The current landscape of business operations is saturated with variations for terms like Marketing Operations (MOPs), Sales Operations (SOPs), and Revenue Operations (RevOps). While the prefixes appear to divide these functions, the core consistency is the “Ops” suffix itself. This consistency in operation defines the new model for leveraging technology to achieve precise business goals.
A Snapshot of Key ‘Ops’ Prefix Functions
The various prefixes define the specific focus area or team where the operational systems and technology are being applied. These are currently the common team structures of corporate America.
- Marketing Operations (MOPs): Martech – the primary focus is the Marketing Automation Platform.
- Sales Operations (Sales Ops): Historically focused on CRM and sales.
- Customer Success Operations: This area offers the greatest amount of gains by hyper-focusing on supporting existing customers, dealing with ticket escalation, and improving efficiency.
- Revenue Operations (RevOps): Sales Ops has evolved into an “umbrella version” of Sales Ops + Marketing Ops that includes sales technology and enablement.
- Go-To-Market Operations (GTM): People who are rethinking everything and trying to take a snapshot of what it looks like to do marketing at scale because they haven’t established full market saturation yet.
- Account Based Marketing Operations (ABM): Sales first approach targeting accounts with the biggest opportunities.
- Product-Led Growth Operations (PLG): The method of building an overall company strategy of the growth, marketing and sales mechanisms being inherently embedded into the product itself with features designed to consider how you can have reach and impact within and via using the tool. Generally limited to SaaS products since physical products are difficult to control once they’re pass on to the customer.
Redefining ‘Operations’
In the modern enterprise, Operations is embedded IT where people run, configure and manage specifically, systems and technology.
- Traditional IT Mindset: Centralized IT is often judged based on tickets and screw-ups, prioritizing risk mitigation over business goals. This fear of failure does not align with enabling growth.
- Embedded Tech Approach: The trend is towards decentralizing IT skills into embedded teams and roles across the company. The driving argument is that since no business can exist without technology, technology management skills must be distributed throughout the entire company. Operations teams are focused on enabling their department to maximize output and help the strategy come true from an executive perspective. For example, a Sales Operations team focuses on enabling salespeople by handling “ugly data work” and making them more effective on calls.
The consistency across all these functions is the operations suffix. Recognizing this pattern and redefining the fundamentals of operations as embedded systems and technology is necessary to evolve corporate structure in 2026.
