What is RevOps (Revenue Operations)?
RevOps (Revenue Operations) is the strategic alignment of sales, marketing, and customer success operations to drive revenue growth. Rather than operating as separate silos with different metrics and processes, RevOps creates unified operations across the entire customer lifecycle.
RevOps breaks down barriers between go-to-market functions. It ensures that marketing handoffs to sales, sales handoffs to customer success, and customer success feedback back to product all flow seamlessly with shared metrics, data, and processes.
Why It Matters
Fragmented go-to-market operations create friction and inefficiency. Marketing generates leads sales doesn't want; sales closes deals customer success can't support; valuable customer feedback never reaches product. These disconnects destroy revenue potential.
RevOps also creates data-driven decision making. When all teams use the same data and metrics, leadership gets accurate visibility into what's working, what's not, and where to invest for maximum revenue impact.
Benchmarks
- Alignment impact: Companies with strong RevOps see 15-30% faster revenue growth
- Forecast accuracy: RevOps organizations forecast within 10% vs. 30-50% without
- Handoff efficiency: Aligned ops reduce lead handoff friction by 40-60%
- Technology stack: RevOps typically requires 5-10 integrated platforms: CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement, analytics, and compensation
Best Practices
1. Create unified metrics across teams - Marketing, sales, and customer success should share key metrics: pipeline coverage, conversion rates, NRR, and ARR growth. Eliminate conflicting metrics that incentivize bad behavior.
2. Standardize data and processes - Ensure consistent data definitions, lead stages, and opportunity stages across all systems. "Marketing Qualified Lead" must mean the same thing to marketing and sales.
3. Build integrated technology stacks - Your CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement, and analytics platforms should share data seamlessly. Data silos kill revenue operations.
4. Establish regular ops reviews - Weekly or biweekly reviews across go-to-market leadership to identify issues, align on priorities, and coordinate initiatives.
5. Create single sources of truth - One dashboard for pipeline, one for forecasting, one for customer health. Multiple versions of "truth" create confusion and misalignment.
Common Mistakes
- Treating RevOps as just "sales ops with a bigger title"
- Focusing only on tools and technology without addressing process and people
- Not getting executive buy-in from sales, marketing, and customer success leaders
- Attempting to align metrics without changing the underlying compensation plans
- Starting too broad instead of focusing on highest-impact opportunities
Key Takeaways
- RevOps aligns sales, marketing, and customer success for maximum revenue
- Unified metrics and data are the foundation of effective RevOps
- RevOps dramatically improves forecast accuracy and reduces operational friction
- Technology integration enables alignment but doesn't replace it
- Executive sponsorship and cross-functional commitment are prerequisites for success
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