RevOps Growth Approaches

If I were designing a PE platform for 2025, I wouldn’t start with M&A capacity, I’d start with the stack. Legacy firms were built around sourcing networks, financial engineering, and the ability to raise and deploy capital. But in today’s environment, where entry multiples are elevated, timelines are compressing, and cost of capital is no longer cheap, the firms that outperform will be those who can drive operational leverage from day one. That means your edge isn’t in the deal, it’s in what you do after the deal closes. The next generation of PE winners will operate more like high-performance growth platforms than financial vehicles. 1) Centralized CRM & Lead Management – shared systems across portfolio companies to manage pipeline, track performance, and reduce leak. 2) Integrated Media Buying – portfolio-wide scale in paid search, social, and CTV to drop CAC by 30–50%. 3) Data Infrastructure – a warehouse that tracks LTV, channel-level ROI, pricing impact, and sales velocity. 4) RevOps & CRO Engines – aligning sales, marketing, and service while optimizing every conversion path across the funnel. 5) Shared Talent Pool – not advisors, but embedded operators: growth marketers, analysts, creative teams. On top of that, embed a true growth engine. Conversion rate optimization, SEO and SEM expertise, pricing strategy, and performance creative. Deploy playbooks that are tested, repeatable, and customized by vertical. Add a RevOps layer to align marketing, sales, and service across the portfolio. Now you’ve got a platform that doesn’t just improve EBITDA, it accelerates it. This isn’t a support function. It’s a compounding capability. Centralized marketing and RevOps can reduce CAC, increase close rates, and deliver revenue growth that simply isn’t possible when each portfolio company operates in isolation. It also de-risks the investment. Better measurement, faster feedback loops, and tighter execution mean fewer surprises and more consistent outcomes. The future of PE isn’t about who has the most capital, it’s about who has the most capability. The firms that win the next decade won’t just own companies. They’ll operate platforms that scale them. Who’s already building this kind of stack? BayPine, Thoma Bravo, TSG, and a handful of others? This playbook is still wide open.

RevOps is changing. For years we focused on efficiency, stability, clean data, and protecting the systems that keep GTM running. Those things still matter, but the pace and complexity of today's revenue teams demand something different. There is this growing tension between the speed required in GTM, amplified by AI and the explosion of new point solutions, and the essence of RevOps which has historically been about scale, predictability, and precision. My worry is that RevOps is going to get left behind if we do not evolve. That means acknowledging something uncomfortable: To move fast, we will create tech debt. We will break things. We will trade perfect for good enough for now. My take is that the rise of GTM engineers is evidence of this. It is not a separate trend. It is a symptom of RevOps being pulled so deeply into back-office work, data hygiene, and systems administration that we are missing the opportunity to focus on growth. So a new role evolved that does. It is very easy for RevOps teams to fall into the trap of operating like an internal help desk instead of a growth engine. That should be a wake-up call for all of us. The more I think about it, the more I believe RevOps can be a massive accelerator when we are deeply aligned with the teams we support. But it takes vulnerability, trust, and a willingness to evolve how we work together. Heading into next year, that is our focus: Less transactional ticketing, more collaboration. Less scale projects, more co-building on quick MVPs. Less pressure to get everything right, more space to experiment and learn. Less RevOps-driven project work in a vacuum, more time with stakeholders ideating solutions that unlock efficiency and growth in a big way. Anyone else feeling this tension? And if so, when do we stop fighting it and start leaning into it? Curious how others are navigating the balance.

Three dashboards. Three different answers. One company. We were in a board prep meeting for a $12M ARR SaaS business. Marketing said pipeline was up 42%. Sales said deals were “strong.” Finance said cash was tighter than expected. All technically true. And completely disconnected. The CEO looked at me and said, “Why does it feel like we’re growing… but not winning?” That’s when we pulled the thread. Marketing was optimizing for MQL volume. Sales was comped on closed-won revenue. CS incentivized on renewals, not expansion. Finance was modeling burn on bookings, not cash collected. Everyone was hitting their number. The company wasn’t. That’s not a sales problem. That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a RevOps problem. And RevOps isn’t CRM hygiene or a better dashboard. It’s economic alignment. We rebuilt the system in three moves: ① Defined a single source of truth for pipeline stages tied to revenue recognition rather than lead status. ② Shifted marketing compensation to pipeline quality (stage progression + win rate), not just top-of-funnel. ③ Modeled CAC payback and expansion revenue by cohort so every growth experiment tied back to enterprise value. Nothing flashy. No new headcount. No AI wizardry. Just alignment. Six months later: Win rate improved 11%. Sales cycle shortened by 18 days. NRR climbed from 101% to 123%. Burn multiple dropped below 1.2. Same team. Same product. Different system. Here’s the thing most founders miss: Growth is not a volume game. It’s a coordination game. If Marketing, Sales, CS, and Finance are optimizing different outcomes, you don’t have a growth engine. You have four very busy teams. The best RevOps leaders I know don’t obsess over dashboards. They obsess over incentives. Because incentives drive behavior. Behavior drives metrics. Metrics drive valuation. If your board meeting feels confusing, it’s probably not because your growth is unclear. It’s because your economics are. End stop.

we were flying blind at $10M ARR until one hire changed everything. marketing claimed wins. sales blamed leads. customer success worked in isolation. everyone had opinions. no one had facts. then we, this is at my last company, Terminus (by DemandScience), hired Mallory Lee as our first revops leader. within 30 days, she built the GTM dashboard that finally showed us reality: - 40% of our "qualified" leads never matched our ICP - our best performing rep was actually our worst (just had better territory) - marketing's top campaign generated zero pipeline instead it was the FlipMyFunnel community that made all the difference brutal truths. but exactly what we needed. suddenly, departments stopped pointing fingers and started sharing data. marketing aligned campaigns to actual revenue impact. sales focused on the right accounts. customer success predicted churn before it happened. that dashboard didn't just organize data — it aligned our entire company around one source of truth. the result? we went from $10M to $25M to getting acquired by a PE in record time. most founders think revops is overhead until you're at $50M+. wrong. it's the difference between guessing and knowing. between departments fighting and teams winning. between burning cash on assumptions and investing in what actually works. if you're still running GTM meetings where everyone shares different numbers... you don't need more salespeople. you need your mallory lee. love, sangram p.s. here's a GTM dashboard template we have used over a 1000 times in last 5 years to align GTM teams. steal it and make it your own.

If you lead go-to-market or are building RevOps from scratch, this is your playbook for how to operate ops (pun intended 😉) in the AI age. In this episode, Navin Persaud (VP of Revenue Operations at 1Password) breaks down what’s changing in RevOps, what AI is disrupting first, and how to combine machine-scale insights with human judgment. My top takeaways: 1️⃣  RevOps is the operating system behind every GTM motion. If you don’t hire RevOps early, you’ll accumulate technical and strategic debt that slows growth. The best companies treat RevOps like the GTM conductor—defining systems, rules, and workflows that keep sales, CS, and marketing aligned. 2️⃣  The best operators move between “in the business” and “on the business.” Elite RevOps leaders know when to dive into CRM workflows and when to zoom out and steer strategy. If you’re doing only one, you’re either missing context or failing to drive real impact. 3️⃣  Product-market fit is a trigger to hire RevOps. Startups that delay until post-PMF waste quarters cleaning up systems instead of compounding growth. Start with a doer, layer in fractional help, and evolve toward a strategic partner. 4️⃣  Forecasting is no longer a CRM-only exercise. AI can now analyze sales calls, MEDDIC fields, and deal behavior to surface accurate forecasts and coaching insights. That’s a major unlock for predictability and performance. 5️⃣  Reporting is ripe for reinvention. Static dashboards are a bottleneck. With the right data foundation, AI agents can summarize trends and respond to natural language queries—making insights self-serve and instant. 6️⃣  Curiosity is the top trait for any RevOps hire. The best operators don’t wait for problems—they hunt them down. They ask tough questions, debug ambiguity, and proactively improve the system. Without curiosity, they’ll stall your scale. 7️⃣  AI-native platforms > AI add-ons. Vendors that bolt AI onto legacy tools won’t win. e.g. Momentum.io stood out by being AI-first, powering workflows like deal insights, pipeline summaries, and trend detection. Future-fit RevOps stacks will be built on native AI architecture, not retrofitted dashboards. 8️⃣  Perfect systems are the enemy of pace. Growth companies need systems that move fast and adapt. Over-optimizing for “clean” or “complete” data slows teams down. As Navin put it: “Perfection is the enemy of pace.” 9️⃣  If your ops team is still bottlenecked on dashboards, you’re behind. Modern RevOps teams don’t wait for requests—they surface insights in real time. If AI can’t answer your CRO’s questions instantly, your data foundation needs work. More in the full episode, available on the GTMnow website or wherever you get your podcasts by searching "The GTM Podcast" 🎧

I‘ve spent many years in the Channel Redesigned Channel Programs for IBM, Lucent & Avaya. Moved partners from transaction to profit by selling ‘solutions.’Today, with the same goal, we’re building ‘productized service portfolios.’   Since 2005, we‘ve expanded our client list: Amelia, CloudCoCo Plc, Deutsche Telekom, Ingram Micro, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions, NTT, O2 (Telefónica UK), Oracle, Xerox...   In 2024, we’re expanding our programs: EMEA Copilot Readiness, WW Onboarding Acceleration, Sales Journey Assessments (Secret Shopping), Portfolio Management/Packaged Offer Development, Telco Maximize GTM Workshops, CloudAscent Acceleration...   While looking at 2024, I started to think..   What to do - if I was a Channel Director today?   1. Customer Insight Know to whom, what, where & why my partners are selling. Use these insights to monitor maturity & therefore investments. Add critical updates to Partner Program & cleanup DBs for unmanaged partners. Drive Customer Insight Milestone Attainment for coop access 2. Skilling & Resourcing Most IT companies have skill & resource gaps, particularly at presales & deployment. Add value with GTM Business & technical training. Improve knowledge of & success in Marketplaces. Where it makes sense, make #P2P plays 3. White Space Want partners to sell more? Show them the business case. Analyse their portfolios-capabilities & ambitions. Identify opportunities for growth: upsell, packetized services, bundles, co-sell, skilling, IP… manage improvements through a Development Plan 4. Walk Don’t Talk Customer Experience. Jay McBain said it best while at Forrester: ‘There‘s a clear correlation between superior customer experience & revenue growth.‘ Understand what it‘s like to buy hardware, software & services from partners & help them improve where they can offer better CX. What experience do we want to offer? Is it helping to close - not abandon - the buying process? What is the Benchmark & the Improvement Plan for corrections 5. GTM Advisory Create a Business Academy for learning through best practice key product-sales & marketing motions for growth   6. Create Offer Development Guidance for Compliancy Regulations Many companies will face new compliancy regulations: CSF, CIP, or for any company selling into the EU – NIS2. These are continuous multifaceted compliancy regulations with expensive risk for noncompliance. Ensuring the People-Process-Legal & Technical compliancy for customers is a big value add for CEOs if done correctly – & a significant potential loss of reputation, revenue & maybe even the customer themselves if done incorrectly. I’d put in the planning time to do this right & provide the guidance.   7.  Leads Now that we know where we’re targeting, what we’re selling & are sure we can close, find clever ways to fill the pipeline – eg. using propensity data against customer lists with tools such as Microsoft CloudAscent & others What would You do if You were a Channel Director today? #channel

As SaaS companies scale, operational complexity multiplies. The key question then: Is your marketing and sales machinery keeping pace? I've been watching the RevOps space evolve from marketing curiosity to business necessity. What is RevOps in a nutshell? • Centralised systems like CRM & revenue intelligence tools eliminating data silo. • Shared KPIs between marketing, sales & customer success. • A focus on end-to-end visibility across the full customer journey • Process automation and standardisation across departments • Proactive identification of growth opportunities & streamlined analytics to spot revenue leaks early • Tech stack alignment and integration The operational gains are material. What's interesting is how RevOps transforms existing resources. Companies with mature RevOps functions are 2.3x more likely to exceed profit goals. BCG research shows RevOps adopters achieve 36% more revenue growth. LinkedIn has roughly 9 million active marketers but only 9,000 RevOps specialists. Still nascent; investing early in this function can prove a competitive advantage in newly forming categories. Companies report 30% reductions in go-to-market expenses and 10-20% increases in sales productivity through automated workflows. New tech fragmentation amplifies the need for strategic alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success. But it also seems to be serving as the solution to the complexity it's creating. Gartner predicts 75% of high-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model by 2025. Then again some of their predictions are on the ambitious side - many businesses lagging behind due to an overwhelm of challenges on multiple fronts. A16z's data suggests that as organisations mature, Account Executive to RevOps ratios should scale from 5:1 to 10:1. This reflects the increasing importance of operational efficiency as complexity grows. Deloitte Digital found orgs leveraging RevOps are 1.9x less likely to struggle with pipeline/forecast challenges. Early adopters of RevOps are clearly hot on new tech - Deloitte notes that RevOps-driven companies are 2x more likely to deploy generative AI for personalised customer interactions and predictive analytics. For SaaS businesses with ambitious targets, RevOps is becoming essential for scaling. Think of it as a multiplier of all the other activity in your GTM engine. If you're struggling with pipeline visibility, attribution challenges, or operational friction between your customer-facing teams, perhaps it's time to look at RevOps.

I led RevOps at Rapid7 on its path to $1B ARR. It was the hardest thing I've ever done and I made A LOT of mistakes. Here's what I'd do differently: 1. Focus on product mix economics earlier. I'd put more emphasis on profitability metrics from day one. At $1B ARR, product mix dramatically impacts margins. I'd design compensation structures earlier to incentivize high-margin product sales and expansions where it made sense. Different products had different margin profiles – this should have been reflected more explicitly in our GTM strategy from the start. 2. Streamline the tech stack. We had too many point solutions. Beyond just cost, this fragmentation made it harder to get a unified view of customer health and product adoption patterns. I'd consolidate earlier around core platforms that drive real value and adoption. 3. Invest more in cross-functional culture. When you're operating across multiple product lines with different margins and GTM motions, you need strong cultural alignment to prevent silos. Culture keeps teams collaborative when competing priorities emerge. Fortunately (and mostly due to the phenomenal folks I worked with), we also got a lot of things right: 1. We built a strong data foundation first. Our success started with unifying data across marketing, sales, and CS. This wasn't just about reporting – it enabled us to forecast accurately, map customer journeys, and understand revenue patterns across different product lines and segments. 2. We invested heavily in forecasting excellence. As a public company, forecast accuracy was oxygen. Every 1% improvement in forecast accuracy translated to millions in optimized resource allocation. When leadership could trust our numbers within 2-3%, they could confidently deploy capital to fuel growth – whether that meant expanding sales capacity in high-performing regions or investing in customer success for products with the best expansion metrics. 3. We prioritized process over tools. We systemized key processes (lead routing, territory planning, forecasting) before choosing tools. When you're operating at scale, bad processes become exponentially costly. Good ones become competitive advantages. 4. We alligned resources across GTM. Resource planning across marketing, sales, and CS created operational clarity. But more importantly, it helped us maintain healthy ratios between hunters, farmers, and support teams as different products scaled at different rates. My biggest learning: Revenue operations at $1B is an exercise in managing complexity and success comes from building systems flexible enough to support different GTM motions while maintaining a consistent customer experience. Most importantly, none of this works without great teams—from the leadership team making strategic decisions to the RevOps professionals executing day-to-day—all working in harmony.

In 2025, the RevTech noise is deafening. Everyone’s pushing new tools and AI promises. But the real question for MOps pros isn’t what’s new—it’s what’s working? A few trends we’re watching closely: Integration is now table stakes. It’s not “can it connect?” anymore—it’s how seamlessly. If your tools need spreadsheets to bridge the gaps, that’s a liability, not a solution. AI is only as smart as your systems. Early wins are coming from AI-powered enrichment, deduplication, and lead routing—but they only work when your data is clean and structured. No amount of AI fixes a broken foundation. Ownership is shifting back to MOps. More teams are pulling RevTech admin responsibilities out of IT and sales ops and returning them to where they belong—inside the go-to-market motion. Metrics are finally evolving. Pipeline impact has replaced MQLs. Teams are tracking time-to-pipeline, stack ROI, and attribution confidence. If your stack can’t support these, it might be time to rethink the setup. These shifts aren’t about chasing trends. They’re about tightening alignment and building for scale. Let’s talk about it. Join the conversation inside the Marketing Ops Community. #RevOps #MarketingOps #Martech #GTM #RevenueTech #MOPro #TechStackStrategy

Your RevOps team is wasted on pulling last quarter's numbers. That's like hiring a data scientist to make PowerPoints. You're treating revenue operations like IT support instead of strategic intelligence. Your RevOps team should be your early warning system. They should spot conversion decay before it hits your forecast. They should identify process breakdown before deals start slipping. I worked with a company where RevOps noticed discovery-to-demo conversion dropped 15% over the last three months. Most execs would miss this until the quarter ends badly. We traced it back to two AEs that were new who were just demoing too early. Fixed it in 2 weeks. Saved the quarter. Here's what your RevOps should really be doing: ✅Conversion audits ✅Process adherence tracking ✅Leading indicator analysis ✅Behavioral pattern recognition Stop asking them what happened last quarter. Start asking what's going to happen next quarter. Most companies use RevOps as historians. Winners use them as fortune tellers. - Want to see the other 4 revenue killers that CROs make in 2025? Go here: https://lnkd.in/gcYBwVTA