Strategy First, Stack Second: Building RevOps That Holds

This RevOps Unplugged episode explores what an effective revenue operations model looks like for businesses trying to scale. The conversation features Omkar Nadh, Founder of Marketing Ops India Group and marketing operations practitioner with 15+ years of experience; Srikanth Vadrevu, Senior Marketing Ops Manager at Clarivate; and Shreyansh Surana, a revenue operations leader with 15+ years of experience helping clients generate more revenue per dollar spent.

RevOps didn't get invented in a boardroom.

It evolved because organizations kept running into the same wall: sales, marketing, customer success, and finance were all working toward revenue but operating on different definitions, different data, and different priorities.

The misalignment wasn't a people problem but structural one, and RevOps is the structural answer.

RevOps is an evolution, not an org chart decision

The function itself emerged gradually, and understanding that history matters for how you build it.

"It all started from marketing operation focus, then we realized, oh, sales is not aligned with marketing, something is missing. Then we evolved into aligned sales and marketing. Then we realized we are bringing in customers — what is happening after that? Then customer success came in. And now we are realizing there are other teams — your technology team, your finance team — everybody needs to contribute. That's where the whole revenue operations ecosystem is building." — Shreyansh Surana, Revenue Operations Leader

What RevOps actually does across each function

The alignment piece gets talked about a lot. The mechanics get talked about less.

In marketing ops, RevOps ensures marketing strategies are tied to sales goals and that leads flow cleanly from marketing automation into sales systems. The handover is where revenue leaks, and smoothing that handover is a core RevOps responsibility.

In sales ops, the focus is cycle compression: reducing the number of days to close, implementing consistent sales processes, and making sure data and tooling support forecasting rather than gut feeling.

In customer success ops, RevOps helps the CS team get ahead of churn rather than react to it. That means integrating the CRM with ticketing platforms, running NPS programs, and identifying cross-sell and upsell signals before they go cold.

Finance has become a newer but increasingly critical partner. Deal structures, pricing, packaging, and contract terms all affect whether revenue gets recognized on the timeline the business plans around. RevOps teams, particularly in sales ops, now work closely with finance to align on these mechanics.

Data and analytics sit across all of it. KPI tracking, behavior analysis, attribution modeling — these exist to answer which products are moving, which offers the market is responding to, and where spend is generating returns.

Technology integration is the connective tissue. CRMs, marketing automation platforms, CPQ tools, and data engines need to talk to each other. RevOps owns that architecture.

"One primary goal of revenue operations is to break the silos between all these functions and all these processes, ensuring everyone is working towards the common objective of driving growth for the business." — Omkar Nadh, Founder, Marketing Ops India Group

The data problem is the trust problem

The data usually exists. The issue is that people don't believe it.

"The biggest problem which I have seen in past was trusting the data. Is that data correct? Can I believe it? Can I take my next step on it? If not, then what's the point of having it? We have a lot of work as revenue operations professionals — one, getting the data together; second, making people trust that data; third, making sure people take next steps based on that data." — Shreyansh Surana, Revenue Operations Leader

One example from the conversation illustrates this sharply. A company spent six months trying to align on what a lead status meant. Marketing had one definition. Sales had another. Nobody could agree on whose data was right. Six months of potential revenue creation, gone, because of an unresolved definition.

The fix isn't a tool. It's a process: stone the definitions. Document them, share them across teams, and make them accessible at the point of work. Omkar described embedding campaign naming conventions and lead status definitions directly as hyperlinks inside Salesforce, so anyone creating a campaign sees them without having to dig. Small change. Significant behavioral impact.

Strategy first. Technology somewhere after that.

The marketing technology landscape has grown from roughly 350-400 tools in 2012 to over 11,000 today. That number is mostly irrelevant to whether your RevOps function works.

"It's easier for us to align our strategy depending on the new technologies that are coming, but that kind of falls flat after you try it out — either the adoption takes a hit, or teams don't realize the potential as expected. Have a strategy-based approach first, see what's working, what's not." — Srikanth Vadrevu, Senior Marketing Ops Manager, Clarivate

For teams starting from scratch, the recommendation is a zero-dollar stack: CRM, marketing automation, a sales outreach tool, a customer success platform, and a project management tool. Get the processes right at low cost before layering in sophistication. The tools don't create alignment. People using tools consistently do.

As teams scale, the stack can evolve to match the complexity. But the principle doesn't change: tool selection should follow strategy, not drive it.

RevOps at scale looks nothing like a startup RevOps team

ServiceNow runs a RevOps org of 500+ people globally. Within that: 17 people dedicated to pricing strategy, 65 on deal desk, 42 on channel operations, 7 on customer outcomes, plus dedicated headcount in sales analytics and marketing segmentation.

That level of segmentation only makes sense at a certain scale, but it illustrates the direction the function moves in. RevOps at maturity is a specialist function with deep domain expertise across pricing, territory management, forecasting, channel, and analytics.

Where SDRs fit now

The traditional structure placed SDRs and BDRs firmly inside the sales org. That's shifting, with some companies moving them under demand generation inside marketing. The logic: SDRs are filtering lead quality, not closing deals. Their job is to understand lead sources, assess priority, and pass qualified prospects to account executives. That work aligns closely with how demand generation thinks about top-of-funnel activity.

"SDR should not be part of sales teams, at least from my perspective — they should move into demand generation and marketing because they are the people who would filter out the quality of leads going to the sales team. They need to understand what are the lead sources, where did it come from, what is the priority of the lead." — Shreyansh Surana, Revenue Operations Leader

The counterpoint is that SDRs carry sales knowledge — an understanding of what "ready to buy" looks like in a real conversation — that's valuable precisely because it's different from how marketers evaluate leads. Moving them under demand gen means they can apply that lens earlier in the funnel, before leads reach an AE.

Neither model is settled. Companies are still working through it. But the direction is clear: SDRs are increasingly seen as a bridge function between marketing and sales, and where they sit structurally is following what they actually do.

The single goal underneath all of it

Every function described in this conversation comes back to one thing: making sure the entire organization is pulling toward revenue as a shared outcome rather than defending individual metrics.

"Rather than four different teams working towards one goal, which is revenue, all the teams coming together, focusing on one goal — it's unleashing the power of one." — Omkar Nadh, Founder, Marketing Ops India Group

The organizations that get this right build shared definitions, shared data, and shared accountability. That's harder than buying software. It's also the only thing that works.