Revenue Ops vs Marketing Ops: Stop arguing and start designing

There’s a familiar conversation happening inside a lot of B2B companies right now.

Marketing Ops says, “This sits with us.”

Revenue Ops says, “No, this is ours now.”

Leadership nods politely, adds another role to the org chart, and hopes the noise dies down.

It rarely does.

Because this isn’t really a role problem.

It’s a design problem.

And MarTech platforms have a habit of exposing design problems very quickly.

Why this debate exists in the first place

A few years ago, nobody was arguing about this.

Marketing Ops had a fairly clear remit. Own the tools. Run the campaigns. Keep the data usable. Try not to break anything important.

Then things shifted.

Marketing automation stopped being “top of funnel software” and became core infrastructure. HubSpot is a great example as it evolved from a marketing platform into a CRM, a sales system, a service platform, and eventually a full revenue engine.

At the same time, leadership started asking better questions. Questions like why pipeline looked healthy but revenue didn’t. Why forecasts changed depending on who built the report. Why marketing and sales could sit in the same meeting and talk about entirely different numbers.

So organisations reacted. They created Revenue Ops.

Not because Marketing Ops failed, but because the business outgrew the way responsibility had been set up.

Where marketing ops genuinely ends

Marketing Ops is still critical. That hasn’t changed.

In a well-run HubSpot setup, Marketing Ops is usually responsible for how demand is generated, captured, and prepared for sales. Campaign architecture, lifecycle logic at the marketing level, lead capture and enrichment, consent and compliance, attribution, and the overall health of the marketing side of the platform.

This is not admin work. It’s skilled, technical, and often underappreciated.

But there’s a line that matters.

Marketing Ops shouldn’t be responsible for defining how revenue works. Not how pipelines are structured. Not how deals progress. Not how forecasts are calculated. And not how success is measured once money is involved.

When Marketing Ops is pulled into those decisions, it’s rarely because they want to be. It’s usually because nobody else has taken ownership.

Where revenue ops genuinely begins

Revenue Ops exists to answer a very simple but uncomfortable question.

How does revenue actually move through this business?

In simple terms, that means owning the structure that sits underneath the numbers leadership cares about. The CRM data model, lifecycle alignment across teams, pipeline definitions, forecasting logic, reporting consistency, and the rules that govern handoffs between functions.

Revenue Ops is not a fancier name for Marketing Ops. And it’s not a replacement for Sales Ops either.

It’s the layer that connects how teams work to how revenue is reported and predicted.

When that layer is missing or unclear, everyone ends up filling the gap in their own way.

What good ownership really looks like

High-performing organisations don’t spend much time debating who owns what.

They’ve already decided.

Marketing Ops focuses on generating and qualifying demand.

Revenue Ops focuses on how that demand converts, scales, and shows up in revenue numbers.

Sales Ops focuses on enabling reps to execute within that model.

Leadership focuses on priorities and trade-offs when things get messy.

No single role “owns MarTech” end to end.

The system is shared. Responsibility is deliberately split.

That’s the difference between teams that argue about tools and teams that use them properly.

The real issue hiding underneath the debate

Most companies never design an operating model.

They hire roles.

They buy software.

They assume clarity will emerge over time.

It doesn’t.

Without an explicit operating model, people default to protecting their patch. Data becomes political. Reports become negotiable. HubSpot turns into a very expensive collection of half-working processes.

When things go wrong, the conversation drifts back to job titles instead of structure.

Marketing Ops vs Revenue Ops is the wrong argument.

The real question is whether the way your business operates has ever been intentionally designed.

Stop arguing. Start designing.

If your teams are debating boundaries, that’s not dysfunction. It’s a signal that the business has changed and the operating model hasn’t caught up yet.

The fix isn’t another hire or another tool.

It’s deciding how your revenue engine is meant to work, then aligning roles around that reality.

If your MarTech feels powerful but oddly underwhelming, and if your teams spend more time debating ownership than improving performance, an Operating model workshop is the fastest way to reset.

Design the system once.

Stop having the same argument every quarter.

Discover our Services