What Is RevOps?
Revenue operations is the function that unifies sales, marketing, and customer success under one operational framework. This means instead of each team working in isolation with separate tools and metrics, RevOps creates alignment around shared goals and a single source of truth.
RevOps owns the systems, data, and processes that drive predictable revenue. Your RevOps team makes sure data flows between systems, eliminates bottlenecks in the buyer journey, and gives leadership clear visibility into what's working.
The scope covers tech stack management, data governance, process design, and performance reporting. Think of RevOps as the connective tissue between your go-to-market teams.
Core responsibilities:
Tech stack selection:
Choose and integrate the tools your teams use daily
Data quality:
Keep contact and company records accurate and complete
Process design:
Build workflows that move deals forward faster
Revenue reporting:
Give leadership one version of the truth on pipeline and forecasts
Lead routing:
Get prospects to the right rep at the right time
Why RevOps Challenges Hurt Pipeline and Revenue
Unresolved RevOps problems compound over time. Bad data leads to wasted outreach. Misaligned teams lose deals. Disconnected tools slow everything down.
What starts as a minor inefficiency becomes a structural problem that caps growth. Marketing can't see which campaigns drive closed deals. Sales doesn't know which accounts customer success flagged as expansion opportunities. Leadership gets three different pipeline numbers from three different teams and trusts none of them.
Your reps spend more time on manual work than selling. They toggle between systems, clean up duplicate records, and chase down missing information instead of talking to buyers.
The cost shows up in missed quota, longer sales cycles, and revenue that should have closed but didn't. You can't scale if your operations are broken.
7 Common RevOps Challenges and How to Solve Them
These challenges appear across nearly every B2B organization scaling past the startup phase. Each one creates friction that slows deals and wastes time.
1. Data Silos Between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success
Each team stores data in different systems with different definitions. Marketing tracks qualified leads in one tool, sales logs activity in the CRM, and customer success uses its own platform. No one shares the same view of the customer.
A prospect fills out a form and marketing scores them as qualified, but sales never sees the engagement history. Customer success closes an upsell, but marketing doesn't know to exclude that account from acquisition campaigns. These data silos prevent information from flowing across teams.
How to solve it:
Establish your CRM as the master record for all customer data. Every other system should feed into and pull from this central hub. When someone updates a record in one place, it updates everywhere.
Integrate tools bidirectionally so data flows between systems automatically. Marketing automation should push lead data into the CRM. The CRM should send closed deal information back to marketing for attribution reporting. Customer success activity should sync to the CRM so sales sees renewal risk.
Define shared data standards across teams. Agree on field definitions, naming conventions, and required fields. If marketing calls something a qualified lead, sales and customer success need to use the same definition.
2. Poor Data Quality and Hygiene
Your reps work with outdated contacts, duplicate records, and missing fields. Bad data wastes time and tanks deliverability.
Marketing campaigns hit dead ends because half the email addresses bounce. Sales chases prospects who left the company months ago. Data decays the moment you capture it. People change jobs, companies get acquired, phone numbers go stale.
How to solve it:
Implement automated data enrichment to fill gaps and refresh stale records. Instead of relying on reps to manually update fields, use tools that append missing information and verify accuracy in real time.
Set up data deduplication rules and merge logic in your CRM. Define what makes two records duplicates and automate the merge process. Assign one team member to audit and clean duplicates weekly.
Use a B2B data provider like ZoomInfo to verify and append contact and company data continuously. Automated enrichment keeps records current without manual effort. You get accurate emails, direct dials, job titles, and firmographic details that help reps prioritize and personalize outreach.
Symptom | Root Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
High email bounce rates | Outdated contact data | Automated verification and enrichment |
Duplicate records | No merge rules | CRM deduplication logic |
Missing fields | Manual data entry | Enrichment at point of capture |
Reps waste time researching | Incomplete records | Append firmographic and technographic data |
3. Tech Stack Sprawl and Complexity
Your GTM tech stack includes dozens of tools. Many overlap in functionality. Few integrate well. RevOps spends more time maintaining the stack than optimizing it.
Each team adds tools to solve immediate problems without thinking about the bigger picture. Sales wants a dialer. Marketing needs an ABM platform. Customer success buys a health score tool. Before long, you're paying for 30 subscriptions and no one knows what half of them do.
How to solve it:
Audit your current tools and identify redundancies. List every platform your GTM teams use, what it does, who owns it, and whether it integrates with your CRM. Look for overlap where two tools solve the same problem.
Consolidate where possible. If three tools handle email sequencing, pick one and sunset the others. Look for platforms that combine multiple capabilities so you reduce the number of logins and integrations to manage.
Prioritize tools with native integrations to your CRM and engagement platforms. Every additional integration point is a potential failure point. Choose vendors that connect directly to Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, or Salesloft without requiring middleware.
Signs you need to consolidate:
Reps toggle between five or more tabs to complete basic tasks
Data doesn't sync between systems or syncs with a delay
No one knows what tools exist or who owns them
You're paying for overlapping functionality across multiple vendors
4. Misalignment Across GTM Teams
Sales blames marketing for bad leads. Marketing says sales doesn't follow up fast enough. Customer success gets handed accounts with no context about what was promised during the sale.
Everyone optimizes for their own metrics instead of revenue. This sales and marketing misalignment kills deals. A hot lead comes in, sits in a queue for two days, and goes cold. An AE closes a deal but doesn't tell customer success about custom terms. Marketing runs campaigns to accounts already in active sales cycles.
How to solve it:
Define shared KPIs that tie back to revenue. Instead of measuring marketing on qualified leads and sales on calls made, track pipeline generated, win rate, and expansion revenue. When everyone's bonus depends on the same outcomes, behavior changes.
Create service level agreements between teams that specify lead response time, qualification criteria, and handoff requirements. Marketing commits to delivering leads that meet agreed-upon criteria. Sales commits to following up within a set timeframe. Customer success commits to logging expansion opportunities in the CRM.
Run regular cross-functional pipeline reviews to surface issues early. Bring sales, marketing, and customer success into the same room weekly to walk through the pipeline. Identify where deals are stalling and fix the root cause together.
5. Limited Visibility into Pipeline and Performance
Leadership asks for a pipeline report and gets three different numbers from three different teams. No one trusts the data. Sales forecasting becomes guesswork because the underlying information keeps changing.
Sales pulls numbers from the CRM. Marketing pulls numbers from their automation platform. Finance has a spreadsheet. Each system defines pipeline differently, counts stages differently, and updates at different times.
How to solve it:
Build a unified reporting layer that pulls from your CRM as the system of record. All pipeline reporting should come from one place. If marketing wants to measure campaign influence, they pull CRM data, not marketing automation data.
Standardize stage definitions and exit criteria across the funnel. Define exactly what it means for a lead to move from qualified to opportunity, from opportunity to closed won. Document the required actions and data points for each transition.
Use revenue intelligence tools to capture activity data automatically rather than relying on rep input. Tools like Gong or Chorus record calls and log activity without reps having to remember. This gives you complete visibility into what's actually happening in deals.
What to standardize:
Stage names and definitions across the entire funnel
Exit criteria for moving between stages
Required fields at each stage
Forecast categories and commit thresholds
Win/loss reasons and competitive intel capture
6. Inefficient Lead Routing and Handoffs
Leads sit in queues for hours or days. High-intent prospects get routed to the wrong rep based on outdated territory rules. Handoffs between SDR and AE or AE and customer success lack context, so the receiving team starts from scratch.
Speed matters. Responding first puts you ahead of competitors still waiting in queue. But if your routing logic is manual or based on incomplete data, you lose that advantage.
How to solve it:
Automate lead routing based on territory, account tier, or intent signals. Set up rules in your CRM that assign leads instantly based on geography, company size, industry, or engagement level. No human should touch a lead before it reaches the right rep.
Enrich leads at the point of capture so routing rules have complete data to work with. If a form only asks for email and company name, append firmographic details immediately so you can route based on revenue, employee count, or technology stack.
Document handoff requirements between teams. Specify what information must transfer, when it transfers, and how. An SDR-to-AE handoff should include discovery notes, pain points discussed, and next steps agreed upon. An AE-to-CS handoff should include contract terms, success criteria, and any custom commitments.
7. Inaccurate Forecasting and Attribution
Your forecasts miss the mark quarter after quarter. Marketing can't prove ROI because attribution is either too simple or too complex to act on. Sales doesn't trust the numbers because they're based on gut feel instead of data.
Single-touch attribution gives all credit to the first or last touch, ignoring everything in between. Multi-touch attribution spreads credit across dozens of interactions, making it impossible to know what actually moved the deal.
How to solve it:
Capture engagement data automatically to reduce reliance on manual logging. When reps have to remember to log every call and email, data gets missed. Automated activity capture fills in the gaps and gives you a complete picture of buyer engagement.
Use multi-touch attribution models that reflect the actual buyer journey. Weight touchpoints based on their position in the funnel and their correlation with closed deals. Give more credit to actions that happen near decision points.
Tie forecasting to leading indicators like engagement signals, deal velocity, and stage conversion rates, not just rep judgment. If a deal has stalled for three weeks with no activity, it's at risk regardless of what the rep says. If engagement is accelerating and multiple stakeholders are involved, confidence should be higher.
How to Build a RevOps Function That Scales
Standing up or maturing a RevOps team requires a clear framework. Start with the foundation and build up, rather than trying to fix everything at once.
Start with data. Clean, connected data is the foundation of everything RevOps does. Invest in enrichment and integration before adding more tools. Poor CRM hygiene means every process built on top of that data will be compromised.
Define processes before automating. Document workflows first. Automation amplifies whatever exists, good or bad. If your lead routing process is broken, automating it just breaks things faster.
Measure what matters. Focus on metrics that tie to revenue outcomes, not activity volume. Track pipeline velocity, conversion rates, and forecast accuracy instead of calls made or emails sent.
Choose platforms over point solutions. Consolidation reduces maintenance burden and improves data consistency. One platform that handles data, engagement, and intelligence beats three separate tools that don't talk to each other.
RevOps maturity indicators:
Single source of truth:
All customer data lives in and flows through your CRM
Documented SLAs:
Clear agreements between teams on response times and handoff criteria
Automated routing:
Leads reach the right rep instantly based on enriched data
Unified reporting:
One dashboard for pipeline, forecast, and performance metrics
Regular reviews:
Weekly cross-functional meetings to inspect deals and fix blockers
ZoomInfo helps RevOps leaders solve data and alignment challenges by providing accurate contact and company intelligence that feeds directly into your CRM and engagement tools. GTM Workspace automates enrichment, surfaces buying signals, and guides seller actions in real time. Talk to our team to learn how ZoomInfo can strengthen the performance of your GTM efforts
Frequently Asked Questions About RevOps Challenges
What is the most common RevOps challenge in B2B companies?
Data quality and fragmentation consistently rank as the top challenge. When teams work from incomplete or inconsistent data, every downstream process suffers, from lead routing to forecasting to attribution.
How should you measure whether your RevOps function is successful?
Track metrics tied to revenue outcomes: pipeline velocity, forecast accuracy, lead-to-close conversion rate, and time spent selling versus administrative work. Activity metrics like calls made or emails sent don't correlate with revenue.
What technical skills do RevOps professionals need?
RevOps professionals need CRM administration, data analysis, process design, and cross-functional communication skills. The best RevOps people understand both the technology and the business outcomes those tools should drive.
How is RevOps different from sales operations?
Sales ops focuses on the sales team specifically, handling territory planning, quota setting, and sales tool administration. RevOps takes a broader view, aligning sales, marketing, and customer success under one operational framework with shared data and processes.