It’s obviously the group tasked with maximizing the value of everyone around them: Operations!

As leaders look at their organizational structure and strive to accentuate what really works within their businesses, they’ve seen the value of leveraging operational knowledge.

In recent years this has led to the rising importance of what we at Captain Data call “the operators”: Sales Ops, Go-to-Market Ops, Product-Led Ops, and Revenue Ops.

These business roles focus on different aspects of a company, but they share a key feature: they’re building and improving the back-end machine that keeps the front of the business humming along.

Given what happened during 2023, we're all inclined to say that a change is in order and that pretty much everybody will have to do more with less.

What are the best operators doing?

Sales Ops wants to make the sales reps more effective.

Marketing Ops wants to better focus their marketers’ creative efforts. 

Product Ops wants to turn real-world customer usage into actionable tasks for the engineers.

Revenue Ops wants to improve margins and cut churn while also finding new revenue-generating opportunities.

This kind of “operational” business role is more critical than ever because it brings together the two key aspects of most modern companies: the technical, code-driven engineering side and the analytical, opportunity-seeking business side.

Acting as an effective bridge between these two sides is becoming increasingly technical, not necessarily in terms of the coding process, but in terms of manipulating technical information. 

To put it simply, great operations are all about interpreting data.

A top operator is a facilitator, helping many other players within the company reach higher performance levels in their day-to-day tasks.

Operators must work across departments, understanding the information needed in different areas.

They also need to make sure they’re establishing and following the proper KPIs. 

It’s not just about having data – it’s about optimizing data management.

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In today’s business world, the deep operational knowledge that helps operators fulfil those needs is driven by data.

The problem, though, is that data has gotten complicated – really complicated.

Operators are trying to access, track and understand data coming from hundreds of different sources, few of which were designed to work together. 

This is tough enough when it comes to internal data sources, and indeed operators spend a great deal of time and effort collecting and managing the in-house data they need.

Ostensibly, they’re not alone – other departments, including IT, can be brought in to build processes and break down silos (the amount of pain associated with getting that done does, of course, vary depending on the company.)

Internal data isn’t the whole picture, however.

Top operators are looking for as much context as possible, and most of that context is today housed in external data sources, notably on the web.

The importance of web data

Take a simple example: you’re a sneaker marketplace and you’ve worked hard to have as much data as possible on your clients so that you can re-activate them over time and boost Lifetime Value (LTV).

But you also want to have data on your competitors, such as up-to-the-minute data on their offers and pricing.

That kind of information is critical for understanding the context in which your business is operating, and it can only come from external data sources. 

But when trying to master these external data sources, whether third-party data providers or web data sources, operators are facing a completely different beast: 

• B2B database providers don’t provide any control or guarantee when it comes to data freshness; and in a world moving faster than ever, having up-to-date data is critical;

• When APIs are available, they aren’t designed to work together with other APIs, which is a big hindrance given the many sources of data an operator needs to bring together;

• As teams grow, they need more and better data to ensure that ROI doesn’t dive off a cliff;

• An enormous quantity of web data is unstructured. Google might index billions of websites, but the majority of data contained on those sites isn’t organized in a rapidly accessible fashion. (Hence the recent excitement over AI/LLM advances such as ChatGPT that create at least the appearance of structuring information.)

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Given that any one operator could need to use data coming from hundreds of sources, attempting to deal with internal and external data manually quickly becomes a nightmare.

All of this automation needs to be done with tools that are controlled by the operators themselves - after all, “operate” is the key part of this business role!

Responding to the needs of operators is a critical task, as this kind of role is scaling enormously across all kinds of industries.

In the past few years, operator positions have been among the fastest-growing business roles within growing companies, specifically due to their ability to provide huge ROI by supercharging other team members.

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This article is adapted from Captain Data’s white paper “The Rise of Operations”. To take a closer look at specific functions such as Sales Ops, Go-to-Market Ops, Product-Led Ops and Revenue Ops, download the full white paper here.