The Missing Layer Between RevOps Strategy and Revenue Results
Becca Eddleman
Six months after hiring a VP of RevOps, a lot of leadership teams find themselves in the same uncomfortable conversation:
The strategy and roadmap exist, and the hire was credentialed and experienced, but the revenue number looks about the same as it did before any of it even got started.
Our instinct is often (and intuitively) to question the contribution of the person, but the better question is, “what exactly did this person walk into?”
Content Sneak Peek:
A real investment with less-than-ideal results
The numbers behind RevOps adoption are hard to argue with:
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- The VP of Revenue Operations title has grown 300% over the past 18 months,
- and 79% of organizations now have a formal RevOps function.
- Companies with mature RevOps report 36% higher revenue growth than those without.
The logic is sound, and it’s a serious investment, but we have to remember that even though 78% of B2B companies now report having a dedicated RevOps function in 2026, up from 48% in 2023. Many of these functions are relatively new, which means a lot of them are still finding their footing in organizations that expected them to hit the ground running.
Titles are growing faster than the infrastructure that makes those titles effective, which might be the biggest gap people don’t talk about when they’re celebrating the new hire.
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Why Most Revenue Operations Teams Are Built Wrong (And How to Fix Yours)
What a VP of RevOps actually inherits
If you walk into most organizations as a new VP of RevOps, here’s what you’ll probably get:
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- CRM data that people don’t completely trust,
- lifecycle stages that frankly mean different things to different teams,
- reporting that varies depending on who pulls it and from which system,
- and handoffs between marketing, sales, and customer success that technically exist on paper, but tend to break down in practice.
As a new VP of RevOps, your job is to fix all that, while also being expected to improve your forecasts and pipeline, as well as demonstrate revenue impact. And you’ve got to do it immediately.
Most people, quite understandably, can’t do all these things at the same time without proper organizational commitment behind them, so they default to what’s manageable: they maintain systems, build reports, and answer questions from leadership about why the numbers look the way they do.
In this scenario, RevOps is not exactly failing, but it’s being set up to administrate rather than execute on anything.
And of course it starts to get uncomfortable here. When the same problems appear across dozens of reps, like missed quotas or bad pipeline, or the very logical issue in a resource-strained environment of inconsistent execution, employees often end up having to pick up the slack, or at least try to: they might try to make more calls, or create more pipeline, or update the CRM.
But you can’t coach your way out of broken territories, unclear stages, bad handoffs, and processes that create more work than they remove. At some point, accountability without infrastructure is to blame.
The situation isn’t hypothetical.
When Skaled partnered with Vehlo, a software provider that had grown to 15 business units through a series of acquisitions, each unit was running its own systems, processes, and reporting standards. Leadership had limited visibility across the revenue org, sales teams were siloed, and data couldn’t be reconciled across units. Before win rates or quota attainment could improve, a foundation had to be built.
Six months after working with us, dealership win rates had moved from 38% to 44%, and an operational excellence roadmap was in place across sales, marketing, and RevOps.
What has to be true before RevOps can perform well
There are three things that should exist before a VP of RevOps can improve revenue, and more than a few organizations provide almost none of them before making such a hire.
- Data that can be trusted
- Processes that create alignment
- “Smart” intelligence
Clean, consistent data
It’s extremely rare that an organization is operating with perfect data, but starting with clean, consistent inputs that the organization has agreed to trust is a non-negotiable foundation before anything, or anyone, can amplify what’s in the system: whether that be AI or a RevOps hire.
At the end of the day, if the CRM is unreliable, every insight built on top of it is unreliable too.
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What is Revenue Operations? Thirty-Five Questions Asked and Answered.
Aligned processes across the revenue org.
Marketing, sales, and customer success all need shared definitions on things like: what a qualified lead is, when an opportunity exists, and what triggers a handoff. Without those agreements, RevOps is coordinating between teams that are optimizing for different things. Going fast on something without being properly aligned won’t lead to anything but more friction.
Intelligence that drives decisions, not dashboards.
A lot of RevOps functions stall out around this: they get good at just reporting what happened in a general sense. But the organizations pulling ahead are using RevOps to report on more specific things, by answering questions like these: what should we do next? Which accounts deserve attention today? Where is the revenue system creating drag? What’s at risk before it appears in the forecast?
That change from simply reporting to making recommendations is where RevOps starts to look like a competitive advantage instead of just an operational function.
Related Content:
Why a Good AI GTM Strategy Needs RevOps
Hiring someone is the right call. But you have to commit to the infrastructure.
Investing in RevOps leadership is absolutely the right decision: the data on revenue growth outcomes is clear enough to prove that. But what do you get when you hire a VP of RevOps without giving them the infrastructure they need to succeed? Not what you’re looking for, that’s for sure. Unless what you’re looking for is more expensive dashboards.
The organizations seeing results from their RevOps investment went beyond simply hiring someone and leaving them to their own devices: they
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- Made executive decisions that followed up with the hire to support them.
- Committed to having higher-quality data before expecting their AI to work properly.
- Made sure their teams all shared the same definitions of mission-critical things before expecting forecasting to improve.
- Built their intelligence layer to help turn existing data into something relevant to decisions made every day instead of simply giving information for quarterly reports.
A title like this is only the beginning. What comes after you hire a VP of RevOps is what determines whether RevOps transforms the revenue org or just adds a new seat to the leadership table. But you can’t get to the after if you skip the beginning.
Along with matching fractional VPs of RevOps to organizations, Skaled also fixes the foundational problems to set up and support your VP. If your RevOps function isn’t delivering the results you expected, our Revenue Operations practice is built around exactly this problem.
Not sure where to focus first? Answer a few quick questions in our free assessment, and we’ll point you in the right direction.