Scaling RevOps: Lessons from High-Growth SaaS Companies
As I considered a topic this week, my thoughts turned to recent conversations. These ranged from discussions with a rapidly growing compliance software company, doubling every few months, to those with a publicly traded company managing multiple business units. Besides the levels of complexity, does what it takes from a RevOps perspective shift? How do you scale your RevOps function effectively?
This post will walk through things I’ve seen work and what hasn’t worked over the past 15 years. As is common, these aren’t groundbreaking items. It’s the basics that get left behind that cause issues. Smooth is fast.
What has worked
Standardizing data
Being able to quickly/easily summarize data into categories is key. Why do you typically lose deals? If everything is just free-form text, you can’t see trends. Now you can send that through to an AI agent and get it classified into categories you want to track. Previously, that would’ve been humans reading through everything and manually classifying.
Get all of your ARR metrics into CRM
When I started in B2B, we had a metric called NCVI (Net Contract Value Increase). It was from the Gartner business model where all new and expansion ARR would be positive and any downsells or churns would be negative. Our quotas were set on a NCVI basis, not ARR (only positive). Large churns or downsells would make quota attainment very difficult. When I first took over Ops, I had to figure out how to easily/systematically calculate it so we could get out of spreadsheets. Thanks to a deep understanding of the business and a curiosity about CRM, I was able to build it out in just a few weeks.
Getting out of spreadsheets and into CRM meant we could easily track all of our key data points and cut data in any number of dimensions. We had as close to real-time information as we could get.
Tracking renewals in CRM
As you grow, more and more importance is placed on high GRR and NRR. How can you get ahead of your renewals and improve your ability to forecast and plan when you don’t have key visibility? It’s not too difficult to get setup correctly (we can help) and drives such value.
Having a single source of truth for reporting
The whole premise of RevOps is to be able to generate insights to drive the business forward. If you don’t have trust in the data you use to build those insights and recommendations, you’re dead in the water. Your credibility is tied to the data. Make a bad recommendation based on poor data? Trust is deteriorated and your ability to make an impact is diluted.
Establishing a single source of truth for key data tables with clear data lineage, you remove those scenarios where marketing/sales/cs stops a key meeting to say “where did you get those numbers? I see different numbers”. Those derail conversations and cause distrust.
Creating an object to link TOFU cycles with Opportunity data
SFDC doesn’t easily allow you to see the whole funnel from initial hand raiser to closed won. Early in my career I was introduced to the use of an object to make that connection between Leads/Contacts and Opps. Whether you use SFDC’s Campaign Member object or create your own, tracking the funnel through a separate object from the main people/deals view is key.
Knowing my numbers
As a senior RevOps leader, you are the right-hand to the GTM team. You should know your key numbers off the top of your head. You likely know the ASP but do you know it by segment? Do you know how much you create/close in a period? When in a meeting, can you quickly get to any number an executive asks for? Numbers are the guide to see if something is working or not. Numbers allow you to push back on things that won’t be big impacts.
Simplifying
Instead of trying to make the most elegant, fancy, time-intensive solution, I would always err toward simplicity. Want to have your sellers focus on the best accounts? Make it easy to understand what the best accounts are and laser-focus their territories on the best of the best. Have marketing spend more of their focus on those personas at those accounts. Have a really convoluted process to spin up POCs? How can you simplify that process/approach while maintaining a focus on the resulting technical win?
What didn’t work
Not communicating up
RevOps teams are consistently under fire from every direction. That’s in addition to the competing priorities across stakeholders. To your stakeholders, you may look like a duck in water - cruising along but not seeing any movement, while under the water, your legs are going 100mph. What are you working on? What is the delivery date of that key project? What is next up? What is not being worked on? How is your team performing? Be sure to prioritize project management with your stakeholders.
Having managers focus on too much
Sales managers have so much coming at them. They are working with 6-8 sellers looking for support in addition to having their manager and execs wanting to know what’s going on with key deals. They also need to be recruiting/hiring and onboarding. We have them in tons of training (product, new process, legal, HR, compliance…). When they’re in a selling mode, do you want them flipping between multiple industries? New business + Expansion + Renewal? I once had a team that was the worst performing from a renewal standpoint. Upon digging in, we noticed they were responsible for everything but focused on new business at the cost of renewals. Org design changes resulted in improvements to customer success metrics.
Promoting SDRs to AEs without any training on how to be an AE
It was a few years into seeing all-star SDRs struggle as AEs before it dawned on me how we set them up to fail. Yes, they had a great manager there to coach them but all of the basics a quota-carrying rep needs shouldn’t be left to chance. They need to learn how to forecast, how to submit forecasts, how to handle expense reports, overcome late stage objections, etc. For us, we finally created a SDR→AE graduation course that would address key aspects new AEs would need to know. Parts of it were repurposed from AE trainings and others were built specifically for these first-time AEs.
Having dashboards with different refresh sync times
If your dashboards have different refresh times, the data can be different between 2 dashboards. Our pipeline/bookings is X on one dashboard, but Y on another because a deal closed and a big deal pushed. Having data integrity is a requirement. Make it easy for your executives to be updated by the numbers and not have to ask whether something is updated.
Asking sellers to do manual entry
It was hard 10 years ago. It’s unnecessary in 2025. There are too many tools out there that can provide deeper insights than we could’ve imagined when I started. For example, Conversational Intelligence providers can pre-fill your sales methodology fields. Forecasting and data providers can automatically sync email communications and add contacts to Opps. Anything manual from a sales rep should be limited and high value activities such as qualifying leads and creating opportunities.
Complicating customer engagements and the way we deliver value
Is your company easy to buy from? Expand with? Go live with your product? I’ve seen companies that bait and switch pricing. I’ve seen companies that take multiple months to go live due to poor processes. I’ve been a recipient of >4 AMs in a single year from a vendor. These experiences leave lasting impacts on your customers view of you. Be the best version.
Not setting baselines or projecting improvements
I’ve lost count on the number of projects that me/my team completed and we could never show the impact of it because we didn’t have the baseline. When you begin a project, identify what metric (or gap) should be improved. Nothing happens in a vacuum but were the changes you made to X a contributing factor to your increased win rates? Did you increase the productivity of your SDRs by doing Y? By how much? Be sure to capture those data points so you can point back to them when you communicate up and out
Wrapping it up
By being aware of the items above, what can you do to make sure your RevOps team is operating most effectively? It can be as simple as creating space in your 1:1 with the CRO to talk about project impacts. Or start a project to get everyone aligned on sources and dashboards to maintain consistency across marketing, sales and CS.
If you need a senior resource to support your evolution of RevOps, let us know how we can help.