RevOps Explained: What Revenue Operations Actually Means for Your Business

RevOps isn't a new department. It's an operating model. It's the decision to stop letting sales, marketing, and customer success operate as three separate fiefdoms with three separate data sets and three separate definitions of a 'qualified lead.'

The core problem RevOps solves: misalignment. Marketing generates leads that sales says are unqualified. Sales closes deals that customer success can't onboard smoothly. Customer success identifies upsell opportunities that never make it back to sales. Each team blames the others. Revenue suffers.

RevOps fixes this by creating shared definitions (what is an MQL, SQL, opportunity, customer?), shared metrics (pipeline velocity, win rate, time-to-value, expansion revenue), shared tools (one CRM, one source of truth), and shared accountability (revenue targets, not departmental targets).

Implementation starts with an audit: map every handoff between marketing, sales, and customer success. Where does data move? Where does it break? Where are people manually transferring information between systems? These handoff points are your highest-ROI automation targets.

The technology layer matters, but it's secondary. You need a CRM that all three teams actually use (not maintain shadow spreadsheets alongside), integrations that keep data synchronised automatically, and dashboards that show the full revenue picture from first touch to expansion.

Common mistake: treating RevOps as a technology project. Buying a RevOps platform without changing how teams work together just creates a more expensive version of the same problem. Start with process alignment, then automate what works.