RevOps is at a crossroads
In many companies, RevOps is stuck in a cycle of daily firefighting. Teams constantly ask for reports, process fixes, and quick data pulls without any clear plan or way to decide what matters most. This turns operators into order-takers when they should be focused on becoming strategic RevOps leaders.
This reactive approach weakens RevOps’ influence. If RevOps doesn’t define its own value and connect its work to business goals, it will stay in a support role rather than driving growth.
Strategic RevOps leaders work very differently. They build a clear approach to alignment, data, and action that ties directly to revenue results. They focus only on work that moves the business forward, not just what teams ask for in the moment. This is how RevOps earns its place at the table.
To learn how to make this shift, we talked in depth with 8 RevOps leaders who have successfully moved from tactical support to strategic partner. Their advice boils down to 5 steps.
Table of Contents:
- Proactively define what RevOps means for your company and communicate it often
- Align RevOps priorities to the business’ most important metrics
- Continuously create alignment in RevOps’ priorities through communication, roadmaps, and trade-offs
- Become a proactive and vocal business partner
- Do great work
Read on to learn about the tactics they use to accomplish each of these 5 steps. Their insights show what sets high-impact RevOps leaders apart from reactive order-takers, and how you can structure your team to drive revenue, efficiency, and lasting growth.
Step 1: define RevOps for your organization
Why this matters
People often misunderstand RevOps. Some see it as just a reporting function, others as an admin support team. But most still link it with traditional sales operations. The most successful RevOps teams go beyond these limiting labels by clearly explaining their function to the company.
We asked our strategic RevOps leaders how they define the role. While their views varied based on company size, industry, and growth stage, one clear theme emerged:
RevOps must focus on work that impacts high-priority business goals, not get caught in a cycle of low-value busy work.
Three ways RevOps leaders define their role
There’s no single definition of RevOps. Different leaders highlight different aspects of the function, based on their company’s structure, priorities, and growth stage.
From our interviews, three main themes emerged:
- RevOps as a strategic business partner: focused on guiding the go-to-market team to hit their top-level revenue goals through analysis and planning.
Lexi Bohonnon, Managing Director, Roam: “If RevOps isn’t tied to business KPIs, it becomes a reactive, low-value function. The best teams are purposeful about their work and connect every project to revenue efficiency, sales speed, and long-term growth.”
Jordan Kindler, SVP of RevOps at Coursedog: “RevOps is the people, process, and tooling discipline—or set of frameworks—that help organizations grow, keep, and expand business with customers, hopefully in a fairly predictable and customer-focused way.”
- RevOps as an efficiency and execution engine: focused on operational excellence for all go-to-market functions, removing bottlenecks and friction in the day-to-day GTM process.
Tom Pae, Founder, Charlie Mike Consulting: “RevOps is a performance engine. Our job is to make sure go-to-market teams can move quickly and confidently by reducing friction, automating processes, and providing clarity through data. The best RevOps teams don’t just report on pipeline metrics, they improve the systems that drive those metrics.”
Pete Matthews, Founder, Trinsx: “RevOps is the systematic removal of barriers so go-to-market teams can achieve their highest level of performance and scalability. Everything flows through RevOps—whether or not it’s something we’re directly responsible for. Our job is to clear those roadblocks and collaborate with those who are responsible.”
- RevOps as a customer journey connector: Focused on making sure data, processes, and people work together to create a smooth customer experience.
Katherine Zhang, CEO, OPEXEngine: “RevOps aligns and coordinates go-to-market resources to enable the customer journey. It’s about strategy—making sure all customer-facing teams are aligned on who we’re targeting and what experience we want them to have. Then, it’s about coordination—building the right processes and structures to bring that strategy to life. If you get those right, you create an ideal customer experience.”
Jeff Klein, RevOps Leader at Lumafield: “RevOps is the connective tissue behind the customer lifecycle. Internally, it’s about helping sales to sell, but externally, it’s about making sure the customer journey is smooth from the first touchpoint to renewal.”
What this means for RevOps leaders
Strategic RevOps leaders balance all three views. They drive business strategy, optimize execution, and ensure a smooth customer journey.
If RevOps focuses too much on execution, it risks becoming a tactical support function. If it only focuses on strategy, it may lack operational impact. If it acts only as a connector, it can struggle to prove measurable value.
The key is defining RevOps in a way that directly supports your company’s specific growth goals while ensuring revenue teams operate efficiently.
By clearly defining RevOps within your organization, you set expectations for your scope of work and value to the organization. This gives you clarity and influence when deciding what to focus on.
Step 2: prioritize and align with business metrics
“I’m always putting out fires with urgent data, reporting, and tech requests. I don’t have the time to be the strategic partner to the business, which is what I was promised when I joined the company.”
– A comment that we at AccountAim have heard at least 500 times.
Once RevOps is clearly defined, the next challenge is prioritization. Even with a well-defined RevOps function, the team can quickly get bogged down by reactive requests and low-impact work if it isn’t both clear and strict in its prioritization strategy.
Driving RevOps priorities
Creating business alignment with Chain Metrics
Aligning RevOps’ work to the most important business metrics is the best way to prove RevOps’ value and create a prioritization process that sticks. Pete Matthews, Founder of Trinsx, describes this process as “chain metrics.”
“Start at the top. If you start at the bottom, you’ll build every metric anyone asks for. But if you start at the top—what your CEO makes decisions on—that tells you exactly what data you need. That data then flows down all the way to the frontline sales and marketing teams.” – Pete Matthews, Founder of Trinsx
Every high-priority project should connect to these top-level goals even if it is focused on a sub-metric, as top-level goals can be laddered down to individual teams and initiatives. For example, revenue growth is often priority #1 for go-to-market teams.
What feeds into revenue growth? It depends on the business context, but we can illustratively break it down into:
Revenue = Average Selling Price (ASP) × Deals Closed
We can break ASP down into:
- Size of package sold (seats, usage, etc)
- Price per quantity
- Mix of customer segment/feature set
We can break Deals Closed down to:
- Type of deal (new, expansion, renewal)
- Deals per rep
We can break deals per rep down to:
- Rep efficiency (sales cycle length)
- Rep enablement (close rates)
And so on. The point is that there are many worthwhile initiatives, but prioritization becomes easier when you can directly tie work to the company’s biggest priorities.
Prioritizing based on chain metrics
- Clear decision-making framework: When faced with competing requests, RevOps can evaluate them against its potential impact on the chain metrics. For example, if improving sales cycle length is identified as a key driver of revenue growth, projects that address this metric take priority over those that don’t.
- Impact quantification: Chain metrics allow RevOps to quantify the potential business impact of different initiatives. If improving close rates by 5% would generate more revenue than reducing sales cycle by 10%, RevOps can prioritize accordingly.
- Resource allocation: With a clear understanding of which metrics most significantly impact top-line goals, RevOps can allocate its limited resources (time, budget, technology) to initiatives with the highest potential return.
- Strategic push back: When receiving requests that don’t align with key chain metrics, RevOps leaders can confidently decline or deprioritize these tasks with a data-backed rationale rather than simply saying “we don’t have bandwidth.”
- Proactive planning: Understanding these metric relationships allows RevOps to proactively identify improvement opportunities before problems arise, shifting from reactive to proactive operations.
Consider this example: A RevOps team is receiving multiple requests: a new sales dashboard, process automation for contract approvals, and enhanced lead routing rules. Using chain metrics, they determine that the contract approval process is directly impacting sales cycle length (a key driver of deals closed), while the other projects have less direct impact on revenue drivers. This provides a clear rationale to prioritize the contract workflow project.
By framing all of your possible initiatives in this light and tying them to the business’s top priorities, you create a powerful tool to prioritize your work and add strategic value to your company’s planning.It also gives RevOps the authority to push back and the power to help make their own decisions more quickly.
Creating a RevOps Roadmap by mapping business capabilities
Once you’ve prioritized your key initiatives and metrics to be improved, there are still questions about which specific tactics to employ.
If we’re trying to improve sales cycles, for example, there are numerous levers that can be pulled. How is RevOps to make sense of it all?
Linda Fitzek offers a valuable framework:
“I use a business capabilities tracker that maps every part of the go-to-market process—lead to opportunity, opportunity to close, renewals, etc. You grade yourself across people, process, data, and technology. It creates a heat map that visually shows where your biggest gaps are.”
She maps her capabilities to the customer journey. This approach helps find the root cause of issues or risks in the system: gaps in expertise, automation, data visibility, and more. This helps inform a roadmap for RevOps to tackle the initiative over time, pending budgets and capacity.
Snippet of business capabilities matrix above. Download a full template here.
Translating capability gaps into prioritized actions
The business capabilities framework isn’t just about identifying problems. It’s about systematically determining which actions will drive the most significant impact. Here’s how this framework directly enhances prioritization:
Root cause identification: Rather than addressing symptoms (like “slow sales cycles”), the framework reveals underlying causes. Is the delay happening because of people (insufficient training), process (inefficient approval workflows), data (poor lead quality information), or technology (inadequate tools)?
Impact vs. effort mapping: By grading capabilities across multiple dimensions, RevOps can create an impact-effort matrix. Initiatives that address high-impact, low-maturity capabilities with reasonable effort requirements become top priorities.
Sequence planning: Some capabilities are foundational to others. The framework helps identify which capabilities must be addressed first to enable future improvements. For example, clean data architecture might be a prerequisite for effective automation.
Resource allocation optimization: Understanding capability gaps allows RevOps to align specialized resources with the right problems. Technical debt might require developer resources, while process gaps might need project management expertise.
Strategic investment justification: The framework provides a structured way to communicate capability gaps to leadership and justify investments in specific areas, making budget conversations more strategic and less reactive.
Consider a RevOps team trying to improve sales productivity. The capability assessment reveals that while their technology is robust (scored 8/10), their process documentation is severely lacking (scored 3/10), and team training is inconsistent (scored 4/10). Rather than investing in yet another tool, this assessment clearly points to prioritizing process documentation and training programs as the higher-impact initiatives.
This is also a great tool for guiding your executive team to necessary investments coming down the road. Rather than appearing reactive and unspecific in your requests, you can show exactly why you need additional support, the business impact, and demonstrate that you identified these needs long ago in your strategic roadmap. Just be sure to up-level the presentation so your execs aren’t staring at a 200-row sheet!
Step 3: create continuous alignment
This all probably sounds great in theory, but experienced RevOps professionals might be thinking: “Sure, this sounds nice, but I know my executive team is going to change their mind every quarter anyway.”
Yes, they probably will. But it’s the strategic RevOps leader’s job to help them see the bigger picture (with tact, of course).
Jeff Klein, RevOps Leader at Lumafield, has a simple but highly effective tactic for keeping executives aligned to high-priority RevOps work: one simple PowerPoint slide. The trick is that he uses it consistently and proactively to keep everyone informed on what the team is working on, why, and what they will need to give up if they switch gears to a new initiative.
“I keep a slide that lists our top four initiatives every quarter. Anytime someone asks for something new, I bring up the slide: ‘Here’s what we agreed on. If this new priority is more important, what should come off the list? Or do we need more resources?'”
Lonny Sternberg, VP of Revenue Operations at Veriforce, adds that you should tie these priorities to business metrics and approach these conversations with genuine empathy and relationship-building.
“Building trust early is crucial so you can ask the right questions: ‘Help me understand how this connects to our business objectives’ or ‘Which OKR does this support?’ When stakeholders make requests, acknowledge them genuinely, then evaluate the business impact before committing. This approach gets people thinking about what you’re balancing—they start to realize not all activity leads to meaningful impact. The best conversations balance both the human element and the systematic process of prioritization.”
This framing transforms RevOps into a strategic driver of business outcomes, not just a task executor. It gets functional stakeholders thinking through “why” they are making requests and creates much more thoughtful discussion. It also ensures you are always working on the most important things for the business.
Step 4: become a proactive business partner
“Strategic RevOps leaders are in the room every week highlighting risks, flagging process breakdowns, and calling out where things need to change.”
– Lexi Bohonnon, Managing Director at Roam
The advice so far is excellent for making RevOps less reactive and more focused on the most important things in the business. This drives impact.
But how can you advance your career? How can you be viewed as a strategic thought partner to executives?
You need to speak up.
Now that you’ve defined RevOps, you have a roadmap, and you understand the customer journey you’re solving for, you need to find ways to improve it.
If you are only ever taking orders from executives, your career will likely hit a ceiling. RevOps is best positioned to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the customer journey. RevOps should feel empowered to speak up and identify these issues, ideally with initial solutions already in mind to address the problem.
The best way to get a seat at the table is to set the table. Identify important topics and own the data so you’ll be the go-to person for advice. That’s how you become a strategic partner.
Step 5: do great work
While strategic thinking is crucial, the foundation of RevOps credibility is built on execution excellence. Strategic RevOps leaders understand that high-quality execution of day-to-day tasks builds the trust necessary to earn a strategic voice.
There are many facets to doing great work. A few themes that came up in our conversations with these RevOps experts include:
- Documentation: Create clear, accessible documentation for all processes, systems, and data definitions. This reduces repetitive questions and builds organizational knowledge.
- Enablement: Develop training materials and self-service resources that empower teams to solve routine issues independently.
- Automation: Identify repetitive tasks that can be automated. Start small with quick wins that save time and reduce errors.
- Data quality: Create a data foundation that breaks down siloes, is prescriptive, and above all, is trustworthy.
- Feedback loops: Create ways to gather feedback from internal customers on RevOps processes and services, then visibly act on that feedback.
Remember that execution excellence isn’t just about completing tasks, it’s about delivering measurable business impact. Track and communicate the results of your work, not just the completion of projects.
Conclusion: Your roadmap to strategic impact
To summarize the experts’ insights, the key to becoming a strategic RevOps leader is following these five critical steps:
- Proactively define what RevOps means for your company, and communicate it often
- Align RevOps priorities to the business’ most important metrics
- Continuously create alignment in RevOps’ priorities through communication, roadmaps, and trade-offs
- Become a proactive and vocal business partner
- Do great work
The journey from tactical firefighters to strategic RevOps leaders doesn’t happen overnight. It requires intentional effort, clear communication, and consistent delivery of value. But by following this roadmap, you can transform both your function and your career.
Remember: RevOps is uniquely positioned to see across the entire customer journey and connect different parts of the revenue engine. This perspective is invaluable to the organization if you choose to leverage it strategically.
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To learn more about becoming strategic RevOps leaders, join AccountAim’s RevOps Connect, a mentorship program designed to elevate the RevOps function.
You can also subscribe to Boardroom RevOps, where we share valuable insight from strategic RevOps leaders.
Our expert contributors
Jeff Klein leads RevOps at Lumafield after a 7 year stint scaling Xometry from 8 to 9 figures in revenue. Jeff is also a mentor at Berkeley SkyDeck.
Jordan Kindler is SVP of Operations at Coursedog, having joined at employee #8 and supported growth from hundreds of thousands to tens of million in ARR. Jordan previously worked in RevOps and Strategy at Loom.
Katherine Zhang is the CEO & GM of OPEXEngine by Bain & Company, the leading performance benchmarking solution for SaaS and software companies. Previously, she spent over a decade building and leading growth strategy and revenue operations teams to scale tech companies including Project44 and Relativity.
Lexi Bohonnon is Managing Director at Roam. She previously spent 10 years as an SVP of Enterprise Sales, Sales Engineering, and CX at Yext, helping scale the company through IPO.
Linda Fitzek is a fractional RevOps consultant with previous experience as VP of RevOps and Business Ops at companies like Everstring, Uber for Business, and Sendoso.
Lonny Sternberg is the VP of Revenue Operations at Veriforice, and has led revenue operations in B2B SaaS organizations for 12+ years, including at Vestwell and AudioEye. He specializes in building and maturing the go-to-market engines required to grow revenue ranging from $0 to $300M+.
Pete Matthews has been doing marketing and sales operations for 15+ years and is the founder of Trinsx. Pete is a passionate, forward thinking, dynamic leader accelerating revenue growth by enabling go-to-marketing teams through operational excellence.
Tom Pae is the Founder of Charlie Mike Consulting, a fractional RevOps service. Tom previously worked as VP of RevOps and enablement at Sendoso.
