[GUIDE] B2B RevOps: What It Is, Isn't and How to Start

Written By Clare French

Look, no one is perfect. If your company has marketing, sales and any sort of service function, something is probably going wrong, somewhere. And it’s happening right now. You’ve probably found this page because you already know that, and you're wondering how a B2B RevOps framework can fix it.

If your company is at all like so many other businesses, you're seeking a vision of predictable revenue growth. In reality, you probably have leads coming in through marketing channels that may or may not be delivering on the promise of lead quality. The marketing handoff to the sales team is possibly (probably) sloppy in places.

As sales reps work to qualify and close those leads, the closing and onboarding process may also be leaky. And then once you have that new customer or client, how that handoff is managed can make or break the customer experience, let alone The Almighty Referral. And we should all care about referral business because it's usually your highest-closing channel.

Further, your data may be messy, incomplete or, worse, misguided by looking at the wrong metrics. And if you've reached this point, and most businesses do, your tech stack is probably struggling to run the revenue engine.

No matter how great your product or service is, you can’t keep your customer satisfaction overflowing, and your employees are likely to bounce, too. According to Axios HQ, 42% of employees left jobs because internal communication was unsatisfactory.

This post will aim to point you in the right direction in defining your RevOps framework, whether it’s hiring a B2B RevOps consultancy, like Hire Clare, or finding the right candidate to bring the job in-house with a full-time hire.

So, What Is B2B Revenue Operations?

Since the concept of RevOps is still relatively new to the business world, let's take a moment to define it.

Simply put, RevOps is a strategic approach to removing friction from internal processes and optimizing your revenue teams, including marketing, sales, customer success / service and product around sustainable revenue growth.

RevOps sits at the intersection of the teams, processes, data and technology involved in generating (and growing) revenue.

A RevOps strategy aims to uncover and remove otherwise hidden barriers to building scale, generally within the budget you already have. It doesn't mean we won't recommend spending some cash. But RevOps strategies only do so when it's genuinely merited, meaning a clear return on investment (ROI) is almost certain.

As a side note, the efficiency component is exactly what pulled me into RevOps. I'm all about efficiency, and over a long and storied marketing career, I got very exhausted by watching the companies I worked for burn money to poorly "fix" the wrong kinds of problems.

A great example of this is working on SEO / AEO without optimizing your site conversion rates in parallel. I never understood it - why double search traffic with an already underperforming conversion rate?!

You can at least double or triple your investment by simply paying more attention to how prospects convert. And you can usually get better leads while you're at it.

Shameless plug, but someone who naturally gravitates toward this kind of analysis has exactly the mindset you should be looking for in a RevOps pro, whether you hire a consultant, a full-timer or a team of full-timers.

With all that in mind, a skilled RevOps leader focuses on building processes that clearly define what each of your revenue teams are indexing toward. They also outline the path of least resistance to get there. Then they often also lead change management with training programs, tools and mentoring.

Pro Tip: when you're looking to fulfill this role, be sure to test for empathy. Someone who can look at data all day and make recommendations is great, but they need to be able to talk to people and gain buy-in, too, even when it's hard.

RevOps leaders also define the metrics that matter, harmonizing disparate systems in your tech stack to support data governance, collection and reporting. They'll leverage automation tools and workflows when it makes sense, taking care not to lose the "heart and soul" of what makes your business model and people unique.

RevOps leaders are accountable for:

  • People: Roles, responsibilities, collaboration and accountability

  • Processes: Lead management, qualification, forecasting, handoffs, renewals and reporting

  • Technology: CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement tools, customer success platforms, analytics and integrations

  • Data: Definitions, governance, quality, accessibility and consistent reporting

What B2B RevOps In Not

RevOps Isn't Just A New Name For Sales Operations

Yes, sales operations is an important part of RevOps. But RevOps covers the broader revenue engine, including marketing, sales, customer success and data shared throughout the company.

Pro Tip: Simply combining each siloed operations team into one unit isn't necessarily the same as having a RevOps team. You may instead wind up with competition and infighting. Avoid this by adding additional members that are tasked with supporting the entire function, like an analytics wizard or an interdepartmental trainer.

RevOps Isn't Simply Spending More on Software

Adding new tools without fixing unclear processes can make bad problems worse. RevOps begins with understanding how processes work (or don't work), where communication breaks down and what the business goals should actually be.

RevOps Isn't Just a Reporting Function

Sure, dashboards are useful, but RevOps is also responsible for improving workflows, clarifying ownership, managing systems and helping teams act on insights. It's more than simple data management. It's about applying data to effectively manage.

RevOps Isn't Forcing Teams to Have Identical Goals

Shared revenue outcomes matter, but individual revenue teams will likely still have role-specific metrics. The aim is alignment and harmonization, indexed toward a broader goal. Perhaps that goal is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (or BHAG). Perhaps it's a series of indicators that lead to scalable growth.

Either way, RevOps is aimed at unifying the revenue engine, not forcing homogeneity.

RevOps Isn't a Substitute For Strategy

RevOps can improve execution, visibility, and coordination. It can't compensate for an unclear market, weak positioning, an unsuitable product or an unrealistic growth strategy (so be careful about how you set your BHAG).

RevOps Isn't Always a Large Department

Some companies may merit a dedicated team. Others may start with a fractional RevOps consultant. You could even start with a cross-functional working group to build buy-in and decide on a right-size solution. Whichever way you get started, the solution should match your company’s size and complexity.

How Does B2B RevOps Differ from B2C Revenue Operations?

It's no secret that the B2B and B2C business worlds are dramatically different. Generating B2B revenue is more like organizing a group vacation. There are numerous decision-makers, a more complex itinerary and someone always needs approval.

On the other hand, generating B2C revenue is more like ordering takeout. You have quick decisions, strong preferences and little patience for a complicated checkout.

While the two vastly different types of business models share a common mission to sell things and make money, the best practices and process design needed to achieve operational efficiency are quite different.

Component

B2B RevOps

B2C RevOps

Sales Cycle

Usually weeks or months with multiple stakeholders

Usually minutes or days with only one decision-maker

Buyers

May include users, managers, finance teams, legal departments and executives

May be triggered by price, convenience, emotion, timing or a particularly persuasive product photo

Metrics

Account progression, stakeholder engagement, demos, proposals and approvals

Clicks, conversions, repeat purchases, cart abandonment and customer lifetime value

Customer
Experience

Account-based metrics and pipeline visibility

Emphasizes speed and frictionless transactions

Because of these differences, each kind of RevOps function will tackle the same kinds of problems uniquely. Neither team is better, they simply solve different revenue puzzles.

B2B revenue operations teams optimize complex relationships and longer buying cycles, and they win by harmonizing the orchestra. On the B2C side, they're optimizing scale, speed, and customer behavior, and they win by ensuring the audience never leaves before the encore.

The Difference Between Traditional Operations Teams and a RevOps Team

One other conception that's important to clarify briefly is around what differentiates commonplace operations teams many companies have long employed from a RevOps team. Admittedly, there's a lot of overlap.

Marketing Operations: Generally enriches the CRM and marketing automation platforms but doesn’t always build them, reports on more granular data and analytics, manages vendors and budgeting and often trains users on more specific functionality. Generally, marketing operations teams exclusively support their marketing team.

Sales Operations: Usually have more impact on the CRM specifically, implements and maintains lead assignment, enables forecasting, monitors other sales analytics and onboards new employees with training support. Sales operations typically exclusively supports the sales team.

Customer Success Operations: Helps customers or clients achieve their goals. They guide onboarding, provide advice and training, monitor customer health, gather feedback and support renewals or expansions. Their focus is building long-term customer value and reducing churn.

Business Operations: This is the backbone of the company that handles resource orchestration, overall budgets, quality control and other day-to-day business processes. Business operations typically supports the entire organization.

Revenue Operations: Specifically unifies client- or customer-facing teams into a unified revenue strategy, oversees the entire tech stack, builds go-to-market or GTM strategy and identifies and resolves bottlenecks.

How Did RevOps Adoption Become Important to B2B Companies?

While RevOps isn't just for B2B companies, there are a few reasons why those companies hire a B2B revenue operations consultant or FTE more quickly than B2Cs.

First, the sales cycle is usually more complex, often requiring weeks, months or sometimes years to complete. Multiple stakeholders are often involved, not only in the sales process, but post-close, too.

Relatedly, B2B companies are often aiming to build their referral business, not only is it the easiest channel to close, but because it's also the most loyal customer base over time. Capturing referrals is often easier said than done, but creating an exceptional customer journey is a natural precursor to winning the Word of Mouth Battle.

And, while it's not often written about in these terms, possibly the real mission of the RevOps team is to delight customers.

Sure, we say the goal of RevOps is to reduce revenue leakage, but the same friction points that cause companies to lose revenue in the first place are the same things that customers get hung up on, too. Think about it:

Friction Point

Internal Outcome

External Outcome

Sloppy handoffs between client-facing teams

Reduces pipeline velocity

Makes prospects and customers feel forgotten about

Bottlenecks that disrupt the sales cycle or onboarding process

Creates costly inefficiencies

Frustrates future and existing clients

Data inconsistencies and unreliability

Impedes communications and complicate product and service improvements

Makes customers feel like "one hand doesn't know what the other is doing"

Yeah, a good RevOps leader has a plan for all of that.

Another big reason for RevOps adoption is that B2B company market position often stalls, and business leadership has a hard time understanding why. They often hire a fractional RevOps consultant as a first step in understanding the root causes and build a strategy to overcome those obstacles.

Key Benefits of A B2B Revenue Operations Team

The benefits of a B2B RevOps strategy are clear:

  • Improved visibility into bottlenecks in the marketing, sales, and customer success pipelines

  • Faster response times and follow up with prospects and clients

  • Clear ownership and roles across the customer journey

  • A more unified and consistent customer experience

  • Greater employee engagement, both cross-departmentally and with existing tools

  • Greater forecast accuracy

All of these forces work together to empower a data-driven decision-making culture that generally leads to a healthier and more profitable company.

How B2B RevOps Actually Works: Evolving the Tech Stack into a Single Source of Truth

Picture this (again, it's probably already happening)... Your marketing ops team's tech stack includes Attentive for texting prospects. Then they implemented CallRail to track call performance by channel. There's also Zoom for webinars, Asana for project management and Clearbit for data enrichment. Oh, and they've even added Unbounce for landing pages.

That's just in the marketing department.

Sales operations has implemented their own tech stack that includes Outreach for prospect follow up, Calendly for booking meetings, Dropbox Sign for tracking signatures and Gong for note-taking and sales intelligence.

Talk about tool sprawl! Each team has a set of tools that "helps" it do its job, but they're all in data silos, recording small snippets of highly valuable marketing and sales processes.

While one tool like HubSpot can handle almost all of these things at least pretty well, that's not the point yet. The point is that each component is capturing a pinhole view of the full picture, and none of them are talking to each other.

Enter RevOps, who's tasked with developing a single operating model to understand and improve revenue performance. You see, as technology has evolved and become increasingly specialized, so too has a general complacency about mandating connectivity between each siloed piece of the tech stack.

They're all useful independently, but they're utterly useless as a whole if you lack a harmonized tech stack that yields actionable data that the entire revenue engine has access to.

So how do you fix this problem? Personally, I'd solve it with HubSpot because it does almost all of these things from a single platform. This isn't a HubSpot sales pitch, it's just a really good all-around tool.

You can take a look at how I nearly tripled revenue with HubSpot.

And it doesn't have to be HubSpot. It just can't be so, darn disparate. In order to truly have a single source of truth within your tech stack, you'll either need a single platform that acts as a Swiss Army knife or you'll need to build and maintain a lot more integrations.

I don't have a problem with integrations. I've built everything from flipping a switch with a thoughtful native integration, to using iPaaS solutions, like Zapier and Make.com, to writing custom integrations.

But the challenge with saying, "Oh, there's an integration for that," is that each addition adds complexity. And complexity is usually an efficiency killer. And efficiency killers almost always cause systemic revenue leaks.

Sometimes, there isn't a real choice. Some business processes absolutely have to have a dedicated tool that simply can’t be replaced. Electronic healthcare records (EHR) are a great example of this, due to regulations like HIPPA. I promise no sales team is using an EHR!

And that's exactly why virtually any RevOps professional worth their salt has quite a lot of experience with integrations.

If the goal of a B2B RevOps leader is to leverage efficiency to increase both revenue and customer satisfaction, then the architecture and data quality of the tech stack must be reliable. This is why most RevOps engagements start with a nice, thorough tools audit.

Deciding what to stop, start and continue is a great first step along the way to a mature RevOps function that maintains and illuminates the precious single source of truth.

Setting Your Up for Sustainable Growth: Signs of a Harmonized B2B Tech Stack

Since every business is unique, and sometimes you just have to work with what you've already got, here are some key differentiators to help benchmark your company in its current state.

You Have Nice, Clean Data

Looking under the hood, you don't have 100,000 companies in your database and 90,000 of them are duplicates. It's not too much of a stretch to say that duplicates are the #1 data hygiene nightmare. Every aspect of the business suffers when you have issues with inconsistent data, like:

  1. Duplicate records: Duplicates make it impossible to know which version is correct. And too often, they all are.

  2. Missing firmographics: Not knowing the annual revenue of a company you're selling too makes it quite difficult to know whether there's a fit or not.

  3. Missing demographics: Segmenting prospects and customers becomes complicated quickly when you lack a holistic picture of what's in your marketing automation and CRM platforms.

  4. Unclear definitions: When your people misunderstand how pipeline stages are defined, for example, forecasting cannot ever be accurate.

Clean data means that it's reliable and trustworthy. It means that when you need to gain an understanding of one particular aspect of your business, you know that data is there to guide you to the correct answer.

Your Data Doesn't Live in Silos

You might have 25 different apps under your roof. That's not absolutely a problem, however. It becomes a problem when your data is divided into disparate subdivisions because none of those apps "talk" to each other.

On the other hand, if you have an ecosystem of apps that have been intentionally set up to communicate, either with each other or within the context of a unified platform, you've struck gold.

You Have Common Definitions, and People Use Them Correctly

Pipeline stages are a wonderful example to illustrate the importance of shared definitions. Used incorrectly, handoffs may happen too quickly or too slowly, communication becomes clouded and forecasting is inherently inaccurate.

When everyone knows exactly what everything means because the definitions are crystal clear and straightforward, it's a leading indicator of business growth.

Your Pipeline Handoffs are Automated

It's not remotely uncommon for a contract to get signed and the check to get paid, only to have the customer experience fall off a cliff at that moment. Sadly, many businesses take a mind-boggling average of 14-21 days for the customer success teams to engage.

Automating that handoff is probably the next best step most businesses can take in improving customer retention. Think about it. Would YOU want to wait that long, or would you love to know that you'll be getting started before you know it?

If you've already taken that step, kudos, friend 🎉

Your People Have the Right Level of Access

This one can slip under the radar. The fact of the matter is that most people get overwhelmed when they have access to more than they need to do their jobs. And, even worse, some people will take that ball and run with it, whether intentionally or innocently.

Going back to the issue of CRM hygiene, many well-meaning sales reps have caused countless duplicates because they had the critical ability to upload data.

If your users have access to the tools they need, in a way that doesn't enable operational chaos, you're doing well!

Frequently Asked Questions about RevOps in the B2B Space

  1. What is B2B RevOps?

    B2B revenue operations, or RevOps, aligns revenue teams, like  marketing, sales, customer success and product, around one goal: generating predictable revenue. In addition to a healthier bottom line, the outcome of unifying teams around that goal should naturally be twofold: 1) a delightful customer experience,

    and 2) disappearing silos.

  2. Why does B2B RevOps matter?

    It reduces friction across the customer journey, improves forecasting and eliminates redundant work. Adopting a RevOps framework also helps teams make decisions using shared data rather than competing, inconsistent spreadsheets.

  3. How is B2B RevOps different from sales operations?

    Sales operations focuses entirely on helping the sales team perform better. RevOps takes a wider view, connecting sales with marketing, customer success, product and finance across the entire revenue lifecycle.

  4. What teams are involved in B2B RevOps?

    Typically marketing, sales, customer success, finance and product. RevOps is the diplomatic corps that rallies these teams around speaking the same operational language.

  5. What does a B2B RevOps tech stack include?
    Common tools include a CRM, marketing automation platform, sales engagement software, customer success system, billing tools, analytics platforms and integration software. The goal isn’t to collect apps like digital souvenirs, but to harmonize them in a way that yields meaningful, actionable data.

  6. How does RevOps improve the B2B customer journey?

    It creates smoother handoffs, consistent messaging, accurate customer records, and timely follow-up. This entire process is optimized from the first marketing touchpoint to onboarding, renewal and expansion.

  7. What metrics does B2B RevOps track?

    Common metrics include pipeline velocity, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), average contract value (ACV), sales cycle length, win rate, churn, retention and customer lifetime value (CLV).

  8. How does RevOps help with sales forecasting?

    RevOps standardizes opportunity stages, improves data quality, analyzes historical performance and identifies pipeline risks. In other words, it replaces “gut feeling” with the ability to make strategic decisions.

  9. What is a single source of truth in B2B RevOps?

    It is a shared, trusted view of revenue data. Everyone agrees on definitions, ownership and reporting—so marketing, sales, customer success, product and leadership are not each working from a different version of reality.

  10. How can a company start building a B2B RevOps function?

    Begin by mapping the customer lifecycle, identifying process gaps, defining core metrics, auditing the tech stack, assigning data ownership and fixing the most expensive sources of friction first. RevOps works best as a business strategy, not merely a new software subscription.

Conclusion

Whether your company is wanting to scale or trying to figure out why it can't, B2B RevOps is about building scalable revenue growth by optimizing the full customer lifecycle. This is accomplished by closely supporting the teams directly responsible for delivering a memorable and positive customer experience.

No matter whether you’re trying to course correct or start out on the right foot, a savvy fractional RevOps consultant can help. Reach out today to see how.

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Clare French