Summary
The OpsStars Awards 2026 are officially open for submissions, recognizing the RevOps, Sales Ops, Marketing Ops and GTM professionals who are doing the hard, strategic work of building modern revenue engines. Now in their eighth year, the awards span eight categories designed around the way elite go-to-market teams actually operate in an AI-powered world.
What You’ll Learn
- Which eight award categories are open for the 2026 OpsStars Awards and who qualifies for each.
- What distinguishes a strong submission from a forgettable one.
- Why recognizing ops professionals matters for team culture and GTM credibility.
- How winners are honored and what happens after the awards are announced.
- How to submit before the August 14, 2026 deadline.
The OpsStars Awards Are Open. Does Someone on Your Team Deserve One?
Every year, the revenue engine improves. Leads route faster. Handoffs get cleaner. AI agents start carrying weight across the buyer journey. Buying groups get orchestrated instead of ignored. The data quality that once made everyone wince quietly becomes something to be proud of.
And most of the time, nobody outside Operations knows who made it happen.
The OpsStars Awards exist for exactly that reason. Now in their eighth year, the awards recognize the GTM and Ops professionals who don’t wait for problems to solve themselves.
They build the systems, enforce the standards, and orchestrate the complexity that keeps revenue moving. Submissions are open now through August 14, 2026.
Whether you’re nominating yourself or the person on your team who has been quietly making everything run better, this is your window.
Why This Matters More in 2026
The 2026 awards theme is Power Your AI GTM, and it reflects where the best revenue operations teams actually are right now: past the experimentation phase and into operationalization.
The strongest GTM teams using AI tools, but they don’t stop there. They’re building the infrastructure to govern them, route signals from them, and tie them to the deterministic actions that close deals and retain customers.
They’re the ones asking:
- What happens after the AI generates the output?
- Who gets it?
- What’s the SLA?
- How do we audit it?
That kind of thinking is operational excellence. And it deserves recognition.
The 2026 OpsStars Award Categories
Eight categories cover the full range of what elite GTM operations look like today. Here’s a quick breakdown:
One important note: the Intelligent GTM Orchestration Award welcomes both mature operational showcases and clear before/after transformation stories. You don’t have to have a decade of infrastructure to qualify. You have to have changed something, and be able to show it.
What Makes a Strong Submission?
The judges are looking for evidence, not just effort. Here’s what separates the submissions that win from the ones that don’t:
Specificity beats scope. A submission that says “we improved our entire GTM process” is harder to evaluate than one that says “We reduced time-to-assignment from four hours to six minutes after routing AI SDR-generated leads.” Name the tools. Name the numbers. Name the before.
Show the systems thinking. The strongest submissions explain not just what changed, but how it was architected. What was the trigger? What was the action? Who owns the process now? Judges want to see that the improvement was engineered, not accidental.
Put people at the center. These awards are for operators, and the best submissions reflect the human intelligence behind the system. Who championed the project? Who had to align the stakeholders? Who rebuilt the routing logic at 11pm before a major campaign launch? Tell that story.
Before and after is always better than after alone. If you have metrics showing where you started, use them. If you don’t, describe the qualitative state before the change. What was breaking? What was the team living with?
If You’re Thinking About Nominating Someone Else
Do it. Seriously.
Most ops professionals won’t nominate themselves. They’re too busy maintaining the systems they built to stop and write 500 words about why those systems matter. If you manage an Ops leader, work alongside one, or partner with a GTM team doing exceptional work, you are probably the right person to make sure they get credit.
The nomination process is designed to be straightforward. You don’t need a finished case study. You need a clear story about what was built, what it changed, and why it mattered.
How Winners Are Recognized
Being named an OpsStars Award winner isn’t just a trophy (although there is a trophy). Winners receive:
- An announcement at OpsStars 2026 in San Francisco
- An invitation to the winner’s dinner reception
- The OpsStars Award trophy and a digital badge for LinkedIn and email signatures
- A feature in the OpsStars Award-Winning Stories ebook, distributed to the broader GTM and Ops community
- Continued opportunities to share insights with the OpsStars community throughout the year
The ebook in particular is worth noting. Past winner stories have become reference materials for ops teams building similar programs. If your team solved a hard problem, sharing how you did it serves the whole community.
Submissions Close August 14, 2026
Don’t leave this for the last week. Strong submissions take time to write well, and the best ones are usually built from a conversation between the nominator and the nominee, where both parties contribute the context and the metrics that make the story land.
Start now. Submit at ops-stars.com/awards-2026.
If you know someone who should win one of these awards, they probably agree with you. Give them the recognition they’ve earned.
FAQ
What is the OpsStars Awards and who organizes it?
Can I submit an award for someone on my team, or does it have to be a self-nomination?
What kinds of results or evidence do the OpsStars Award judges look for?
Do I need to be a LeanData customer to submit for an OpsStars Award?
What Does it Take to Win?
Kim Peterson
Kim Peterson is the Senior Manager of Content Strategy at LeanData where she digs deep into all aspects of go-to-market strategy and execution. Kim's writing experiences span tech companies, stunt blogging, education, and the real estate industry. Connect with Kim on LinkedIn.
