Revenue operations is sales ops and marketing ops, forced to share a spreadsheet.

Like anything that suddenly has a name, the first question from a CEO is: "Right, so what is it, and how do we put it in place assuming it works like it says on the box?" Good question. Let's break it down.

Know where you are

The first step is an honest look at your operations funnel between marketing and sales. Are they working as a consolidated team, actively sharing data and insights? Or are they blaming each other for the numbers on the wall?

Does this sound familiar:

1. Marketing says lead volumes are up
2. Sales says the lead quality is poor
3. Marketing asks why they are poor
4. Sales says something along the lines of "they are not reachable, they are the wrong type of lead, they are just browsing"
5. Marketing says they are targeting the correct user type and questions the sales process
6. Sales pushes back, says the process is fine, says the problem is who marketing is targeting
7. The CEO or CFO asks for data to find the areas that need the most attention
8. Sales and marketing stare at each other wondering what data the execs mean

And so it goes. The issue here should be apparent, but if it's not, let me break it down:

• No clear ICP has been set and agreed between both teams. If it had, "wrong type of lead" would be low on the list of complaints.
• There are no defined lead quality levels. No lead scoring. If there were, sales would not be allowed to say "quality is poor" without naming which signal failed.
• There is no ongoing, structured communication between the two teams. The weekly stand-up does not count if no one brings numbers.
• There is probably no documented sales process and no CRM discipline to analyse the funnel.
• And the winner. No one knows how to begin investigating the issue, because there is no formal data and insights process.

Sounds familiar?

Know where you want to be

Now you have a clear picture (I hope) of the issues plaguing your revenue function. The next step is being specific about where you want to be. What do you want to see? What does a "win" look like for you?

At this point you are probably thinking: "That is a stupid bloody question, we want better processes for more sales." My response is: "Duh, Sherlock. Everyone wants that. Tell me what you need to make it real. Be specific."

Not every organisation is doing this work to grow sales, either. Some want to optimise an already high-performing funnel. Some want to surface insights into what else they could be selling. Some want to fire a vendor and bring the function back in-house. The shape of the answer changes the shape of the system.

So identify what YOU want from the process and system, then build for that. Use real statements:

• I want my sales and marketing teams operating off a single set of numbers
• I want clear communication channels and data hand-offs between the teams
• I want to identify wins and losses quickly and hold people accountable for both
• I need to find issues in the funnel within a week of them appearing, not a quarter

Now you have a direction. Next is the build.

Architect your solution

Your clarity from the previous step does most of the work here. It tells you what to build first and what to leave for later. Here is the skeleton, by team.

Marketing

• Clear ICPs and disqualification criteria, documented and signed off by sales
• Analytics beyond Google Analytics. GA4 alone is not enough to run a revenue function. You need attribution, product analytics, and a warehouse the CRM can talk to.
• Clear KPIs by ICP, platform, channel, and funnel stage
• Specific campaign builds for top, middle, and bottom of funnel, with separate goals for each
• Feedback loops from sales, customer success, and product
• A functional learning, testing, and iteration process. Not a quarterly review. A weekly one.

Sales

• A documented sales process with named stages, exit criteria for each, and an honest cycle-time estimate per stage
• A CRM that is actually used. Opportunities loaded, stages updated, lost-reason captured every time.
• Lead scoring tiers tied to behaviour and fit, agreed with marketing
• Data surfacing back to marketing on what closed, what stalled, and why

The business

• One central source of truth that both teams pull from. Usually a warehouse plus a BI layer, sometimes just the CRM if the company is under fifty people.
• An agreed glossary. "MQL", "SQL", "opportunity", "pipeline" mean the same thing on both sides of the wall.
• A revenue dashboard the CEO can open without a translator. One screen. Last week, this week, trend.

Operate the system

The build is the easy part. Most companies stop there and wonder why nothing changes. The system only works if you run it on a cadence.

The cadence I recommend in nearly every engagement:

• Weekly: sales and marketing leads review the funnel together. Thirty minutes. One agenda: what changed, what we are doing about it. No status theatre.
• Fortnightly: a working session on one specific funnel stage. Pick the worst-performing one. Fix it. Move on.
• Monthly: revenue review with the CEO or CFO. The dashboard is the agenda. Anything not on the dashboard is parked.
• Quarterly: ICP and lead scoring review. The market shifts. Your definitions should too.

Someone owns the cadence. That is the actual job of revenue operations, whether it sits with a person, a head of ops, or an advisor running the function as a service. Without an owner, the meetings drift, the dashboard rots, and within a quarter you are back to sales and marketing blaming each other in front of the CFO.

Traps to avoid

I have watched companies do every step above and still end up where they started. These are the traps. Most teams hit at least two of them.

Buying the tool before agreeing the definitions. This is an expensive mistake, and a common one. A new CRM or attribution platform will not fix a disagreement about what an MQL is. It will encode the disagreement, make it harder to resolve, and bill you monthly for the privilege. Agree the glossary first. Then buy the tool. Not the other way around.

Letting "RevOps" become a third silo. If you hire a revenue operations lead and they end up with their own roadmap, their own dashboards, and their own meetings that sales and marketing do not attend, you have created a third team to blame. The role exists to make the other two work together, not to do their work for them.

Running the cadence without the CEO once a month. If the monthly revenue review is optional for the exec sponsor, it will be optional for everyone within a quarter. The meeting needs an audience that can act on what comes out of it.

Lead scoring built in a vacuum. Marketing builds a model on paper, ships it, and sales ignores it because no one asked them which signals actually predict a close. Build the scoring with the sales team in the room, on real closed-won and closed-lost deals from the last six months. Otherwise you have built a sorting hat that no one trusts.

Treating attribution as the answer. Attribution tells you where leads came from. It does not tell you why they closed, why they stalled, or why the good ones came from a channel you were about to cut. Attribution is one input into the revenue conversation. It is not the conversation.

Reporting on activity instead of outcomes. "We sent 14,000 emails this month" is not a revenue metric. Neither is "we made 400 calls". If your dashboard is full of activity counts, you are running a marketing ops report, not a revenue one. Pipeline created, pipeline closed, cycle time, win rate by ICP. That is the screen.

Skipping the post-mortem on lost deals. Closed-lost is the most valuable data set in the company and the one most often ignored. If sales is not capturing a structured lost-reason on every deal, and marketing is not reviewing it monthly, you are flying blind on the question that matters most: why people who almost bought from you, didn't.

Letting the dashboard rot. A revenue dashboard built in March and not touched by June is worse than no dashboard at all. It tells the team that nobody is reading it, which tells them nobody is acting on it, which tells them they can stop loading clean data into the CRM. The dashboard is a contract. Honour it or take it down.

What good looks like in 90 days

If you do this work properly, here is what you should see by the end of the first quarter:

• Both teams quote the same ICP from memory
• Lost-reason data exists and is reviewed weekly
• Marketing knows which channel produced last quarter's closed-won revenue, not just last quarter's leads
• Sales can tell you which campaign produced a specific opportunity without asking marketing
• The CEO has stopped asking for "the numbers" because the numbers are already on a screen they trust
• You have killed at least one campaign and at least one sales stage that were not earning their keep

If none of those are true at ninety days, the build was not the problem. The cadence was.

Closing thought

The companies winning at this in 2026 are not the ones with the fanciest stack. They are the ones whose sales and marketing leads can sit in a room, look at the same number, and agree on what to do about it by Friday. The stack just makes the number visible. The agreement is the work.

If you are looking at your own funnel right now and recognising more of this than you would like, that is the start of the work, not the end of it. Find the signal. Move the number.