10 Comments
May 30Liked by Toni Hohlbein

Totally agree with your thinking—reporting up to the COO also works well in my observation, as it's another "neutral" and long-term oriented executive who has a holistic view of the business.

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Yes, these COO folks are just getting rarer and rarer.

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I think you're wrong. RevOps should be reporting to the COO, if not the CEO (smaller companies). Every RevOps person and COO share this opinion.

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Yes, I actually fully agree with that. What I found though is that the COO role is increasingly rare. Usually it gets swallowed up by the CFO - because you will always have a CFO.

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This point should be part of your article to rationalize and justify the case you're trying to make. The COO and CFO roles have very different descriptions and responsibilities which prompted my disagreement. The bulk of the discussion centers on traditional CFO responsibilities which don't begin to encompass all of RevOps like COO.

If the COO roles are being swallowed up by CFOs, what does that mean, what does that look like? If they aren't including COO responsibilities, then a case can / should be made for RevOps to take a seat at the C-suite table beside the CFO.

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It seems odd to put RevOps under the CFO because, while great questions would be asked, you’re better off as a company to have them asked all the time by the commercial team and make tweaks consistently.

In other words, the questions you said the CFO would ask, should be the ones the CRO should ask.

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Yes - I kinda write that also in the "modern CRO" part. But thanks for the call-out

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Agree Toni! As SaaS companies shift to efficiency from growth at all costs moving the revenue strategy & operations under the CFO or COO is to be expected.

RevOps Evolution as I see it:

Sales Support -> RevOps + Hire a CRO -> Evolve/Integrate to GTM Ops -> re-org RevOps under the CFO or COO at the end of the FY

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Haven't thought about it like that. I think though the whole "RevOps vs GTMOps" is a bit tiring actually. While a more flashy name, I haven't heard the real difference between those two yet.

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I love the “tiring” comment & honesty. RevOps teams in America often exclude Marketing & Product teams. A GTM team is a task force from Sales, RevOps, Marketing, & Product. GTM Ops is really about a scheduled process and working groups. The larger a company gets the less marketing & sales & product work hand in hand. GTM Ops is just a way of scheduling the teams to work together and the GTM team is the team held accountable together for GTM issues or successes.

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