” he says. “You don’t need to go from zero to 100 in the first step. Take some incremental improvements along the way.”