RevOps: More Than CRM Administration

The difference between RevOps and CRM admin

CRM administration is tactical: field configurations, page layouts, user permissions, report building. Important work, but it's maintenance.

Revenue operations is strategic:

• •How do we define and measure pipeline stages consistently?
• •What activities actually correlate with closed deals?
• •Where are leads falling through the cracks between teams?
• •Why do forecasts never match reality?
• •How do we attribute revenue to the right sources?

The CRM is a tool RevOps uses. It's not the point.

Why forecasts are always wrong

Every sales leader complains about forecasting. The numbers don't match. Deals slip. Big opportunities appear from nowhere. The problem usually isn't the forecast model - it's the data going into it.

• •Inconsistent stage definitions: What "Proposal Sent" means varies by rep. Some move deals forward too early, others too late.
• •Stale opportunities: Deals sit at the same stage for months. Nobody closes them out or advances them.
• •Rep sandbagging: Experienced reps undercommit to look good when they overdeliver. Skews the aggregate.
• •Missing close dates: Every deal closes "this quarter" until it doesn't. No real timeline data.

Fixing forecasting means fixing pipeline hygiene. That's process work, not technology work.

The handoff problem

Marketing generates leads. Sales works deals. Success handles customers. Simple, right?

In practice, every handoff is a place where deals die:

• •Marketing to Sales: What qualifies a lead? Sales says marketing leads are low quality. Marketing says sales doesn't follow up.
• •SDR to AE: Meeting scheduled, but context lost. AE re-asks questions the prospect already answered.
• •Sales to Success: Deal closes. Customer expects things that weren't actually sold. Churn risk from day one.

RevOps owns these transitions. Not as a referee, but as the designer of processes that make handoffs clean.

What to measure (and what to ignore)

You can measure everything. You shouldn't. Dashboard bloat leads to metric paralysis - so many numbers that nobody acts on any of them.

Start with these:

• •Pipeline velocity: How fast do deals move through stages? Where do they stall?
• •Conversion by stage: What percentage of deals advance from each stage? Where's the drop-off?
• •Win rate by segment: Which customer types do you win? Which do you lose? Are you chasing the right deals?
• •Sales cycle length: How long from first touch to close? Is it getting longer or shorter?
• •Rep productivity: Activities per deal. Deals per rep. But be careful - activity metrics without outcome metrics drive busywork.

Add metrics only when there's a specific decision they inform. "Nice to know" isn't good enough.

Tech stack sanity

The average sales team uses 10+ tools. Most of them overlap. Few of them integrate cleanly. RevOps spends half their time duct-taping systems together.

Before adding another tool:

1. Can your CRM do this natively? Often yes, with the right configuration.
2. Does it integrate properly? "API available" doesn't mean integration is easy.
3. Will reps actually use it? Another login is another barrier to adoption.
4. What happens to the data? If it doesn't flow to your source of truth, it's a silo.

Where to start

If your revenue operations need work, start with data quality. Everything else depends on trustworthy data.

1. Audit your pipeline. How many open opportunities are real? How many are zombies? Clean up before measuring.
2. Define your stages. Written criteria for what qualifies each stage. Enforce it.
3. Fix one handoff. Pick the leakiest transition. Design a better process. Measure the improvement.
4. Build one dashboard. The metrics your leadership actually needs for decisions. Nothing else.

This isn't sexy work. It's the work that makes everything else possible.