A few years ago I wrote a post about how to get specialists to join a revenue operations team.

It came out of a conversation with Andrew Lobb, who later opened the first episode of Kill Yr Silos, about how you get people onto a RevOps team at all. My answer then was carrots and sticks: the carrot was more responsibility and something new to build, and the stick was the threat of being left behind. Reading it now, I'd keep the problem and rewrite the answer.

The problem is real. Most people in go-to-market become experts in one lane. They know the marketing automation platform, or the forecast, or the CS playbook, better than anyone in the building. That's valuable, and it's also why RevOps is hard to staff. At Go Nimbly we described the work as four capabilities: strategy, tools, enablement, and insights. A healthy team needs all four, and a pure specialist covers one. The operators who did well were the ones who mastered their own function and then built bridges to the teams around it.

What I got wrong was the framing. Carrots and sticks treat becoming a generalist as a sacrifice you have to bribe or scare people into. The people who made the move didn't experience it that way, and they turned out to be right about it. The world kept changing. Tools got replaced, teams got reorganized, whole job titles came and went. The people who had bought in and learned to work across functions kept their jobs through all of it, because their value didn't depend on any single system staying put.

I think of the best of them as orchestrators, and I think the orchestrator is the most highly skilled generalist there is. The section players may each play their instrument better. The orchestrator knows each one well enough to hear when it's off, and knows what the whole piece is supposed to sound like. In a revenue team that means knowing why marketing's pipeline number doesn't match sales', what the handoff to CS actually promises the customer, and which of those problems to fix first.

The orchestrator knows each one well enough to hear when it's off, and knows what the whole piece is supposed to sound like.

That skill is getting more valuable. A lot of the narrow work that specialists owned is the work AI is taking over fastest. What's left is the part that sees across functions and decides what matters, and specialists working in silos can't do that part.

So I'd stop pitching it as a carrot or a stick. If I were rebuilding a RevOps team today, I'd tell people what I watched happen: the ones who learned to orchestrate were the ones who stayed employed.