Why RevOps is the most misunderstood function in business
Most companies skip RevOps. That’s their ceiling.
Bring up RevOps and people picture different things: the ones patching CRM fields, the team untangling messy reports, and the guys (and girls) wiring HubSpot to Salesforce. True in part, but not the whole.
Let’s backtrack for a second. Revenue Operations didn’t just appear overnight; it was born out of years of frustration with siloed go-to-market teams.
For decades, sales ops lived in its own corner, focused on comp plans and forecasting. Marketing ops built its own world of automation, routing, and campaign reporting. Customer success ops arrived later (often with a whole new stack of tools and definitions!).
Each did important work. But when the seams showed, they showed in the worst places - board decks that contradicted themselves, forecasts nobody trusted, and frontline teams that never saw the same picture of the business.
By the mid-2010s, SaaS leaders started to realize those cracks weren’t just annoying, they were existential. You couldn’t scale if people, processes, and technology were all pointing in slightly different directions.
RevOps emerged as the fix: a unifying function built to bring consistency, clarity, and compounding efficiency across the revenue engine.
At first it was a scrappy idea - one or two operators trying to glue systems together. But it quickly turned into a movement. LinkedIn reported RevOps roles grew by 80% year-over-year between 2018 and 2022, proof that companies were investing beyond one-off fixes. Analysts caught on too: Forrester and Gartner now treat RevOps as a core discipline, not a passing fad.
What started as a band-aid became a recognized function, with more than half of B2B SaaS companies creating dedicated seats. In private equity, portfolio operators increasingly see it as non-negotiable.
Today, RevOps has its own career paths, leadership titles, and playbooks - a sign it’s not an experiment anymore; it’s the operating system for growth.
Reactive vs strategic RevOps
Regardless, most companies reduce RevOps to janitorial work. Clean a field. Fix a trigger. Pull a report. Necessary stuff, but shallow in context.
Reactive RevOps keeps the lights on. Strategic RevOps increases enterprise value. That’s the difference boards actually care about: tighter conversion rates, faster cycle times, larger deal sizes, higher retention, and more accurate forecasts.
Treating RevOps like a profit center shifts the focus. You’re no longer paying for point fixes. You’re investing in a system that reliably turns inputs like leads, reps, and dollars into predictable pipeline.
The three phases every mature RevOps engine runs through
Paul Stansik often talks about growth in stages; you “figure it out,” then “fix it up,” then “scale it up.”
The trap almost everyone falls into is trying to sprint from stage one to stage three without doing the hard, messy work in the middle.
Here’s what each stage really means, not in theory, but what it looks like day-to-day.
1. Figure it out
At this stage you close deals mostly on sheer effort, while the tools you use barely talk to each other.
Processes live in people’s heads instead of being documented.
The data is a mess. You’ve got duplicates everywhere, fields are misused, and pipelines become blurry.
Performance swings up and down, and more often than not, it’s individual heroics compensating for structural cracks.
2. Fix it up
This is where discipline kicks in (and the stage most teams neglect.) You start standardizing definitions so “lead,” “opportunity,” and “qualified” actually mean the same thing across teams.
Data gets cleaned and enriched.
Routing is rebuilt so nothing slips through the cracks. Automations are rationalized; what’s useful is kept, and what confuses people is scrapped.
Reporting finally starts to reflect reality instead of wishful thinking. It’s definitely not glamorous work, but it’s the foundation that makes growth sustainable.
3. Scale it up
With a clean system in place, you can finally lean into strategy.
Expansion plays and cross-sell motions get operationalized.
Forecasting shifts from reactive to predictive.
Multi-product or multi-geo growth becomes possible without overwhelming the team.
At this stage, growth compounds instead of sputtering, because people, processes, and technology are pulling in the same direction.
Why skipping “fix it up” stakes your growth
When you skip the “fix it up” stage, three things usually happen.
- You pour resources into scaling (more reps, more spend, more tools) without improving what you’re feeding the system: clean data, clear definitions, and reliable routing.
- Your pipeline gets harder to manage and your data harder to trust. Reports stop lining up, and every forecast feels like guesswork.
- Your teams burn out, and you lose days, sometimes weeks or months, to firefighting and damage control.
So why do people skip it?
Because it’s slow. It’s tedious. And it rarely feels like progress at the moment.
But it buys stability. It buys margin. It buys trust from the board. Most importantly, it creates the space to scale without smashing into the ceiling too soon.
What strategic RevOps really looks like
When RevOps is done right, it feels calm instead of chaotic.
Dashboards tell one story, not five. Leaders trust the numbers because they’re built on clean definitions, not patched together in Excel at the eleventh hour. That trust alone shifts the whole tone of a board meeting.
The pipeline starts behaving too. Confusion about what counts as a lead or what qualifies as an opp fades out. Every team knows what stage they’re in and what comes next. Energy moves forward instead of getting caught in the cracks.
Daily work gets easier. Reps don’t need six tabs open to chase down a single contact. Marketers don’t have to bend campaigns around broken fields. The system stops being a tax and starts giving time back.
And when the business takes a big swing - whether that’s buying another company, launching a new product, or breaking into a fresh market - you’re not holding your breath. The system holds. That’s the payoff of fixing it up.
But the reverse is true, too.
Skip the work, and you can see it everywhere.
- Excel revenue models that barely hang together.
- Sales teams act like gatherers because the CRM hides more than it reveals.
- Reports that snap under pressure the moment volume increases.
That’s just the cost of ignoring foundations.
So what makes strategic RevOps possible?
The grind.
The plumbing.
The parts nobody notices when they’re done right, but everyone feels when they’re not.
Standardizing. Cleaning. Documenting. Enforcing.
It’s slow, unglamorous work. But it’s the reason everything on the front stage looks simple.
Why operators bring in RevBlack
RevOps talent is hard to find and pricey when you do, and rarely quick to ramp. Meanwhile, the stack changes every month. PE funds don’t have a year to wait for an internal hire to figure it out. That’s why they bring us in.
We start with the biggest sinkholes in your system: dirty data, duplicate hell, and reports stitched in Excel.
We fix it up first, then layer in the campaigns and dashboards that a board can actually point to. And when we walk out, the system isn’t a black box. Your team knows how to run it.
Over the past three years of helping mid-market companies move the needle, a few truths have stuck.
First: definitions beat dashboards. Most reporting problems aren’t technical - they’re arguments about what words mean.
Second: less really is more in the stack. If the motion doesn’t work in your core system, no point tool will fix it.
Third: enrichment isn’t optional. Stale records kill segmentation and scoring faster than any campaign can rescue them.
Fourth: forecasting is a habit, not a model. Consistency and hygiene matter more than any algorithm you buy.
And finally: integrations don’t clean things up;, they just magnify what’s already there. Best practices scale, but so does chaos.
Let your number one takeaway be this:
“You need someone who’s in the system consistently… It’s not enough to approach a project, check it off the list, and send everybody home.” - Tate Stone
Markets don’t sit still. Tools update weekly. People move on. Growth has a way of pulling every weakness into the light.
RevOps is the only way the revenue engine keeps compounding instead of stalling.
Read next
- The Hidden Work Behind a HubSpot–Salesforce Integration
- In-House or RevOps Agency?
- The 3 Main Pillars of RevOps
RevOps: Choose your own path
If organic growth pressure is real, RevOps can either be your ceiling OR your advantage. Make sure you know how to tilt it to the latter.
What’s your next move?
- Skim our services: Get a fast read on where we plug in: integrations, governance, analytics, GTM efficiency.
- Book a free Tech Stack Audit. We’ll review your CRM, automations, routing, and dashboards; flag the top five breakpoints; and map them to the figure → fix → scale ladder.
- Talk to Tate. If you’re staring down a board meeting, an integration deadline, or a messy HubSpot↔Salesforce handoff, book an hour. You’ll leave with a 90-day RevOps plan your team can actually run.
