Marketing, sales and customer success all exist to grow revenue. In most businesses, though, each team has its own goals, its own process and often its own system. Leads fall through gaps between teams. Reports don't match. Customers repeat themselves every time they're handed to someone new.
Revenue operations, or RevOps, is how you fix that. This post covers what it is, what it does, how to tell when you need it, and why many growing businesses get it from a fractional team rather than hiring for it.
What is revenue operations?
RevOps is the function that runs the systems, data and processes behind marketing, sales and customer success as one connected operation. It covers the whole customer journey, from first touch to renewal.
It has two aims: a better experience for the customer, and more predictable revenue for the business. Put simply:
RevOps = Operations + Enablement + Insights + Tools
"Revenue Operations is the inner ring of that flywheel, reducing friction and providing the lubrication to make sure the three big areas of your business (sales, marketing, and service) are moving smoothly, accelerating your growth flywheel and letting nothing stand in your way. Putting the metaphor aside, Revenue Operations is the combining and aligning of revenue goals throughout marketing, sales, and success teams within a business."
HubSpot
In practice, RevOps work looks like this: setting up and maintaining the CRM, defining lifecycle stages and lead handoffs, building the automations that move leads and deals along, connecting the tools that feed data in, keeping that data clean, and building the reports leadership uses to make decisions. Increasingly it also means deciding where AI fits, so people spend less time on admin and more on customers and strategy.
Why RevOps matters
1. Shared goals and KPIs
Marketing, sales and customer success need goals that connect to revenue and to each other. Marketing measured only on lead volume will produce leads sales doesn't want. Sales measured only on closed deals won't care much about what happens after the contract is signed.
When the teams agree on definitions, such as what counts as a qualified lead and when a deal moves stage, they stop arguing about the numbers and start working on them. Dharmesh Shah's talk on aligning vectors explains the idea well: a team pulling in the same direction moves further than a stronger team pulling in different ones.
2. One connected tech stack
The CRM is the centre of it. For most of our clients that's HubSpot, but the principle applies to any CRM. Your systems need to talk to each other, the data needs to be shared, and every conversation with a prospect or customer should be visible to the people who need it.
Picture this. Marketing sends an email and a prospect replies. Without a clear lead allocation process and a shared CRM, two salespeople call the same person and ask the same qualifying questions marketing already answered. Later, the onboarding team has no idea what was promised during the sale.
With a connected setup, a prospect is contacted by one person, sales doesn't ask questions marketing already captured, and customer success can see the whole history from first touch to closed won. That's why CRM strategy and data quality is the foundation of everything else in RevOps.
A connected stack also means more of the routine work can be automated, so each person on the team can handle more pipeline without burning out.
3. Room to adapt and grow
Once goals are aligned and systems are connected, you can change direction without rebuilding everything. Restructuring teams, changing territories or commission plans, launching a new product or entering a new market all become manageable, because the data and processes are already in order.
Some examples of what this makes possible:
- Sales and finance agree how deal amounts are used to measure rep profitability.
- Leadership can see which partnerships work best for which industries or services.
- Marketing and sales agree on lead quality and work together to improve it.
- Marketing and sales plan lead volume around the growth needed to support hiring another rep.
- Customer success and product share customer feedback and agree which improvements to prioritise.
- Customer success and marketing adjust messaging based on what customers actually say.
- Sales and marketing agree on a new segment or vertical to go after.
RevOps lets you grow without the systems falling over. It works on the levers that drive revenue: lead volume, deal value, sales velocity and conversion rates.
Signs you need RevOps
You probably need someone looking after revenue operations if:
- Marketing and sales report different numbers for the same month.
- Nobody fully trusts the CRM data, so people keep their own spreadsheets.
- Leads go cold because it's unclear who owns them or when to follow up.
- Pulling a basic report takes hours, or only one person knows how.
- Automations have been built by different people over the years and nobody is sure what they all do.
- You're paying for tools that don't connect, or that nobody uses.
- You can't say with confidence which campaigns or channels produce revenue.
- The business has grown, but the CRM is still set up the way it was on day one.
In-house RevOps or a fractional RevOps team?
Larger companies often hire a RevOps lead and build a team under them. For many growing businesses that's hard to justify. The work needs CRM architecture, automation, integrations, reporting, paid media tracking and increasingly AI, and it's rare to find all of that in one hire. A single in-house person can also become the only one who understands how everything works.
A fractional RevOps team gives you that range of skills without building a department. The team runs your systems day to day, works with your marketing, sales and service leads, and keeps the setup in line with how the business actually operates as it changes.
That's how we work at Gather 'n' Grow. We're a HubSpot Platinum Partner and a Google Partner, and we act as our clients' fractional RevOps team. We run their HubSpot, their Google Ads and the AI that sits across both, so their own people have more time for customers and strategy.
Where to start
Start with an honest look at where things stand. Which of the signs above sound familiar? Where do leads, data or customers fall through the gaps? Our RevOps checklist walks through the questions to ask for each team.
If you'd rather have a team run it with you, see how our fractional RevOps service works.