Structuring Your Ops Team: Should Sales, Marketing, and CX Ops Sit Under RevOps?
- Rebecca Thachil
- Sep 22
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 3
If you’re leading Revenue Operations at an organization that doesn’t fully “get” RevOps yet, you’ve probably faced this dilemma:
The CX team wants to hire their own Ops person.
Marketing is eyeing a Marketing Ops hire.
Sales may already have a Sales Ops function.
And suddenly you, as the RevOps leader, are left asking: Should these roles sit within my team? Or should they live under their respective departments?
This question is more than just reporting lines. It’s about how your company will align, scale, and ultimately drive revenue efficiency. Let’s break it down.
The Risk of Uncentralized Ops
At first glance, letting each department hire and manage their own Ops person seems logical. After all, Sales knows sales best, Marketing knows marketing best, and CX knows their customer workflows.
But here’s the catch: when Ops is decentralized, silos multiply.
Data silos: Marketing, Sales, and CX all build separate reports, often with different definitions of “pipeline,” “churn,” or “conversion.” Leadership is left questioning which number is “true.”
Process misalignment: Leads flow one way in Marketing’s world and another way in Sales’. CX may not even get visibility into deal handoff until it’s too late.
Tool sprawl: Each Ops team purchases their own tools (HubSpot here, Gainsight there, spreadsheets everywhere), leading to a bloated tech stack and messy integrations.
Conflicting priorities: Marketing Ops optimizes for MQL volume, Sales Ops optimizes for quota attainment, and CS Ops optimizes for retention—without a unified lens on total revenue impact.
The result? Friction, duplicated work, higher costs, and executives who don’t trust the data.
The Case for Centralized RevOps
RevOps was created to solve exactly this problem: misaligned operations.
When Ops is centralized under Revenue Operations:
Single Source of Truth: Reporting and dashboards flow through one team, using consistent definitions and metrics across GTM.
Aligned Incentives: Instead of optimizing for “my function,” Ops optimizes for revenue efficiency across the whole funnel.
Simplified Tech Stack: One team manages system architecture, ensuring integrations work and tools are consolidated.
Cross-Functional Strategy: RevOps sits at the intersection, balancing Marketing’s need for pipeline, Sales’ need for efficiency, and CS’s need for retention.
Centralization doesn’t mean Sales, Marketing, and CX lose influence. It means Ops roles become neutral partners, working across departments to ensure alignment and execution.
When Decentralization Can Work
That said, not every org is ready for a fully centralized Ops structure. If your company is early stage or departments are still building maturity, it may make sense to let each team hire their first Ops person under their functional leader.
The benefits of this setup:
Ops can embed deeply with one team, learning their workflows and pain points.
Faster iteration on department-specific processes.
Cultural buy-in from leadership who feel ownership over their Ops resource.
But even in this model, the drawback is clear: without RevOps oversight, those embedded Ops hires risk creating silos that are painful to unwind later.
So, What’s the Best Approach?
Here’s a framework you can use as a RevOps leader when deciding how to structure:
Option 1: Centralized Ops (Ideal for Scaling Companies)
All GTM Ops roles (Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, CS Ops) roll into RevOps.
Benefits: Alignment, single source of truth, cost efficiency.
Drawback: Functional leaders may feel less direct control over “their” Ops resource.
Option 2: Hybrid Ops (Transitional Model)
Department-specific Ops hires sit in their teams but have a dotted-line relationship to RevOps.
RevOps provides governance on data, systems, and metrics.
Benefits: Balance of specialization + alignment.
Drawback: Still risk of competing priorities. Requires strong governance from RevOps.
Option 3: Decentralized Ops (Early-Stage or Legacy Orgs)
Each department owns their own Ops.
Benefits: Deep specialization, cultural ownership.
Drawback: Silos, duplicate tools, inconsistent reporting.
Practical Guidance for RevOps Leaders
If you’re in an organization where CX and Marketing are already trying to hire their own Ops people, here’s how to approach it:
Make the case for centralization early. Show leadership the cost of duplicate tools, the risk of conflicting metrics, and the inefficiency of siloed reporting.
Offer a hybrid compromise. If Marketing insists on a Marketing Ops hire, propose a dotted-line structure: RevOps sets standards, Marketing manages day-to-day.
Emphasize enablement, not control. Position RevOps not as “taking Ops away” from Sales/Marketing/CX, but as providing a backbone that helps those teams scale more effectively.
Anchor on the business outcome. Remind everyone: Ops isn’t about ownership—it’s about enabling revenue growth. Centralization is a means to that end, not an end itself.
Final Thought
There’s no one-size-fits-all. But here’s the principle:
In smaller or early-stage orgs, it’s natural for Ops to start in silos.
As the company scales, those silos create friction, duplication, and mistrust.
That’s when centralized RevOps becomes critical—one team, aligned to the full revenue engine.
If you’re a RevOps leader today, your role isn’t just to manage systems and reports—it’s to shape the structure of how operations supports growth. And that means asking the tough question: Do we want a collection of Ops teams, or do we want a Revenue Operations function that ties it all together?
Because in the long run, it’s the latter that delivers sustainable revenue alignment.
Want to go deeper on questions like this? Join the Reklik Community on Circle — where GTM pros figure out what actually works in the field.
