Everything You Should Know About RevOps as a MOPs Person

(A friendly reality check from someone who learned it the hard way.)

Here’s the thing about Marketing Ops: at some point, you also have to learn Sales Ops. At least a little bit.

You don’t need to be a CPQ wizard. You don’t need to enjoy commission tables (no one does). And you absolutely do not need to reinvent yourself as a Deal Desk person.

But if you work in Marketing Ops long enough, you eventually realize something important: you will never understand your own impact unless you understand how sales works. Because MOPs, at its core, is not just about running campaigns or managing Marketo/HubSpot. It’s about driving revenue, and driving revenue requires a shared language, shared systems, and shared truth. That’s where RevOps comes in.

So let’s talk about what MOPs people actually need to know about RevOps.

1. You don’t need to know everything. Just the right things.

RevOps is a big world. CPQ, quoting, forecasting, territories, commissions – that’s all their domain. You don’t need to get too deep into any of those things. But there are a handful of areas where a MOPs person needs enough fluency to be dangerous, including:

• Lead routing & assignment rules (actually, MOPS people should have this one down cold)
• Territory logic (even high-level understanding is super helpful)
• Account hierarchy structure (parent/child, global vs regional)
• Opportunity lifecycle and required fields
• How BDRs actually work inside the CRM: the actual workflows, not the slide-deck version
• What Sales considers “real” pipeline vs “fluff”

If you can answer questions like:

• “Where does a lead actually go after it hits Salesforce?”
• “What automatically triggers an opportunity?”
• “How do AEs accept or reject something?”
• “What has to happen for something to show up on a forecast?”

…you’re already ahead of half the MOPs world.

2. All your pretty marketing dashboards fall apart without sales context

You can have the cleanest lifecycle. The smartest scoring model. The fanciest attribution dashboard. But if you don’t know:

• how a BDR qualifies something
• what handoff actually looks like
• what Sales changes on a record
• how opportunities are created, updated, or closed

…then none of your reporting will reflect reality.

This is why so many MOPs teams feel like they’re “flying blind.” They’re building dashboards on top of data they don’t fully understand.

Understanding Sales processes isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s required if you want to tell a real story with your data.

3. RevOps is your bridge to the CRO, whether you realize it or not

Marketers love talking about MQLs, nurture strategy, engagement scores, and “top of funnel.” CROs do not care about any of that language.

They want answers to:

• “Where will revenue come from?”
• “What’s slowing deals down?”
• “What creates the highest-quality pipeline?”

If you’re a MOPs person who can translate your work into those answers, you become invaluable. And the fastest way to learn the CRO’s language is to get close to RevOps. They’re already in those conversations every day.

4. Spend time with BDRs. It’ll change everything.

I tell every marketer I work with: If you want to understand revenue, sit with the BDRs.

Not for a formal meeting. Just… go watch them work.

What you’ll learn:

• What they actually click in Salesforce
• How they decide if something is “good”
• How they use (or avoid) your lead scoring
• Why certain data points matter to them
• Where handoff breaks in practice, not theory

This is where your best improvements come from.
Not whiteboards.
Not flow charts.
Actual behavior.

5. You and RevOps either partner… or nothing works

Marketing Ops can’t win alone.
Sales Ops can’t win alone.
BDRs can’t win alone.

Revenue is a team sport.

When MOPs and RevOps partner well:

• your lifecycle finally matches what is actually happening
• your lead routing makes sense to humans
• your dashboards help people do their jobs better
• your attribution stops getting questioned
• your CRO trusts your numbers
• your tools stop duct-taping around each other

When they don’t partner well? You end up with messy data, frustrated teams, and a MarTech stack that gets blamed for problems it didn’t cause.

6. Understanding sales doesn’t make you less of a MOPs person. It makes you better.

The best MOPs pros I know aren’t “tool people.” They’re problem solvers who understand the entire revenue engine.

You can be incredible at:

• Marketo
• HubSpot
• 6sense
• Demandbase
• Clay
• Zapier
• ZoomInfo
• Salesforce integrations

…but the moment you understand how sales actually works, everything clicks into place.

You stop just building things. Instead, you start building things that move revenue forward.

7. Your future career will thank you

MOPs is evolving fast. Organizations want people who understand cross-functional impact, not siloed operations. If you ever want to move into:

• Director of Marketing Ops
• Head of RevOps
• CMO
• Consulting
• Anything that touches revenue strategy

…your RevOps fluency will be one of the biggest unlocks in your career.

(And no, you probably still won’t need to touch CPQ.)

Final thought

Marketing Ops is so much more than running campaigns or fixing sync errors.

We’re the ones who build the systems that both marketing and sales rely on.
We’re the ones who translate activity into actual impact.
We’re the ones who turn chaos into clarity.

Understanding RevOps doesn’t take you away from MOPs.

It makes you the most valuable person in the revenue engine.