Revenue operations

RevOps owns the layer that sits above any single department: what counts as an MQL, an SQL, or a closed-won deal, the service-level agreements that keep a lead from rotting in a queue between teams, pipeline governance and forecasting hygiene, and the reporting that has to span marketing, sales, and CS to mean anything. None of that requires one celebrity hire to justify it. It's just the function that keeps every department from quietly running its own version of qualified, which is how a forecast turns into a guess with a dollar sign attached.

Where the job stops

A good RevOps hire spends real time reconciling why a CRM and a marketing platform disagree about the same account, and real meetings enforcing an SLA a rep wants to ignore. Unglamorous, necessary work. What it typically doesn't do is build new automated infrastructure from a standing start: a custom enrichment pipeline, an AI-orchestrated outbound workflow, a chain of data sources feeding a lead before it ever touches the CRM. RevOps optimizes and governs systems that already exist. It rationalizes tools and tightens process. Building the system that doesn't exist yet is a different skill, and asking a RevOps person to do it from scratch is asking them to do work they weren't hired for.

That gap is exactly where the confusion with GTM engineering starts. Without a builder in the picture, RevOps ends up absorbing every ad hoc request, "can we check if this account visited the pricing page before routing it," as a one-off spreadsheet or an undocumented automation chain. The backlog of temporary fixes never shrinks. It just grows until someone asks why three people are manually cross-referencing a spreadsheet every Monday morning.