TLDR: Marketing Operations and Sales Operations work better together. People in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have knowledge that mutually enriches each others’ work. For a successful RevOps function, leadership should express this clearly through culture and processes. Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights.

 

Marketing Operations and Sales Operations share many common goals and competencies. Both define processes to:

  • capture meaningful engagement data
  • measure the impact of Marketing and Sales activities, and
  • surface actionable micro and macro insights to help marketing and sales understand their performance and progress towards goals.

 
In a perfect world: Marketing Ops and Sales Ops are tied closely together. And they have a clear understanding of each team’s responsibilities and contributions.

In the real world: Issues will arise that hinder the productivity and revenue intake of your business—poor data hygiene, inter-team friction, and fragmented customer experiences.

Sound familiar? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to explain to leadership why MOPs and Sales Ops alignment matters—and how to bring both teams together. This conversation will help leadership spend their time and money wisely and create team harmony.

 

How alignment breaks down

Often, the day-to-day projects of MOPs and SOPs teams don’t directly intersect, even as they both frequently use the CRM.

This lack of visibility can encourage a misconception that SOPs teams exclusively manage the CRM and have authority over all actions in the system. For comparison, while MOPs uses a CRM for things like attribution, lead lifecycles, and reporting, SOPs people typically don’t need to access a marketing automation platform.

In environments where SOPs and MOPs are siloed away from each other, the inevitable result is territorialism. Suppose Sales and Marketing leaders haven’t created a culture where SOPs and MOPs know each others’ accountabilities and haven’t incentivized regular communication. In that case, people become protective over “their” tools and systems and reluctant to share information.

In other words: Culture makes or breaks your Sales-Marketing alignment.

When SOPs and MOPs are at odds over who owns what in the CRM, both teams get things done slower and at a greater risk of creating problems with data hygiene.

With bad or outdated data, Sales and Marketing teams waste time acting on dead ends. If discrepancies build between the data in your CRM and marketing automation platform, Sales and Marketing leaders lose a single source of truth to support their decisions.

Sales and Marketing efforts become splintered as fractures emerge between Marketing content and comms versus Sales outreach. Lead gen falters without effective targeting, which causes your ROI to diminish.

The consequences are sweeping—paralysis, hostility, and stagnant growth. Fortunately, there’s a lot your leaders can do to correct course.

 

Uniting MOPs and SOPs

There are two initiatives your leadership should pursue:

1. Aligning MOPs and SOPs on goals, and
2. Encouraging them to work closer together.

First, leadership should punctuate just how much Marketing ops and Sales ops have in common. Both teams:

  • capture accurate lifecycle data
  • design effective lead-scoring models
  • create reports that surface key insights for Sales and Marketing
  • define processes to measure the impact of Sales and Marketing activities
  • protect systems from data loss due to technical limitations/errors
  • facilitate Sales and Marketing to review and share feedback on each others’ processes
  • set Sales and Marketing funnel goals in the CRM, and
  • enable cohesive customer experiences between Sales and Marketing efforts.

 
For each goal, leadership should establish which components MOPs and SOPs own. Responsibility Assignment Matrices are helpful structures to define and communicate who is responsible, accountable, informed, and controlled for each goal.

To make this work, your CRO should meet with SOPs, MOPs, and their leaders to identify the smaller processes that contribute towards achieving each goal.

For example: what’s the division of labor and impact on the lead lifecycle before and after the handover of MQLs? Use these accountabilities as a basis for joint ownership of the CRM, getting MOPs and SOPs to agree on features, dashboards, and processes that each leads.

The value of sharing information

Beyond assigning responsibilities, leadership should impart the value of sharing information on a regular basis.

Just as access to the CRM helps MOPs, MOPs people can share insights and reports from their marketing automation platform that SOPs might otherwise lack.

This deepens how SOPs people understand the customer journey and enriches the strategies and tactics they can recommend to sales.

Encouraging MOPs and SOPs to meet quarterly (at minimum) to share their opportunities and challenges—things that worked, things that didn’t, ongoing goals—also helps both teams be visible, accountable, and collaborative with each other.

 

Natural collaborators

MOPs and SOPs are natural collaborators—people in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have access to information that mutually enriches each others’ work.

For a successful RevOps function, your CRO should express this clearly through your culture and processes.

Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights. The closer you align MOPs and SOPs, the more productive and profitable your business can be.

Get in touch for more guidance on making your RevOps team a success.