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Michael Inghilterra
Michael Inghilterra

Posted on Originally published at michaelinghilterra.com

The RevOps job description doubled. Nobody wrote the new one down.

#revops #revenueoperations #gtm #leadership

98% of RevOps leaders say their function grew in scope over the past year. 89% say it lacks clearly defined strategic goals.

The state of the function, in two numbers

Those two figures come from the same 2025 survey: Salesloft and Wakefield Research asked 400 US RevOps and executive decision-makers about the function. Salesloft sells to RevOps teams, so weigh it accordingly. But the pairing is hard to ignore.

Read together, they describe RevOps in one line: the job got bigger, and nobody wrote down the new one.

How big the job got

The growth isn't only in scope. It's in seniority.

  • Head of Revenue Operations was the #1 fastest-growing job in the US in LinkedIn's 2023 Jobs on the Rise list. (LinkedIn grouped Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Revenue Management into that entry, so read it as revenue leadership broadly.)
  • Director of Revenue Operations ranked #4 on LinkedIn's 2024 list.
  • 73% of companies now have a C-suite role dedicated to RevOps, in the Salesloft survey. RevOps teams there work most closely with COOs (26%), CEOs (25%) and CFOs (24%).
  • Pipeline generation is now a top-five priority for both sales leaders and RevOps, in Rattle's 2025 State of RevOps survey of 199 US participants.

A function that used to sit under sales operations now works next to the COO, the CEO and the CFO, and it's expected to care about pipeline, not just report it.

The job got bigger. Nobody wrote the new one down.

What didn't grow with it

Three things stayed the same while the scope expanded.

The written mandate. 89% say RevOps lacks clearly defined strategic goals. The scope grew by accretion: one more report, one more system, one more problem nobody else owned. Nobody sat down and rewrote the charter.

The time. A separate 2024 survey of 1,200+ revenue professionals, from BoostUp.ai and RevOps Co-op, found only 23% could prioritize GTM strategy, with many still spending substantial time on systems administration. A bigger mandate on top of the same admin load doesn't produce strategy. It produces a longer week.

The authority. Being asked to care about pipeline is not the same as owning it. In most companies I've seen, nobody has said where RevOps' job ends and sales leadership's begins.

The trap

Put those together and you get the most common way good RevOps leaders get set up to fail: measured on outcomes they were never given the time, the authority or the written goals to move.

I wrote about this in September as the scorekeeper-or-operator question. My own seat was a scorekeeper seat that kept getting handed operator problems. That's the pattern the 98% and the 89% describe at scale.

Write the job description yourself

If your scope grew this year, don't wait for someone else to rewrite the charter. Draft it yourself, one page, and walk it through with your boss before your next review.

1. What you own. The outcomes you're accountable for, where a miss is yours to explain.

2. What you influence. The outcomes you shape but don't control, like pipeline generation when sales leadership owns the reps.

3. What you only measure. The numbers you report and keep honest but don't answer for.

4. The three numbers you'll be judged on. Written down, with how each one is calculated.

5. The admin you'll stop doing, or the headcount or tooling that takes it off your plate. A bigger mandate needs time from somewhere.

The conversation is uncomfortable once. Not having it is uncomfortable every quarter.

RevOps leaders: did your scope grow this year, and did anyone write the new one down?

A correction to something I posted in September

In September I opened a post with "'VP of Revenue Operations' as a title is up roughly 300 percent in 18 months." I traced it for this piece. It comes from a 2021 vendor infographic that counted LinkedIn job titles over roughly late 2019 to early 2021, with no published method. It isn't a study, and it isn't current. LinkedIn's own rankings, cited above, are the better evidence for the same point.

Sources

Originally published at michaelinghilterra.com.

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