RevOps as the Connective Tissue: An Investor’s Guide to Assessing GTM Health
If you want to know whether a company can grow efficiently, you have to look beyond the sales forecast and marketing spend. The real story often lives in how the go-to-market (GTM) engine is designed and run.
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is the connective tissue that keeps the entire customer journey aligned from the first marketing touch through to customer expansion. When RevOps is strong, sales, marketing, and customer success are working toward shared targets, using the same definitions, and pulling from the same trusted data. When it is weak or missing, those functions drift apart, creating inefficiencies that compound over time.
For investors, understanding the state of a company’s RevOps function can reveal both risks and growth potential. Here’s how to assess it.
Start with the Framework
At Domestique, we think of RevOps in five workstreams. The order matters because each one builds on the previous.
Planning – The documented GTM strategy, including ICP (ideal customer profile), target segments, sales methodology, and capacity plan.
Process – The operational playbooks and workflows that bring the strategy to life day-to-day.
Tooling – The technology stack that supports those processes, set up to match the strategy (not the other way around).
Data – The reporting and metrics that come from the tech stack, built to inform decisions at the right altitude.
Enablement – The training, skills, and resources that help people execute effectively.
If one of these is missing or out of sequence, the GTM system will struggle. For example, buying an expensive CRM (tooling) before defining the sales process almost guarantees wasted spend and poor adoption.
What Strong RevOps Looks Like
From an investor’s standpoint, a company with strong RevOps will demonstrate:
Aligned definitions across the funnel. “Marketing Qualified Lead” means the same thing to marketing, sales, and finance. Opportunity stages have documented entry and exit criteria.
Consistent data you can trust. Board reports match the numbers in team dashboards. No one is pulling their own version of the pipeline from different systems.
Proactive capacity planning. Targets are set with both top-down goals and bottom-up historical performance in mind, and there is a process for tracking assumptions over time.
Closed-loop insight into performance. Leadership knows not only what is working, but why. They can see which channels, territories, or customer segments are driving results.
Tight connection between go-to-market teams. Marketing knows what sales needs. Sales knows how customer success is performing. Everyone has a stake in retention and expansion.
When these elements are in place, the GTM machine is more predictable and more adaptable, both of which investors value highly.
Where Weak RevOps Shows Up
On the flip side, there are red flags that suggest RevOps maturity is low:
Stage definition drift. Different teams use the same terms but mean different things, leading to inflated or misleading numbers.
Reporting headaches. Leadership meetings start with debates about data accuracy instead of discussions about action.
Reactive planning. Growth targets are set without considering actual conversion rates, sales cycle length, or resource capacity.
Isolated functions. Marketing generates leads that sales ignores. Customer success hears about problems too late to fix them.
Overbuilt tech stack. Multiple tools do the same job, none are fully integrated, and usage is inconsistent.
These issues do not just create inefficiencies. They make it hard for an investor to assess the true health of the GTM engine.
Questions Investors Should Ask
If you want to quickly gauge the maturity of a portfolio company’s RevOps, here are some direct questions to ask:
How do you define each stage of your funnel, and where are those definitions documented?
Can I see the same set of metrics in your board report and your team dashboards?
When was the last time you reviewed your ICP, and who was involved in that process?
How do you track the assumptions in your annual capacity plan over the course of the year?
What is your process for aligning marketing, sales, and customer success on shared goals?
The goal is not to catch teams off guard. It is to see whether they have the clarity and alignment that signal scalable growth.
Why This Matters for Future Performance
RevOps maturity is one of the clearest indicators of whether a GTM strategy can scale without constant heroics. A company can hit its number in a given quarter through brute force by over-allocating marketing spend, pushing last-minute deals, or relying on a few top performers. That is not sustainable.
A healthy RevOps function ensures the GTM machine can deliver consistent results quarter after quarter. It also creates a feedback loop that allows the company to adapt quickly to market changes. When a downturn hits, or when a new product launches, teams with strong RevOps can pivot without losing alignment or visibility.
For investors, that means less risk, better forecasting accuracy, and a clearer path to sustainable growth.
The Takeaway
If you are evaluating a current or potential investment, do not stop at revenue growth charts or a polished sales pitch. Look for the connective tissue. Assess whether planning, process, tooling, data, and enablement are in place and working in sequence.
RevOps might not be as visible as a product launch or a big customer win, but it is the underlying system that keeps those wins coming. For investors focused on long-term value, it is one of the most important things to get right.
