Cross-Functional Ops Tools Replace CSVs
Nancy Dong, CEO of Roster, on the rise of ops-centric tooling
The key split in ops is between teams that own one revenue function in detail, and teams that stitch the whole funnel together. Sales Ops is the oldest and most tool defined slice, centered on CRM setup, forecasting, comp plans, pipeline reviews, and rep workflow design. Revenue Ops sits above it, connecting marketing, sales, and customer success so handoffs, routing, and reporting work as one system instead of a chain of spreadsheets and CSV exports.
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Sales Ops is the closest thing to a system administrator for the sales team. It owns Salesforce and adjacent tools, territory design, lead and account assignment, compensation logic, forecast hygiene, and rep playbooks. The job appears around Series B, when founder led selling breaks and repeatability becomes more important than hustle.
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Revenue Ops is broader. It spans marketing, sales, and customer success, and usually becomes the buyer for workflow tools that sit across the funnel, like lead qualification, enrichment, routing, scheduling, and CRM automation. That is why many newer vendors sell to RevOps rather than only Sales Ops.
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Marketing Ops is adjacent but different in its daily work. It usually owns campaign systems, lead processing, email operations, and the mechanics of moving leads into CRM cleanly. The common thread across all ops roles is stitching together fragmented systems, but each function starts from a different source of truth and a different set of workflows.
The category is moving toward cross functional ops software that starts with one narrow workflow and expands outward as it captures the underlying business logic. The winners are likely to be the systems that do not just report on funnel outcomes, but also capture the actual actions, routing rules, and process steps that teams use every day to produce those outcomes.