"Hey, we're about to have a strategy meeting - can I invite you/your team?" These words are heard way too infrequently by Commercial Ops and it costs businesses money. All too often, until a nurturing sequence, form or automation breaks, nobody cared how the leads arrived in their inbox, who maintained how they got to them, or what “data hygiene” even means.
Marketing Operations (MOps) and Sales Operations (SOps, together; Commercial Ops) often live in an invisible zone.
When working well, it’s quiet, prospects are nurtured and leads route correctly. Emails and segmentation behaves, forms funnel leads for actions smoothly and the data is usable. Sales sees what it needs at the right time and your prospects experience a coherent journey from “I’m curious” to “Let’s talk” without a spray-and-pray email avalanche, confusion, or being ghosted.
When it’s not working, teams panic and the finger-pointing begins. Why are leads going to the wrong rep? Why did the nurture email hit customers and prospects with the same message, etc?
Ops can feel “difficult” – bear with them
Most commercial strategies look elegant on slides but real life is more complicated. People have limited time, definitions are not clarified or drift and systems don’t behave as expected. That doesn’t even include clients - who do unexpected things (like clicking “request a demo” three times, or buying after reading a blog post without ever filling out a form!)
Commercial Ops is hardwired to surface the questions that knit “great idea” into “operational reality.” These questions can feel inconvenient because they question ideas early by demanding clarity and trade-offs. They expose where leadership hasn’t agreed on what “good” looks like. That can be uncomfortable but it’s also exactly how you avoid wasting months and money building the wrong thing.
A strong Commercial Ops function tends to ask questions like: What outcome are we actually driving here - pipeline this quarter, revenue later, retention, expansion or partner-sourced deals? Who exactly is this for, and what are we choosing to ignore so we keep focus? What is the customer experience end-to-end, including the bits after the form submit when people are waiting? What counts as an MQL and SQL in our business, not someone else’s framework? How will we measure impact, and what data needs to exist for that measurement to be trustworthy? Who owns each step, and what happens when they don’t do it?
These aren’t “admin” questions, they are commercial questions that sharpen and ground your plan in reality for repeatable execution.
What do Commercial Ops do?
These professionals often get reduced to “the person who makes HubSpot work” or “the team that runs the tools.” Tools matter, yet that framing misses the bigger value which is Marketing Ops is the discipline of designing and running the systems behind growth: the data, workflows, automation, measurement, and operational experience that customers and revenue teams move through every day.
When MOps is included early, the following happens that commercial leaders care about:
First, decisions get better. Commercial decisions rely on signal: segment performance, funnel conversion, acquisition cost, channel mix, pipeline velocity, response rates, intent signals, and the story the data is telling. When the signal is confusing, the business makes expensive guesses and then argues about what happened later. Commercial Ops improves decision quality by engineering reliable capture, consistent definitions, and a sensible measurement system that leadership can trust.
Second, execution gets faster, sustainably. Speed is about being able to act repeatedly, learning, and scaling without rebuilding every single time by creating reusable assets like campaign templates, routing logic and automation flows so the business can move quickly without creating fragile systems that collapse when one person goes on holiday.
Third, customer experience improves. The buying journey has an operational interface, including how many form fields you demand, whether the thank-you page is helpful, how quickly someone follows up, if sales is informed or unaware, and whether the emails they receive make sense based on what they did. Commercial Ops shapes that operational UX directly affecting buyer experience in particular trust, conversion, and momentum.
The hidden cost of excluding Commercial Ops from commercial decisions
When Commercial Ops is invited late, predictable failures occur. Some examples include: backlogs because nobody mapped capacity, sequencing, or implementation; sales and marketing disagree on reality because dashboards tell different stories and definitions aren’t consistent, or Leads get mishandled, either routed incorrectly or followed up too slowly.
Customer experience suffers in invisible ways that aren’t clear immediately, or in a single measurable way, such like duplicate emails, irrelevant nurture, inconsistent messaging or sales conversations that start from zero context, all of which require operational clean-up.
I can’t emphasise this more - that clean-up cost is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly upfront and breaks trust internally. Teams lose confidence in systems (and sometimes, more dangerously, each other), then build workarounds, then your process becomes a patchwork of spreadsheets and Teams messages.
An inclusive operating approach
Including Commercial Ops in commercial decisions doesn’t have to turn everything into decision-by-committee. It means thinking of ops in the moments where decisions become operational reality, and giving them clear ownership over how the system is built.
A practical starting point is to change your mindset about Commercial Ops from downstream execution to co-designer of growth and the easiest way to do that is to decide which decisions require an ops voice. Any decision that changes what you measure, how customers move through the journey, or who owns which step should involve Commercial Ops early. Think go-to-market changes, pricing and packaging changes, lifecycle definitions, lead qualification rules, campaigns, CRM or MarTech changes, integrations, and anything that touches customer data, consent, or handoffs.
The Strategy-to-Execution Brief: one page that changes everything
If you adopt one habit, make it this: every meaningful initiative gets a short “Strategy-to-Execution Brief” that Commercial Ops helps shape. Keep it to one page. The goal is to translate intent into an executable system before you commit timelines and targets.
In paragraph form, the brief answers: What are we trying to achieve commercially, and in what timeframe? Who is the target audience, what is the offer, and what is the call-to-action? Where in the funnel are we expecting movement, and how will we know the initiative worked? What operational requirements exist - changes to the CRM, automation, routing, tracking, data capture? Who owns each step, what is the expected follow-up time, and what happens if that follow-up doesn’t happen? What risks exist - tracking gaps, deliverability issues, consent problems, data quality - and how will we mitigate them?
This is about creating a clarity mechanism that Commercial Ops co-authors with marketing and sales leadership.
Definitions are a fundamentally necessary foundation
Every organisation claims it wants alignment, which consequently requires shared language. Without it, you can’t tell whether you’re winning, and you can’t compare performance across teams, segments, and time periods. Definitions may sound boring until they save you. I have unfortunately experienced working in many businesses where this clarity was never defined or documented resulting in consistent misalignment and mistrust between teams and results.
At minimum, commercial leadership should align on what counts as a lead, what “marketing engaged” means, how qualification works, what an SQL is, deal stages and how customers move through lifecycle stages, and what disqualification reasons look like. These definitions should be documented and embedded in the systems, CRM properties, validation rules, routing logic, reporting dashboards, and onboarding materials so users behave consistently.
This discipline highlights where definitions create unintended consequences. If you reward volume, you’ll get volume, or “MQLs” without quality controls, and you’ll get a funnel full of people who were never going to buy, turning it into a vanity metric vortex. Commercial Ops helps design the system so your incentives and definitions support revenue outcomes rather than vanity metrics.
Designing the buying journey like it’s a product
Buyer experience or BX has never been more important. In 2025 I saw a brand new AI-enabled CRM built around this exact premis. The fact of the matter is that prospects experience your sequence of operational steps long before they experience your service or product.
A practical way to include Commercial Ops is to treat the buyer journey like a product flow. Map how someone enters, what they see, what they do, and what happens next. Then pressure-test the edge cases, because edge cases are where systems break and reputation suffers. For example - what happens when someone is already a customer and requests a demo? What happens when someone is in a region you don’t serve? What happens when the lead source is missing?
Commercial Ops shines here because it thinks in “if this, then that” mode which supports customer experience and protects team time and reduces the number of “why didn’t it work?” post-mortems.
A lightweight rhythm of business that keeps ops embedded
A short weekly revenue execution check-in (30 - 45 minutes) can be enough: what was executed, what wasn’t, what’s blocked, what decisions are needed and what the funnel signals are saying across your top 3 KPIs. A monthly funnel health review (60 minutes) can focus on looking for leakage points, SLA compliance, conversion trends, and what experiments are working. A quarterly alignment session allows for bigger discussions such as GTM changes, new products in the pipeline that need CRM field and journey thought, tech stack reviews, governance, and what operational investments will support the next stage of growth.
Give Commercial Ops ownership over the “how”
A common pattern is that leadership wants ops accountable while refusing to let ops make operational decisions which slows down execution, creates constant rework, and resentment on all sides.
Commercial leaders and founders should own the “why” and the “what”: commercial goals, target segments, strategic bets and resource allocation. Commercial Ops should own the “how” within its domain: data architecture, lifecycle implementation, routing logic, automation design, tracking and reporting, documentation, and governance.
When Commercial Ops has clear swim-lanes and actual authority, execution speeds up and fewer changes need to be reversed later.
What inclusive leadership looks like day-to-day
Inclusive commercial leadership brings ops in early, while ideas are still being cogitated rather than after deadlines have been promised. It treats operational questions as a necessary discipline that sharpens strategy, tests assumptions, and turns a vision into something buildable, not as “pushback” to be managed. It protects focus by making hard prioritisation decisions, choosing fewer initiatives that can be executed properly over a long list that collapses. It also guards against tech stack proliferation by resisting tool sprawl and one-off workarounds that quietly create cost and complexity later.
A quick test for whether you’re building an ops-inclusive culture, ask yourself - what happens when something breaks? Does the team ask “who mucked up?” or “what do the systems allow?” [Tip, you are aiming for the latter response!]
Your simple next step:
Take your next campaign, GTM shift, new product/service, or funnel initiative and write a one-page Strategy-to-Execution Brief with your Commercial Ops lead (or the colleague currently undertaking the MOps and/or SOps work). If you don’t have that capability in-house, or you want an experienced expert to help you, get in touch and we can connect you with a marketing operations or sales operations expert who can help you design the brief, tighten your definitions, and turn the plan into a working system that supports your revenue objectives.
