10 Hard Truths for Revenue Operations
You wanna talk Revenue Operations?
Fine. Let’s talk. But don’t come to me with your spreadsheets full of hope and your buzzwords thick as a fifty-dollar steak. I’ve seen it all before. The bright-eyed VPs, the eager analysts, all of ‘em think they’ve found the secret sauce. The magic bullet. The amazing tool. The incredible strategy. The killer technique. The one weird trick to make the numbers go up.
They’re all wrong.
Revenue isn’t a prayer meeting.
Growing a company is a knife fight in a phone booth.
And Revenue Operations? That’s the team that makes sure your knife is sharp, your grip is sure, and you know exactly where to stick it. It’s not about synergy, it’s not about gut feelings. It’s about one thing and one thing only: the truth.
The cold, hard, unvarnished truth of the number.
So, you want the rules? You want to know how the game is played?
Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s no poetry here. No hand-holding. Just the unforgiving mechanics of money. Here are the ten rules.
The only rules that matter. You break ‘em, you’re out. It’s that simple.
1. The Silos Get a Bullet
Listen to me. Marketing. Sales. Customer Success. They’re not your friends. They’re not your family. They’re tribes. And what do tribes do? They protect their own. They hoard resources. They speak in tongues only they understand. A lead. What is a lead? Ask a marketing guy, it’s a name on a list. Ask a sales guy, it’s a guy on the phone with a wallet. Ask a customer success rep, it’s a problem she’s gotta solve before it blows up in her face.
They’re all talking, but they’re not saying the same thing. And in that gap, that’s where the money dies. Your job? Your only job, when you get right down to it, is to bust down the walls. Not with trust falls and off-sites. With a sledgehammer.
You make them speak the same language.
You give them one set of numbers to live and die by.
Revenue. Not leads. Not demos. Not happy-talk survey scores and pipeline fantasies. Revenue. You chain their fortunes together. The marketing guy doesn’t get his bonus unless the sales guy closes the deal. The sales guy doesn’t see a dime until the customer renews. You make them a single organism with a single purpose: to bring home the goddamn money.
Even if you can’t get compensation alignment like that right off the bat, build dashboards to visualize that is working right away.
Ownership and leadership will see them if you create and socialize them.
2. The Data is God
People lie.
All the time.
They lie to themselves, they lie to you, they lie to their mothers. Your salespeople? They’re lying about their pipeline. Your marketing team? They’re lying about their attribution. The clients are lying about their timeline to close, their authority, or both. The only thing that doesn’t lie is the data. The raw, unfiltered, unforgiving data.
So you worship at that altar. You build a temple to it. A single source of truth. One CRM to rule them all. I like to build a revenue intelligence layer way above the CRM. And you guard it like a junkyard dog. No one gets to bring their own numbers to the party. No more “I think” or “I feel.” Show me the data. Show me the report. If it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen.
And your data has to be clean. Spotless. You see a duplicate record? You kill it. You find a data entry error? You find the guy who did it and you make him understand, in no uncertain terms, the gravity of his sin. Because bad data is worse than no data. It’s a lie that looks like the truth. And that’s how you end up driving off a cliff you never saw coming.
3. Process is a Weapon. Wield It.
Don’t talk to me about agility. Don’t talk to me about empowerment. You want to empower a salesman, give him a good pen. You want to win, you need a process. A rigid, repeatable, scalable process for every single thing that touches a dollar.
How does a lead move from marketing to sales?
Who touches it? When?
What are the exact criteria?
Write it down. Make it law. The handoff should be as clean and as brutal as a knockout punch. No ambiguity. No room for interpretation.
Map the entire customer journey. Every single touchpoint. From the first ad they see to the day they churn. And at every single point, you ask the question: where’s the friction? Where’s the place this whole thing can go sideways? And then you sand it down. You pave it over. You make it so smooth, so inevitable, that the customer just glides from one stage to the next, their wallet getting lighter with every step.
Process isn’t bureaucracy. It’s a weapon. It’s how you impose your will on the chaos.
4. The Customer Ain’t Your Pal
This whole customer-centricity thing. It makes me want to puke. The customer isn’t your friend. They’re not on your team. They want something from you, for as little as they can possibly pay. Your job is to give it to them, and take as much as you can get in return.
I know that’s going to make some people uncomfortable, but that’s business actually.
But here’s the thing. They have to feel like you’re on their side. They have to have a good experience. Why? Because an unhappy customer is a loud customer. An unhappy customer is a churned customer. And churn is a cancer. It eats your revenue from the inside out.
So you obsess over their experience.
Not because you care about their feelings.
But because a seamless experience is a profitable experience.
A customer who doesn't have to think, who doesn't have to struggle, is a customer who stays. And a customer who stays is a customer who pays. So you make their journey frictionless. You make it easy for them to give you their money.
It’s not about love. It’s about economics.
I love economics, so there’s that.
5. Goals Are For Closers
You want to know what a bad goal is? “Increase brand awareness.” “Drive more engagement.” That’s chatter. That’s happy-talk for people who are afraid of the number.
A good goal is a number. A hard number. We will increase bookings by 15% this quarter. We will reduce churn by 2%. We will decrease the sales cycle from 60 days to 50. These are things you can measure. These are things you can hit. Or miss.
And everyone has to have a number. Everyone has to be accountable. The sales team has a quota. The marketing team has a pipeline target. The success team has a retention goal. And these goals aren’t whispers. They’re screamed from the rooftops. They’re on every dashboard. They’re the first thing you talk about in the morning and the last thing you talk about at night. You don’t hit your number, you don’t have a job. It’s that simple. There’s no A for effort. There’s only the number.
6. Your Tech Stack is a Loaded Gun
A fool with a tool is still a fool. I’ve seen companies with more software than sense. A CRM over here, a marketing automation platform over there, a sales enablement tool nobody uses. Different CRMs for different teams at the same company selling the same stuff. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of subscriptions, and it’s bleeding you dry.
You don’t need more tools. You need the right tools. And they have to talk to each other. They have to be integrated. The data has to flow from one to the other like water. If a salesperson has to log into three different systems to get the story on a prospect, you’ve already lost.
Consolidate. Simplify. Find a platform, not a collection of point solutions. And for God’s sake, drive adoption. A tool that no one uses is just a line item on an expense report.
Train them. Force them. How? Tie their compensation to using the damn thing correctly. Your tech stack should be a force multiplier, not an anchor.
Why are you spending money on people and technology and getting less than 100% from both?
7. The Truth is in the Lagging Indicators, The Power is in the Leading Ones
Revenue. Churn. Customer Lifetime Value. These are the lagging indicators. They tell you what already happened. They’re the autopsy report. Important? Sure. But you can’t change the past.
The real game is in the leading indicators. The things that tell you what’s going to happen. The number of qualified demos set this week. The pipeline velocity. The product usage rates for new customers. These are the numbers that give you a glimpse into the future.
Your job is to find the handful of leading indicators that actually predict success. And then you watch them like a hawk. You put them on a dashboard in letters of fire. When a leading indicator starts to dip, the alarm bells go off. Not next month when you miss your revenue target. Now. So you can do something about it. So you can get in there and fix the problem before it becomes a disaster. That’s not forecasting.
That’s control.
8. No Surprises. Ever.
The C-suite. The board. They hate surprises. More than they hate bad news. They can handle bad news. They can’t handle being blindsided. Trust me. Been the blind sider and the blind sided.
So you must become the single source of truth.
The one person who can tell them, without any bullshit, exactly where things stand. Your forecasts aren’t hopes and dreams. They’re a cold, calculated assessment of the facts on the ground. You have a methodology. You have a model. And you can defend it.
You provide a regular, predictable cadence of reporting. No one should ever have to ask you for the numbers. They know when the report is coming, and they know what’s going to be in it. And if there’s bad news, you deliver it early. You come with the problem, but you also come with the plan. You are the voice of reality in a building full of ambition. It won’t make you popular. It will make you essential.
9. Enablement Isn’t a Babysitter. It’s a Drill Sergeant.
Sales enablement. Don’t get me started. Most of the time, it’s a joke. A bunch of people building slide decks no one ever uses and running training sessions everyone forgets a week later.
True enablement is about making your revenue-generating teams more lethal. It’s about giving them the content, the tools, and the training they need to win. Not just once, but every single time.
You aren’t a serious company unless you are recording every single interaction with the market automatically, with AI processing it afterward.
Your content isn’t a library. It’s an arsenal. And you measure its effectiveness. Which case study is closing the most deals? Which email template is getting the most replies? You give them what works, and you take away what doesn’t. Your training isn’t a one-time event. It’s continuous. It’s drills. It’s practice. It’s making them so good at the process that they can do it in their sleep. Enablement isn’t about making them happy. It’s about making them effective.
10. You Don’t Get a Parade for Doing Your Job
Let me tell you the final, and most important, rule.
No one is going to thank you.
When the numbers are up, the sales team gets the credit. They’re the heroes. They get the big checks and the slaps on the back. When a new product takes off, the marketing team takes a bow. They’re the geniuses.
You?
You’re the plumber.
You’re expendable (according to them).
You’re the guy who keeps the pipes from bursting. No one notices you until the whole basement is flooded. Your job is to make the whole damn thing run so smoothly, so predictably, that it looks easy.
Your reward isn’t a trophy. It’s the quiet satisfaction of knowing the truth.
Of knowing that without you, without the systems you built, the processes you enforced, the data you cleaned, the whole thing would fall apart. You’re the foundation. You’re the engine. You’re the one who makes the money machine go.
They don’t have to know it.
But you will. And in this business, that’s the only thing that matters.
Friends: in addition to the 14% discount for becoming annual paid members, we are excited to announce an additional 10% discount when paying with Bitcoin. Reach out to me, these discounts stack on top of each other!
👋 Thank you for reading Mastering Revenue Operations.
To help continue our growth, please Like, Comment and Share this post.
I started this in November 2023 because revenue technology and revenue operations methodologies started evolving so rapidly I needed a focal point to coalesce ideas, outline revenue system blueprints, discuss go-to-market strategy amplified by operational alignment and logistical support, and all topics related to revenue operations.
Mastering Revenue Operations is a central hub for the intersection of strategy, technology and revenue operations. Our audience includes Fortune 500 Executives, RevOps Leaders, Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs.