(Hint: It’s RevOps)
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a strategic discipline that serves as the connective tissue between revenue-generating functions….marketing, sales, customer success. It ensures alignment in strategy, process, workflows, data, technology, and analytics to eliminate silos and reduce inefficiencies and friction. Acting as a dispassionate referee / scorekeeper, RevOps provides impartial analytics, fosters collaboration, and ensures decisions are based on data. At B2B Enterprise Organizations, RevOps is essential to providing a powerful CX and enabling efficient growth through a unified customer experience.
Most modern enterprise organizations can benefit from implementing a Revenue Operations (RevOps) discipline, particularly those with complex structures and operations. Research, industry insights, and organizational experience suggest that adopting RevOps can drive significant improvements in revenue growth, commercial efficiency, profitability, and customer experience. Additionally, it enhances the ability to accurately and consistently forecast bookings and revenue, providing a more strategic and data-driven approach to business growth.
- Revenue and Profitable Growth: Gartner has identified that organizations that implement advanced RevOps functions are 200% as likely to exceed revenue goals and 230% more likely to exceed profitability goals, compared to those with less mature operations. (Gartner)
- Efficiency: Forrester has identified that RevOps can lead to a 10% increase in operational efficiency across GTM departments. (Forrester) Gartner identified a 20% increase in sales productivity and a 15% reduction in operational costs (due to streamlined tech and processes) with RevOps. (Gartner)
- CX and CSat: Forrester also identified that RevOps may lead to a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores due to a more cohesive customer experience. (Forrester)
- Forecasting and Strategic Planning: Gartner found that RevOps may lead to a 30% increase in forecast accuracy, enabling significant improvements in strategic planning capabilities. They also found a 25% increase in data-driven decision-making capabilities, enhancing strategic initiatives and market responsiveness. (Gartner)
- Employee Engagement: Contrary to concerns about upsetting frontline sales and marketing team members, Forrester found a 10% increase in employee engagement on GTM teams when RevOps provides clearer roles, goals, and processes.
RevOps is not just a department, but a discipline that should guide all GTM efforts. RevOps is a strategic framework, discipline, and business function that aims to ensure revenue growth that is measurable, actionable and sustainable. RevOps works by aligning Revenue Teams (i.e. Marketing and Account Management) (PEOPLE), streamlining processes (PROCESS), and leveraging data and technology (PLATFORMS) in an unbiased manner to identify areas of opportunity, improvement and to drive more informed decisions.
To understand, let’s start with a world without RevOps…
GTM teams are traditionally organized themselves into GTM Departments, roughly along the axis of the end-to-end Buyer’s Journey–Marketing owns the earliest interactions, Sales Development owns the first human interactions, then Sales, Product, and Delivery playing their respective roles, mostly in mutually exclusive succession. Each department leverages their own systems and evaluation of success.
The problem with that assumption, however, is that while internal optimization of each function may impact your audience, we cannot assume that all optimizations will impact your audience in the same direction. And it’s possible that the optimizations of two functions may neutralize each other for a net neutral impact. Let’s take for example a situation where B2B Enterprise Organizations’s Brand team is trying to brand B2B Enterprise Organizations as “a leader in healthcare performance improvement,” while the Spend Management team is in practice positioning B2B Enterprise Organizations as “a way to reduce expenses.” There is clearly a way that these two messages can complement each other, but there is also clearly a way they can contradict each other (i.e. if the Brand team leads with a message of “cutting expenses will never help you win” while the BU is saying “cutting expenses is at the heart of transforming into a great health system”).
While such strategic contradictions are sometimes easy to spot, more nuanced tactical contradictions most often go unnoticed. For instance, even if the Brand and Spend Management BU teams are speaking the same language, they might be speaking to different people at different times on different channels. This probably makes a lot of the Spend Management sales conversations harder to start (because of lack of brand equity with the prospects) and wastes the Brand awareness budget (by building brand affinity with people who will not regularly be approached by the BU sales team).
These are all examples of friction, fumbles, and confusion that exist between Revenue Teams. These siloed heroics tend to fall into one of these broad categories:
- Not pursuing the same strategy
- Not using the same data
- Not following the same timing
- Not prioritizing the same things
- Not providing a seamless experience for prospects / customers / members
- Not using the same metrics… and not using metrics that are within the “line of sight” of revenue
So what is RevOps and how does it help us avoid the above mistakes? RevOps is the science of sustainable revenue growth that is measurable, actionable, and repeatable. It has the end goal of driving business performance using a scientific method. The founder of TOPO (now Gartner) said:
“RevOps is the operating model for driving efficient, predictable revenue… [aligning] organizations based on strategy, process, workflow, data, analysis and technology.” – Craig Rosenberg, Distinguished VP & Analyst @ Gartner
Boiling it down even more simply than that:
RevOps is a discipline that optimizes the connective tissue between Revenue Teams (and their respective functions). This discipline reduces the frequency and severity of the friction, fumbles, and confusion.
The discipline of RevOps (not just the RevOps department) starts with facilitating the development, documentation, and alignment of strategy. This includes GTM Strategy that is owned by a central GTM leader (like a CMO, CRO, or Chief Commercial Officer), GTM strategy that is owned by the BUs, integrated play strategy, and even Account-level strategy – for which RevOps (both the discipline and the department) provide structure, alignment, and uniformity.
RevOps then seeks to define the process and workflows by which that strategy is activated. This includes, for instance, defining the processes that Marketing uses to turn the strategy into integrated plays.
RevOps then seeks to manage the data that sits at the heart of your Commercial activities. This means defining, collecting, cleansing, and expanding your data so that all of your Commercial teams know everything they need to know to find, attract, convert, retain, and expand your ideal customers.
RevOps then seeks to provide analytics that are deep, comprehensive, and consistent across all Commercial Support Teams and BUs.
RevOps then (and ONLY then) seeks to focus on selecting, implementing, and managing the right tech platforms to implement and manage all of the above.
While some of these capabilities can be distributed, others often benefit from having a dedicated unbiased perspective outside of those teams. This allows decisions, analysis, and recommendations to consider the entire end-to-end CX and the entire GTM organization.
But WHY does any of this even matter?
Because Customer Experience (CX) directly impacts the speed, amount, and predictability of your revenue. The core of the RevOps philosophy is the following value ladder:
- Increasing revenue requires you to secure more buying decisions…
- …and buying decisions are made by Buying Committees…
- …and Buying Committees are made up of various Roles…
- …and these Roles are filled by specific individuals…
- …and these individuals go on a joint and individual Buyer’s Journey…
- …and this Buyer’s Journey follows the CX that you provide…
- …and your CX is based on the level of value, responsiveness, and personalization you provide to each individual…
- …and your ability to personalize is based on how integrated and aligned your Strategy, Process, Workflow, Data, Analytics, and Tech really are.
In other words, the better your CX, the more your customers will buy, in some cases up to 56% of customers will buy additional products or services due to good customer experience. This means that RevOps drives lifetime value of your customers (LTV).
What’s Next? How to Get Started with RevOps
Implementing RevOps isn’t just about adding another function; it’s about transforming how your revenue-generating teams operate. To start leveraging the power of RevOps, consider these key steps:
- Assess Your Current State – Conduct an audit of your revenue processes, tools, and team alignment. Identify inefficiencies, silos, and gaps in data or communication.
- Align Strategy Across Revenue Teams – Ensure that Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and other revenue-related teams are working toward the same goals, using shared metrics and insights.
- Optimize Processes and Workflows – Define and document streamlined processes that reduce friction between teams and enhance the customer experience.
- Leverage Data for Smarter Decision-Making – Implement a single source of truth for revenue data to improve forecast accuracy and strategic planning.
- Invest in the Right Technology – Select and integrate RevOps tools that support automation, analytics, and cross-team collaboration.
- Measure, Iterate, and Improve – Continuously track the impact of RevOps initiatives on revenue, efficiency, and customer experience. Use data-driven insights to refine your approach.
The Bottom Line?
RevOps isn’t a buzzword—it’s a proven framework for driving sustainable growth, improving efficiency, and enhancing customer experience. Organizations that embrace RevOps see higher revenue, improved forecast accuracy, and better collaboration across teams.
So the real question is: Is your business ready to optimize its revenue potential? Now is the time to take action and implement a RevOps strategy that propels your company forward.
Looking to implement RevOps in your organization? Start by assessing your current revenue operations framework and identifying key areas for improvement. A well-executed RevOps strategy could be the catalyst for unlocking your company’s full growth potential.
This article was developed in collaboration with Intelligent Demand’s Aaron Owens, Senior Director of Growth Consulting and Kele Powell, RevOps Strategy Analyst.