Matthew Atkinson
MAR 13, 2026
RevOps is not a revolutionary new idea. In one sense, sure, it is a newer label. But the basic idea is not new at all. What’s new is that businesses are trying to solve, again, a problem they created themselves: they split the go-to-market function into narrow departments, then woke up one day and realized no one owns the whole thing.
That is basically the story.
A discipline is not the same thing as a department. A discipline is a body of knowledge. It has theories, frameworks, methods, debates, and people who study it seriously. Economics is a discipline. Accounting is a discipline. Engineering is a discipline. Psychology is a discipline. A company may have an accounting department, but accounting itself is bigger than the people sitting in that box on the org chart.
Marketing was supposed to be like that.
It has been studied in universities for more than a hundred years. I wrote a bit about that here. And if you go back and look at how marketing was understood for much of that history, the scope was far broader than how most executives use the term today.
Originally, marketing was not just ads, brand, or lead gen. It was a collection of business functions tied to getting goods and services to market and getting them sold. Sales was in there. Distribution was in there. Advertising was in there. Market research was in there. Product planning was in there.
That broader view was still alive well into the twentieth century. One definition from the 1960s put it like this:
“Marketing permeates the entire organization. Marketing plans and executes the sale—all the way from the inception of the product idea, through its development and distribution, to the customer purchase.”
That is a massive definition. And honestly, it sounds a lot closer to what people now want from RevOps than to what most companies today mean by marketing.
Compare that with how many executives define marketing now. Usually it comes out something like this:
The function responsible for creating demand, building brand awareness, and helping drive revenue growth.
That sounds normal to modern ears. It also represents a huge collapse in scope.
What happened?
My guess is that once companies started building marketing teams that did not include sales, marketing began to shrink from a cross-functional discipline into a narrower function. It stopped being the thing that integrates the commercial operation and became one specialized group within that operation. In a lot of businesses, marketing went from owning a broad body of knowledge about how firms connect to markets to owning campaigns, messaging, events, content, and maybe demand gen if they are lucky.
That is not a small change. That is the difference between a discipline and a department.
And when that happened, a vacuum opened up.
Someone still needed to look across the full go-to-market system: how sales, marketing, and customer success fit together, where handoffs broke down, how incentives conflicted, and where one team’s local optimization hurt the whole.
Enter RevOps.
The Forrester definition gets at it pretty well:
“Revenue operations is an execution strategy that focuses on unifying the operations resources across sales, marketing, and customer success to improve the customer experience and create more value for customers.”
That is a sensible idea. Necessary, really. But here is the risk: companies are going to take that idea, put it in a box, build a department, and make the same mistake they made with marketing.
At first it will be broad. Over time it will narrow. It will drift toward systems administration, reporting, forecasting support, and cleanup work between siloed teams. Then a few years later someone will invent a new label for “the function that sees the whole GTM system,” and everyone will act like they discovered fire.
That is the cycle to avoid.
It should shape how sales, marketing, and customer success work together. It should influence incentives, planning, process, customer experience, and the flow of information across the organization.
In other words, it should remain a discipline.
The irony here is that RevOps is, in many ways, rediscovering what marketing was supposed to be before marketing got boxed in and downsized conceptually.
That does not mean we should rename RevOps to marketing. That ship has sailed. The term marketing means something narrower in most companies now. But there is still a lesson in that history: once a cross-functional discipline gets reduced to a department, its scope starts to collapse.
That is the mistake not to repeat.