Definition
Also written: RevOps
Revenue operations is the function that aligns marketing, sales and customer success around one set of definitions, one data model and one measurement system. Its work is mostly at the seams — handoffs, routing rules, stage definitions, field hygiene and reporting that all three teams accept.
The problem it addresses is structural rather than a skills gap: each team optimises its own metric, and the gaps between them belong to nobody.
Most of the recoverable value sits in those gaps — leads that arrive and are not worked, stages that mean different things to different people, outcomes never written back to their source.
The usual error
Where this goes wrong in practice
Buying tooling before agreeing definitions. Implementing a platform on top of three incompatible definitions of "qualified" encodes the disagreement.
Related terms
Lead scoring
Lead scoring assigns a numeric value to a lead based on fit attributes (industry, size, role) and behaviour (pages viewed, emails opened, forms submitted), to prioritise follow-up. Its accuracy depends entirely on whether the model was built from outcomes rather than assumptions.
DefinitionSpeed to lead
Speed to lead is the elapsed time between an inbound enquiry arriving and a human making genuine contact. It is one of the few operational metrics where the direction of the effect is not seriously disputed — contact rates fall sharply as the interval grows.
DefinitionLead routing
Lead routing is the logic that decides which person or team receives an inbound lead, based on territory, product, company size, source or availability. It runs automatically in most CRMs, and the rules tend to outlive the organisational structure that justified them.
DefinitionPipeline velocity
Pipeline velocity estimates how quickly revenue moves through a sales process, combining the number of qualified opportunities, average deal value, win rate and average cycle length into a single rate-of-revenue figure.
Definition