5 Common Revenue Operations Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is supposed to act as the connective tissue across your go-to-market teams, aligning sales, marketing, and customer success around shared data, tools, and goals. But let’s be honest: it often falls short. Not because the function is broken, but because the implementation is. In working with dozens of B2B SaaS companies, we see the same five mistakes crop up again and again.
Here's what they are and what you can do about them.
1. Siloed Systems (and Teams That Don’t Talk)
The problem: You’ve got marketing living in HubSpot, sales in Salesforce, CS in Gainsight, and each team running their own reports. No one agrees on which data is right. Everyone spends half of each meeting arguing about definitions instead of outcomes.
Fix it: Start with alignment on funnel definitions. You need clearly documented life cycle stages and deal stages, with entrance criteria, owners, and automation rules. These should be the same no matter who’s pulling the report. A Demand Council, a weekly meeting across RevOps, Marketing, and Sales, can keep this shared language alive and hold teams accountable to the same numbers.
2. Fuzzy Metrics and Mismatched Reporting
The problem: Your dashboards are full of pretty charts, but no one trusts them. Forecasts are way off, and no one can explain what changed between last quarter’s “commit” and today’s shortfall.
Fix it: Anchor your metrics in systems of record, not spreadsheets. Build a shared reporting architecture where key reports, like pipeline coverage, conversion rates, and MQL to opportunity flow, are automated and reviewed weekly. Keep metrics at the right altitude: high-level summaries for execs, tactical breakdowns for operators.
And stop measuring things you don’t use. Every metric in your dashboard should exist to inform a decision.
3. Over-Automation Without Strategy
The problem: There’s a workflow or integration for everything, but no one can explain why it exists. Instead of saving time, automation has created complexity. Leads go into a black hole. Opportunities bounce between reps.
Fix it: Revisit your tooling after you’ve nailed down your strategy and process. Too many RevOps teams fall into the trap of buying tools before defining workflows. Your tech stack should reflect your go-to-market playbook, not the other way around.
Start with a tooling audit: for each system, identify the business problem it’s solving. If it’s not solving one, shut it off or reconfigure it. Less tech, used well, beats a bloated stack every time.
4. No Clear Ownership of the Funnel
The problem: Marketing says sales isn’t working the leads. Sales says the leads are junk. CS doesn’t know when to engage because handoff rules are unclear.
Fix it: Ownership has to be explicit. Define who owns each stage of the customer journey, from anonymous visitor to closed-won to renewal. Document that ownership in your lifecycle framework. Then, revisit it quarterly as your strategy shifts.
One practical tip: track not just handoffs, but follow-through. Are BDRs actually working the leads they receive? Are CS teams engaging before the handoff, or only after onboarding? Your funnel health depends on more than just automation, it depends on humans doing the right things at the right time.
5. Treating Capacity Planning as a One-and-Done Exercise
The problem: Your board sets a growth target, you back into headcount needs, and that’s it. Six months later, you’re off track and surprised.
Fix it: Great RevOps teams treat capacity planning as a living process. Start with a bottoms-up model rooted in historical conversion rates and sales cycle lengths. Marry that to the top-down board target. Then identify the gap and assign named tactics to close it. That could mean increasing meeting volume, improving close rates, or launching a new outbound campaign.
Don’t stop there. Review assumptions monthly. If MQL-to-pipeline conversion needs to hit 40% but you're still at 20%, that’s a flag. Raise it early, before the forecast gets away from you.
TLDR
RevOps isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it function. It’s a discipline. And like any discipline, the wins come from doing the hard, unglamorous work: documenting definitions, aligning teams, revisiting plans, and owning the data.
These five mistakes are fixable. But only if you treat RevOps as a strategic function, not just the people who run reports or fix Salesforce bugs.
Want help building the connective tissue for your GTM teams? Let's talk.
