Today’s question:
Hi everyone, I would love to get your fresh take on the ownership of Salesforce governance across Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, and RevOps (within an independent department – analytics or finance team).
Also, any decisions you feel should be led by sales vs. marketing (e.g., contact vs. lead object)?
Today’s answer:
Interesting question. For some context, what do you feel is driving this change or need? Is it purely reporting, an org capacity thing, or is there a perceived cost savings or something else?
If you absolutely don’t get a vote in keeping MOPs owned by you and independent, we typically see leads and campaigns owned by Marketing, with any other system touching SFDC (6s, Marketo) also owned and negotiated by Marketing. Sales (Ops or RevOps) owns contacts and opportunities.
Account ownership can vary depending on the complexity of your market and depth of ICP. Ownership includes data quality, data completeness, etc. It can get more complex if you have other data tools (e.g., Slintel or a ZI) that span multiple objects or tools that run data quality (Ringlead, CRM Fusion), which would be Sales Ops or RevOps.
The key MOPs blindspot we see is any MOPs need doesn’t have the same level of urgency as owning it by Marketing – sharpest felt with reporting needs that are rarely understood by other parties. We’ve seen (and supported) orgs that consolidate the ops function like you suggest (though rarely owned by Finance full disclosure, mostly owned by RevOps for similar-sized companies) and we’ve seen them run independent orgs reporting into department heads.
The second blind spot is budget – all of a sudden Ops has a vote on the tools you need to succeed, which can be challenging. Either way, you may want to have a strong POV on the reporting requirements so it is ‘declared’ and known before the consolidation of function – maybe that’ll also help get it prioritized by the analytics team.
If you have a vote, the strong suggestion would be not to centralize so you get your CMO needs met on a timely basis – but if the ship has sailed, then plan B would be above