With expert input from Cherine Grove, co-founder, Cybersolve
Quick answer: RevOps, short for revenue operations, is the work of running marketing, sales, customer success and customer service (and often the revenue side of finance) as one system: one process for winning and keeping customers, one set of data, and one set of numbers every team trusts. A RevOps team or person owns the gaps between those teams, where leads, deals and customer information usually go missing.
Most growing businesses don’t have a RevOps department, so the work lands on whichever team feels the pain first, very often marketing. Written for leaders whose marketing, sales and service teams work from different numbers, this guide explains what RevOps involves in practice, who should own it, the handoff almost every business forgets, and how to start. It draws on the experience of Cherine Grove, co-founder of Cybersolve, who runs RevOps work with clients every week. To see where you stand first, go straight to the nine-question self-check.
RevOps in plain terms
Revenue operations grew out of three separate jobs: sales operations, marketing operations and customer success operations. Each one made its own team more efficient. The trouble was everything in between: the lead marketing passed over that sales never called, the deal that closed without anyone telling onboarding, the meeting where three reports showed three different revenue figures. Those gaps belonged to nobody. RevOps owns them.
Most definitions break RevOps into four parts:
- Process: the stages a customer moves through, and the rules for moving between teams.
- Systems: the CRM and the tools connected to it.
- Data and insight: one set of definitions and reports that every team accepts.
- People and enablement: the training, playbooks and support that let teams work the process.
RevOps is sometimes confused with DevOps. The names follow the same pattern, but DevOps is about how software gets built and released, and has nothing to do with revenue teams.
What a RevOps team actually does
The balance changes from week to week, but the work usually falls into six areas.
One revenue process. RevOps agrees the stages a customer moves through, what each stage means, and what happens when a lead or customer moves from one team to the next. The CRM is then set up to match, so people report on the same stages they work in.
The systems and the data in them. Day to day, that means CRM administration, integrations and data quality. The bigger decisions are about the stack itself. Platforms are best chosen against the business’s “true north” (its goals, vision, mission and company KPIs) rather than a feature list, which is why a migration to a different platform is often the first step towards a solid foundation.
Tracking and reporting people trust. Building dashboards is half the job. Validating the numbers in them is the other half, because a report only helps if the business is willing to make decisions from it.
Finding problems early. Good monitoring dashboards show three kinds of trouble: things that are moving slowly, things that aren’t working as they should, and things lagging at a particular point in the journey, which usually means a bottleneck in one department.
Planning. A lot of RevOps time goes into strategy calls. If the business wants to reach a particular goal in five years, what does that actually involve? The answer always starts with a solid foundation, followed by the milestones that lead to the goal.
Enabling the teams. Helping teams get campaigns live, automating repetitive work and keeping processes current. Once the milestones have been met, the work turns outward:
“We go and look at best practice, either in other businesses, or at new product launches within the platforms that we’re using, to make sure that we’re really and truly optimising and scaling.”
Cherine Grove, co-founder, Cybersolve
How the work is reviewed: by risk, not by calendar
A fixed weekly or monthly checklist rarely fits, because every business’s set-up is different. A more useful approach, and the one Cherine and the team at Cybersolve use with clients, is to rank each function by importance and risk and divide the review that way:
| Risk level | What usually sits here | How closely it’s watched |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | The most important functions, and anything new, recently changed or known to be unstable | Most closely, especially straight after go-live |
| Moderate | Important functions that run reliably but still change from time to time | Regularly, with less attention than critical |
| Not critical | Processes that have worked well for a long time and rarely break | Occasionally |
Whenever something goes live, it moves into a period of monitoring and review. A launch tests the new process, and it can also unsettle existing processes that were already fragile.
Whatever the tiers look like in a particular business, three checks always come first:
- Are leads being handed over?
- Are they being contacted?
- Is everyone working from the same data, so that reporting agrees?
Who should own RevOps?
Someone should always look after RevOps, whether that’s a person inside the business or an outside partner, rather than leaving it to whichever department has the most need. RevOps covers marketing, sales, customer success and customer service. Many businesses have no RevOps department, so the work ends up inside one team, very often marketing, because marketing needs data from every other team to communicate with its customers.
That arrangement tends to fall short in three ways:
- It favours one department. RevOps that sits inside marketing or sales tends to serve that team’s needs rather than the whole revenue function.
- It overloads people who are already busy. Every department has its own purpose and its own workload. Nobody is sitting idle, waiting for RevOps work to fill their week.
- The expertise falls short. RevOps touches systems, data, process and reporting across four teams, and that range rarely sits in one department.
Her recommendation is simple:
“My suggestion is to always have someone who looks after the RevOps function, someone that can help tie everything together, whether that is internal or external.”
Cherine Grove
What that looks like depends on the business:
| Your situation | Who looks after RevOps |
|---|---|
| No separate departments: a commercial manager, or one marketing person and one salesperson | Someone who manages both, or the two working very closely together to one shared process |
| Separate departments, but no RevOps role | A named owner of the RevOps function, either a person inside the business or an outside partner |
| A RevOps person or team | They own the shared process, data, handoffs and hand-backs across all four teams |
Who should RevOps report to?
Where a business has a RevOps lead, the role usually reports to the CEO, the COO or a chief revenue officer. The title matters less than the principle: RevOps works for the whole revenue function, so it shouldn’t answer to one department’s targets alone.
Your first 90 days: get tracking right
Asked what a first RevOps person or partner should take on, Cherine starts with tracking:
“I would honestly say tracking, every time. More often than not, we’re seeing that clients are blind to what the other departments are doing.”
Cherine Grove
Good tracking means every lead carries a label or tag that shows:
- which department generated it in the first place
- which department re-engaged it, if it went quiet and came back
- which source within that department brought it in
Then it means knowing exactly what happens at every handoff between teams, and at every hand-back, the step most businesses forget entirely.
The handoff everyone forgets: the hand-back
Most RevOps advice covers the handoff. Marketing generates a lead, so how does sales find out about it? Far fewer businesses plan the return journey. If sales has tried everything and the lead isn’t ready, how does it go back to marketing to be re-engaged? And when marketing re-engages it, how does it get back to sales?
It’s also the handoff Cherine sees break most often:
“There is almost never a process for either of those, and that always results in leads being communicated to ineffectively, because no one truly understands their current state.”
Cherine Grove
In practice, a lead who told sales “not now” can keep receiving sales follow-ups, or a lead in the middle of a sales conversation can keep receiving marketing nurture emails, because neither team knows what the other is doing. Each direction needs its own answer:
| Direction | The question it must answer | Without a process | What to set up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing to sales | How does sales know this lead exists and is ready? | Leads wait, or get called with no context | An agreed definition of a sales-ready lead, an owner and a time frame for first contact |
| Sales back to marketing | If sales has tried everything, where does the lead go? | Leads sit in a salesperson’s list, or receive nothing at all | A clear “not now” state, the reason, and the marketing programme the lead moves into |
| Marketing back to sales | When a re-engaged lead is ready again, how does sales find out? | Re-engaged leads are missed, or two teams contact them at once | A trigger that alerts sales, with the history of what happened in between |
In HubSpot, two default properties do much of this work. Lifecycle stage records where a contact is in the journey, from Subscriber and Lead through Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead and Opportunity to Customer. Lead status adds detail within the Sales Qualified Lead stage, with options such as Attempted to Contact, Connected, Bad Timing and Unqualified.
“I would describe the lifecycle stage as the current relationship with the business, and lead status as the verb, or current activity.”
Cherine Grove
One detail matters for hand-backs. HubSpot’s automatic updates only move lifecycle stage forward; to send a contact back to an earlier stage for re-engagement, the value has to be cleared first, by hand or with a workflow (as of November 2026). If nobody designs that step, contacts stay labelled as sales-ready long after sales has stopped working them, which is exactly the “current state” problem Cherine describes.
Start here: a nine-question tracking self-check
Answer each question yes, partly or no, using numbers that marketing, sales and customer success would all accept. The questions come from what Cherine finds most businesses can’t see when she first looks at their set-up.
| # | Can you answer this today? |
|---|---|
| 1 | What happened to all your leads? |
| 2 | Where did they come from, and which sources were valuable? |
| 3 | Which department generated each lead, and which department re-engaged it? |
| 4 | What is sales actually doing to convert leads, and where are conversions falling short? |
| 5 | Which activity is working, and which isn’t? |
| 6 | Is there an agreed process for handing leads back from sales to marketing, and back again? |
| 7 | How is customer success onboarding new customers? |
| 8 | How well can customer service manage the business once it’s onboarded? |
| 9 | Where are the bottlenecks? |
How to read your answers:
- Mostly yes: tracking is a foundation you can build on. Look next at automation and forecasting.
- A mix: close the gaps before adding new tools, or the new tools will simply report the gaps faster.
- Mostly no: tracking is your first RevOps project, and it’s worth starting early. Reporting, forecasting and automation all depend on it.
Once tracking is in place, a sensible order is: agree definitions, handoffs and hand-backs; clean and connect the data; automate repetitive work; then plan against the business’s true north.
RevOps vs sales ops and marketing ops
Sales operations and marketing operations each make one team more effective. RevOps is responsible for how the teams work together, which is why it shouldn’t sit inside either of them.
| Sales operations | Marketing operations | RevOps | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Works for | The sales team | The marketing team | Marketing, sales, customer success and customer service |
| Main focus | Pipeline, targets, sales tools and forecasts | Campaigns, automation, lead management and attribution | One revenue process, shared data, the full stack, handoffs and hand-backs |
| Success looks like | Sales productivity and targets met | Leads and pipeline generated | Revenue across the whole customer journey |
How do you know RevOps is working?
Revenue is the obvious measure, but it isn’t the first sign. RevOps is working when departments are on the same page, the process holds up, and everyone knows what to expect from each other and what to inspect. The three standing checks make a good test: leads are handed over, leads are contacted, and every team’s reports agree.
When revenue does rise, it rarely comes from one place. In Cherine’s experience, it arrives from several directions at once: more sales, better retention, and lower spending on paid advertising, usually because organic and direct traffic start climbing.
Which tools does RevOps work with?
The CRM sits at the centre. Billing, support and reporting used to need separate tools; most of the CRMs Cybersolve works with, Salesforce and HubSpot among them, now cover them too.
Around the CRM, the tools RevOps works with most often, in Cherine’s experience, are:
- The Google stack: Google Ads and Google Analytics.
- Connectors: tools such as Zapier that move data between systems, or custom APIs and webhooks.
- Email platforms: for example a dedicated tool for cold outbound email, or a transactional email platform that has to integrate with everything else.
- Task management: less than it used to be, because HubSpot now handles most of it.
- Data and attribution tools: to show which channels and activities actually lead to revenue.
Whatever the stack, RevOps decides which system holds the master record for each kind of data, and makes sure the others follow it.
A practical first step
Run the self-check with the people who lead marketing, sales and customer success, and mark each answer honestly. The gaps are your RevOps backlog, and the order you close them in is your first plan.
If nobody looks after RevOps in your business today, or the gaps run across marketing, sales and service, book a consultation. Cybersolve’s RevOps consulting can help you map where leads, deals and customer information get lost between teams, and decide what to fix first.
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