Why RevOps Looks Different Everywhere — And What to Do About It

Ever wonder why there's no standard playbook for revenue operations? You're not alone. In this episode of RevOpsAF the Podcast, co-host Camela Thompson sits down with Jelena Arnold to tackle one of the most frustrating realities facing RevOps professionals: the complete lack of organizational consistency across companies.

Spoiler alert: It's not just about systems and processes. The real challenge? People.

The Reality Check: There's No Universal RevOps Blueprint

While the RevOps Co-op community might be aligned on what revenue operations should look like, the market tells a different story.

"If you look under the hood at really any company out there, they have their own crazy creature [called RevOps]." — Jelena Arnold

The organizational chaos is real:

• Marketing ops reporting here, RevOps there
• Some teams under sales, others under a CRO
• CFO-led structures mixed with customer success ownership
• Legacy sales ops trying to evolve into unified RevOps

This fragmentation isn't just an academic problem—it's creating real challenges for RevOps professionals trying to drive meaningful change. The lack of standardization means you're often building the plane while flying it, without a clear blueprint to follow.

The People Problem: Why Technical Skills Aren't Enough

Here's where most RevOps professionals get it wrong: they focus exclusively on systems, tooling, and processes while completely underestimating the people skills required for organizational change.

Jelena's background in cold-call sales and client operations gave her a unique perspective.

"Those are all the same skills that we utilize in RevOps. When you're trying to unify the team or change a process, you essentially need to sell the go-to market leaders and the exec team on why that's important." — Jelena Arnold

The skills that matter most:

• Objection handling (sound familiar, sales folks?)
• De-escalation when dealing with volatile personalities
• Complex topic simplification for executive consumption
• Change management across multiple stakeholder groups

This aligns perfectly with insights from our recent episode on why most PLG dreams fail on day one—technical readiness means nothing without organizational buy-in.

Where Should RevOps Actually Sit?

One of the most contentious debates in our field: organizational reporting structure. Jelena makes a compelling case for RevOps reporting through Finance rather than go-to-market teams.

"Your job is to be that facilitator and not really a referee. You really want to be that middle person without that bias because it's really easy to just get pulled back into sales firefighting." — Jelena Arnold

This perspective echoes themes we've explored in our guide to fixing tech bloat without making enemies—neutrality is crucial when you're trying to optimize across competing priorities.

The Finance reporting structure offers several advantages:

• Objective perspective on resource allocation
• Protection from departmental politics
• Focus on company-wide metrics rather than siloed KPIs
• Natural alignment with budget and planning cycles

The Executive Challenge: Dealing with Biased Leadership

Let's address the elephant in the room: CROs. The conversation reveals a harsh truth about many Chief Revenue Officers—they tend to focus on what they know best, often at the expense of other go-to-market functions.

"You know what I hear, it tends to be VP of sales moves into a CRO role. But then they tend to focus on sales because they know sales and they know the importance of sales and it's hard to make that branch out." — Jelena Arnold

This creates a cascade of problems:

• Underinvestment in customer success despite all the talk about retention
• Marketing operations treated as an afterthought
• Handoff processes that remain broken
• Competing rather than complementary departmental goals

The solution? RevOps professionals need to become multilingual, speaking the distinct languages of sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. As our customer onboarding best practices guide demonstrates, success requires understanding each function's unique perspective and motivations.

Breaking Free from the Sales Support Trap

One of the biggest frustrations for RevOps professionals is getting stuck in reactive sales support mode. The conversation provides a clear framework for breaking free:

Step 1: Get Sales Processes Right First

"You do have to get that process done in sales before you can move on to the full go-to-market journey." — Jelena Arnold

But here's the key—make sure your processes account for human behavior, not just theoretical efficiency.

Step 2: Align Everyone on Unified Goals

Stop letting departments compete against each other. Instead of separate sales numbers, retention numbers, and marketing numbers, focus on company-wide metrics like overall revenue or EBITDA.

Step 3: Lead the Strategic Conversation

"RevOps is a change management function. You're not just building reports and admining systems and creating dashboards. You should be leading that conversation about what that goal is, what our new tactics are." — Jelena Arnold

This strategic positioning is exactly what we explored in our sales forecasting accuracy guide—moving from reactive reporting to predictive insights.

The Art of Executive Communication

Perhaps the most actionable part of the conversation focuses on tailoring your communication style to different executive personalities:

For Sales Leaders: Skip the data dumps. They respect sales-style interactions, so essentially give them a sales pitch for your initiatives.

For CFOs: Come with your top three bullet points showing bottom-line impact, backed by solid reporting. No long-winded stories.

For Customer Success Leaders: Combine numbers with narrative. They need both the data and the story of how it affects customer outcomes.

This nuanced approach to stakeholder management is crucial for success, as we've seen in our analysis of mutual action plans for predictable revenue.

The Change Management Imperative

The conversation keeps circling back to a fundamental truth: RevOps is ultimately about change management. Technical competence is table stakes—the real differentiator is your ability to drive organizational transformation.

Key principles for effective change management:

• Start with executive buy-in before focusing on rep-level adoption
• Use sales skills to sell internally
• Account for personality differences in your approach
• Focus on unified goals rather than departmental metrics
• Lead strategic conversations instead of just responding to requests

This aligns with insights from our digital sales rooms and buyer enablement analysis—success requires orchestrating complex stakeholder alignment.

Key Takeaways

• There's no universal RevOps blueprint—and that's actually okay. Focus on principles, not rigid structures.
• People skills matter more than technical skills when driving organizational change.
• RevOps should report through Finance to maintain objectivity and avoid departmental bias.
• Executive communication requires different approaches for different personality types and functional backgrounds.
• Change management is the core competency—everything else is just tools and tactics.
• Unified company goals beat competing departmental metrics every time.
• Sales skills are RevOps skills—objection handling, de-escalation, and persuasion are daily requirements.

The reality is that RevOps looks different everywhere because every organization has unique challenges, cultures, and constraints. Instead of fighting this reality, successful RevOps professionals learn to adapt their approach while maintaining focus on the fundamental goal: creating predictable, scalable revenue growth.

"It all comes down to the human element of stuff. You have to deal with the people and the personalities." — Jelena Arnold

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