Your Revenue Operations Roadmap is your main strategic tool to determine your priorities, align your stakeholders, and secure your resources. If your Revenue Operations team is mainly a reactive order-taking function, then you urgently need a Revenue Operations Roadmap.

The B2B buying landscape is changing faster than ever, and companies must adjust how they generate revenue in response. Many Marketing, Sales and Customer Success (CS) leaders are scratching their heads, watching their efficiency metrics plummet while wondering what needs to change. Who in your organization is best positioned to design and lead this much-needed transformation? Revenue Operations Leaders, this is your opportunity to step up to the challenge!

What's Changing?

Here are some examples of key shifts that are affecting business-to-business (B2B) revenue generation:

• Buyers are conducting their research through a broader range of sources. Search and social is expanding to AI tools and communities that live in various platforms. Lead generation practices need to adjust to this shift.

• As customers spend more cautiously, initial purchases are getting smaller, and more revenue is being generated through customer expansion. As a result, the lines between Sales and Customer Success are starting to blur. This impacts:

• Org design and scopes of responsibility.

• Talent profiles, hiring and training.

• Targets, territories and compensation plans.

• Customer lifecycles and sales processes.

• Forecasting, reporting and analytics.

• The tech stack that supports all of the above.

• Data is sourced and enriched more easily and in record speed. This overwhelm of data needs to be processed, curated and served up to Marketing, Sales and CS in an actionable way. They need to prompt the right conversation with the right customer (or prospect) about the right topic in the right moment.

What is a Revenue Operations Roadmap?

A Revenue Operations Roadmap reimagines your company's revenue generation engine, and provides a credible plan through that transformation, including clearly-defined milestones, and intentionally-ordered initiatives.

Don't worry. You don't have to be able to predict the future in order to develop your roadmap! You just need a reasonable set of assumptions, and you can evolve your roadmap as you learn.

Why Is a Revenue Operations Roadmap Important?

Revenue Operations powers many different go-to-market (GTM) teams, each with their own unique set of needs. These teams may include Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Partnerships and Channels. At the same time, other internal partners like Finance and Product Management often require RevOps support. The leaders from these functions are all bringing their requests to Revenue Operations, and they are not coordinating with each other first! The result is a growing list of independent tasks and projects all vying for RevOps attention. In other words, a backlog.

In the absence of a Revenue Operations Roadmap, your stakeholders will naturally try to shape your priorities for you. Can you really blame them? After all, they are competing for a finite shared resource that they depend on to deliver the revenue they are on the hook for. Often their jobs are on the line, and that pressure is overflowing to you.

Without a Roadmap:

• You don't know where you're going, so you remain at the whim of the next loudest demand. This can drain your energy, leaving you feeling like you're not in control of your own destiny.

• Your team doesn't know where you're going, because your priorities are disjointed, leading nowhere in particular. This makes it difficult to retain top RevOps talent who wants to be part of something great and know the impact they are making.

• Your stakeholders don't know where you're going, so they have nowhere to anchor their expectations.

With a Roadmap:

• Your GTM stakeholders are all aligned to common vision.

• You can secure the resources needed (staffing and budget), because resources tend to follow a credible plan of action. You are now requesting headcount (for example) not just to stop falling behind, but to fulfill a compelling promise.

• You know where to focus and prioritize work, because you're clear on where you're going and what you're optimizing for.

• You can say "no" to requests, if they don't serve the next milestone in your roadmap that has already been collectively prioritized.

• Your stakeholders will be more patient if they know that their needs already have a home somewhere in your plan.

Important Things to Note:

• Once your roadmap is in place, you must demonstrate and declare your progress along the way. Every milestone fulfilled will build trust and help you secure the resources needed for the next milestone.

• You cannot dedicate 100% of your RevOps staffing to your roadmap. A portion of your team's time needs to be reserved for critical maintenance work like managing commissions, contract support and CRM support. It's important to be very clear how much of your staffing is dedicated to this maintenance work vs. your initiative-based roadmap.

What's the Difference Between a Backlog and a Roadmap?

Here's a summary of the difference between a backlog and a roadmap.

Shifting from operating in "backlog mode" won't be easy, but it will be well worth it! You can make a lasting impact by leading the transformation of how your company generates revenue, one milestone at a time!

So, How Do I Develop a Revenue Operations Roadmap?

Join us on August 20, 2025 for "RevOps Real Talk", as we discuss how to develop a Revenue Operations Roadmap. Register free here.