RevOps in subscriptions and events: the unglamorous work that decides who wins
For CEOs, MDs, commercial, sales and marketing leaders in specialized subscription, membership and events businesses
At our roundtable on 5 August, Helen Coetzee, Director, Strategic Advisor and Co-Founder at Marketing Pro Group (MPG), asked whether anyone would describe their RevOps as well established. The honest answer from most people was not yet.
That is more encouraging than it sounds. The work is already happening in these businesses, spread across sales leaders, marketers, finance and whoever has the strongest grasp of the data, all doing it alongside their actual jobs. What is missing is the line drawn around it and the person accountable for whether it connects. That is a much smaller gap to close than starting from nothing.
RevOps is the discipline of mapping, engineering, measuring and optimising every step of the customer journey, from first touch through to renewal and lifetime value. In B2B subscriptions and events it is mostly early stage. The businesses that invest in process and data foundations now will compound the advantage, because AI amplifies whatever system it is dropped into.
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What RevOps actually is
The definition we worked from: mapping, engineering, measuring and optimising every step in the customer journey, from first touch through the funnel to sale, onboarding, renewal and lifetime value. It spans marketing, sales, customer success, account management and renewals, tying them together as one measured system.
Two people in the room reached for the same words. Nick Burroughs, Director of Sales Operations at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, called it the glue that holds everything together. Jenny Demetriou, CRO at TMT Finance, described it as the intersection of sales, marketing, customer success, finance, events and editorial, producing a single view of the truth.
The test is not whether you have the components. Most businesses have a CRM, some reporting and a sales process. The test is whether anyone is responsible for how they connect and the impact they have.
Why the gap between businesses is about to widen
AI does not fix a broken process. It scales it.
Helen described AI as automation on speed, and the effect is exponential in both directions. Automation on a process never proven manually produces the same failure faster and at greater volume. Tooling follows the same rule: putting HubSpot in does not create a process, and without structured data the tools burn credits and produce nothing. Terrapin made the same point at a Renewd session in July, having moved from £1.5m a year of data bureau spend to a self-refreshing audience engine and enriched 1.5m records. The prerequisite was a data strategy, not a subscription.
Which leads to the least appealing conclusion in this subject. The work that delivers the returns is process mapping. Map the "as is", then the "to be", then close the gap. Helen named it as the most undervalued piece across the businesses MPG sees, and it is also the cheapest thing on the list.
Why events lags subscriptions
Subscription revenue is continuous and system-native, so it generates the data trail RevOps runs on. Events revenue is lumpy and cyclical, tied to show cycles, biennials, sponsorship and physical logistics, so the standard toolkit does not transfer without adaptation. Most organisers still run each show as its own P&L and its own dataset.
That is changing, and the driver is money. Private equity and venture capital coming into events brings tech stacks, data and AI with it. The large acquisitive groups are already unifying CRM and measuring renewal rates as though they were subscriptions businesses. The same sequence played out in subscriptions when investors started paying attention to recurring revenue.
For an SME, strong RevOps is not yet the norm at your size, so it remains a differentiator. The businesses with good RevOps tend to be the successful ones, and success then funds more of it.
Whose job is it
If there is no RevOps person, the commercial lead is doing it, or several people are doing it their own way in parallel. One participant described his senior leaders turning into de facto data engineers, mining datasets and assembling reports, until the skill set he had hired them for was crowded out.
The room leaned towards a distinct role, on the basis that the skills are not sales skills. In one business it sits within the commercial team as commercial operations, reaching across events, marketing and finance.
Promote or hire?
The test offered was the size of the change you want.
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Evolving something that broadly works - promote internally. Someone who has lived the plumbing carries credibility and avoids upheaval.
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Rebuilding fundamentally, or scaling hard - bring someone in, because anyone too close to the current setup drifts back to what they know.
Hire for curiosity tied to commercial outcomes. There was some doubt that future RevOps leaders will come from sales at all. One example in the room came up through lead generation and sales enablement with no tech background, which made the internal tech team the relationship that mattered most.
That same role has since been renamed revenue engineer. Reporting that took a person's week six months ago now runs itself, so the job has moved from producing outputs to designing the flows that produce them.
What stops people
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Change management. One participant found his team experiencing RevOps as something slowing them down. Nick shared that this does not really get easier, but people come with you when the benefit is theirs. One business rebuilt HubSpot with the sales team in the room rather than around them.
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Prioritisation. Named in the discussion as the biggest barrier for Jenny. RevOps touches everything, so everyone wants something from it. The defence is a clearly communicated remit and a standing question about whether the function is working on outcomes that matter commercially.
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Cost. A RevOps person's first act is to tell you what is broken and their second is to ask for new, often expensive kit. The spend lands well before the return is visible.
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The board. Where the chair or CEO champions it, everything moves. Where they do not, it does not get funded.
Where to start
Start small enough that it survives contact with a busy commercial team. Helen described a six-person business with two salespeople carrying the entire revenue target. MPG surfaced the options, let the salespeople choose the three changes they thought would help most, and built only those. It held because the people using it picked it.
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Map your funnel end to end and name who owns each stage.
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Find where you have no data at all, before worrying about better data.
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Choose three small changes your commercial team will adopt, and let them choose.
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Make one person accountable, then tell the business what that role is and is not.
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Layer on automation and AI once the process underneath is proven.
On step one, Nick's advice was the most practical of the session. Follow your sales journey, speak to whoever owns each stage, and identify where you cannot see anything. How long things take, how many leads arrive where, what happens after a call.
The takeaway for Renewd members
Nobody in the room had this finished, and that is the point. The advantage does not go to the business with the best tech stack, it goes to the business that maps its process, names an owner, and proves the thing manually before automating it. That work is unglamorous and cheap, and it is what everything else is built on.
Frequently asked questions
What is RevOps?
RevOps, or revenue operations, is the discipline of mapping, engineering, measuring and optimising every step of the customer journey, from first touch through the funnel to sale, onboarding, renewal and lifetime value. It spans marketing, sales, customer success, account management and renewals, tying them together as one measured system.
Why does RevOps matter more now that businesses are adopting AI?
Because AI does not fix a broken process, it scales it. Automating a process that has never been proven manually produces the same failure faster and at greater volume, and without structured data the tools burn credits and produce nothing. The process and data foundations have to come first.
Why is RevOps less developed in events than in subscriptions?
Subscription revenue is continuous and system-native, so it generates the data trail RevOps runs on. Events revenue is lumpy and cyclical, tied to show cycles, biennials, sponsorship and physical logistics, and most organisers still run each show as its own P&L and its own dataset. Private equity and venture capital money entering events is changing that.
Should I promote a RevOps lead internally or hire externally?
The test is the size of the change you want. If you are evolving something that broadly works, promote internally, because someone who has lived the plumbing carries credibility. If you are rebuilding fundamentally or scaling hard, hire externally, because anyone too close to the current setup drifts back to what they know.
Where should a smaller business start with RevOps?
Map your funnel end to end and name who owns each stage, find where you have no data at all, choose three small changes your commercial team will adopt and let them choose, make one person accountable, and only then layer on automation and AI.
This post is based on the Renewd virtual roundtable "RevOps for Subscriptions and Events Businesses", facilitated by Helen Coetzee of Marketing Pro Group, with contributions from Nick Burroughs of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and Jenny Demetriou of TMT Finance.
🎥 Watch Now - Virtual Roundtable: RevOps for Subscriptions and Events Businesses
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