Revenue operations, or RevOps, connects the processes, data and technology behind your revenue. It makes sales, marketing and customer service work as one system. Not as three departments passing work to each other.
Is it worth it for you? That depends on one question. Can you sell more without your commercial structure growing at the same pace?
That is what we help you do. At Monreal & Meadow, we design and build that system for mid-sized companies. First we understand how your teams sell. Then we lead the change with the suppliers you already have. Or we build the software ourselves, when that is the better route. Often, a little of both.
We speak from experience. We have led sales at one of Spain’s largest websites, through a channel that generates more than €15 million a year with almost no human intervention.
What revenue operations actually is
Think of the journey a customer takes with your company. They hear about you. They ask for a price. They buy. Then, if all goes well, they keep buying for years. Or they quietly stop. At every step, a different team holds a different piece. Marketing has the campaign. Sales has the conversation. Finance has the invoice. The ERP has the order history.
RevOps treats that journey as one flow. It works with four materials: processes, data, technology and metrics. Its purpose is plain. You should sell more, and keep selling, with less friction.
Forrester describes RevOps as an execution strategy that unifies data, processes, technology and talent across marketing, sales and customer success. The aim is to serve the customer better throughout the relationship.
Gartner described the shift in 2021. It predicted that 75% of the world’s highest-growth companies would deploy a RevOps model by 2025. Its description still helps: aligning the technology, data and indicators of sales, marketing and customer success to give ‘an end to end view of the revenue-generating engine’.
Gartner was writing about large firms. The principle travels well. A distributor with forty reps faces the same problem. At a different scale.
It helps to see where RevOps sits in your company. Your sales director sets commercial policy: whom to target, how to price, how to run the team. Marketing decides the campaigns. IT keeps the systems running. Your CRM and ERP hold the data.
RevOps occupies the space between them. It builds what turns commercial policy into everyday practice. It makes sure campaigns reach the right customers, and that someone can measure what happened. It decides what your systems must do for revenue, and why. And it makes sure the data in your CRM and ERP is data people can trust.
In most companies, that space belongs to nobody. That is exactly where value leaks away.
A practice older than its name
RevOps did not begin with its name. Companies have had sales operations teams for decades, looking after territories, forecasts and tools. Marketing later built its own version. Each function kept its own house in order. Nobody looked after the whole.
The name came later. It began to spread through software companies in the late 2010s. Then it took off. In 2023, LinkedIn put head of revenue operations at the top of its list of the fastest-growing jobs in the United States, measured between 2018 and 2022.
We got there before the word did. Around 2010 we were already connecting sales, marketing, data and technology at one of Spain’s largest websites. Nobody called it RevOps. It was simply how we sold more without growing at the same pace.
The business question behind it
Definitions help. But you will rarely hear a leadership team ask for RevOps by name. They ask something more direct. How do we sell more without the commercial structure growing at the same pace?
The question usually comes in one of three forms. Which one sounds like yours?
How do we get ahead of our customers? You want to know which customers are buying less, which could buy more and which are about to leave. Early enough to act, not just to explain.
How do we put the sales team where it adds most value? You want your sellers free of data entry, chasing and reporting. Their time should go to the accounts and conversations that need judgement.
How do we cut the work each sale requires? You want an order to travel from first contact to payment without being re-keyed, re-checked or chased. Routine sales, follow-ups and renewals should run on their own. So that growth does not depend on adding people at the same rate.
Revenue operations answers all three. They share a root: departments, data and tools that do not work as one.
Signs your company needs revenue operations
You do not need a framework. Check these symptoms against your own company:
- Your reps copy data between systems, or keep private spreadsheets because the official ones are unreliable.
- Marketing waits days for a customer list your ERP could produce in seconds.
- Nobody notices a good customer has stopped ordering until the quarter’s figures show it.
- Sales and marketing report different numbers for the same thing.
- Nobody can say for sure which customers and products are profitable.
- Each department has its own supplier. Nobody checks that their work fits together.
- Selling more means hiring more, because every sale needs someone’s hands.
Two or three are normal. Five or more? The problem is not effort. It is the system.
Getting ahead of the customer
Picture a wholesaler. Its ERP shows that a regular customer’s orders have halved. In most companies, that signal sits unread. In a revenue system, it alerts the rep responsible. Or it sends an approved message on a channel the customer already uses, such as WhatsApp. Then it checks whether the customer orders again, and records the result.
You stop learning about lost customers from the quarterly figures. You learn in time to act.
Context matters, though. A customer may have gone quiet because that is their normal buying cycle. Or because their last order went wrong. Other signals call for other responses. A proposal still pending needs a follow-up. A change in what someone buys may open a conversation about other needs. The system should help your people read the signal before anyone acts.
Marketing has its win-back campaign. Sales has a reason to call. You have a figure you can trust. And nobody filled in an extra screen.
Recurring customers: technology without losing the personal touch
With customers who already buy from you, the worry is understandable. They have dealt with the same person for years. What if technology cools the relationship?
Designed well, it does the opposite. It takes care of what needs nobody: repeating a usual order, checking an invoice, knowing when a delivery will arrive. The customer sorts it out whenever they like, without waiting for someone to call back.
And it frees their salesperson for what does add value. When they visit or call, they no longer come to take down an order. They arrive knowing what the customer has bought, what they have stopped buying and what went wrong last month. And they bring something new to show: a product demonstration, an option the customer has not yet seen, an offer designed for their situation. The conversation starts where it should.
The problem is not the technology; it is the coldness with which it gets used when it is done badly. A message that sounds like a machine. A reminder that arrives for no reason. The art lies in making every interaction feel as natural as possible. The customer should feel they are dealing with the company they have always known, even with a system working behind it.
The rule is simple. Make the routine easy. Keep what matters personal.
Putting the sales team where it adds value
How much of your sales team’s week goes on selling? Salesforce asked 5,500 sales professionals in 2024, for the sixth edition of its State of Sales report. Reps spend 70% of their time on tasks that are not selling.
Not all of that is wasted. Some admin is necessary. But much of it is your sellers acting as glue between systems. Every hour spent re-keying an order is an hour not spent with a customer.
RevOps gives that time back in two ways. It automates the routine: the reminder, the follow-up, the data entry. And it puts context in front of your people when they need it. So the conversations that do need a human start in the right place.
Cutting the work each sale requires
A sale can move fast and then stall straight after. Administration re-keys the order. The customer repeats their details. Someone types the same information into another system.
Do you know how much work it takes to complete one order in your company?
We follow the whole journey, from first enquiry to payment. We look for duplicated steps, waiting time and errors at each hand-over. Then we connect systems, agree shared criteria and automate the repetitive steps. Exceptions get a clear route, and someone able to resolve them.
Field work can be designed too. The system can rank the week’s visits by each customer’s potential and risk. It can suggest the route. And it prepares every visit with the context the salesperson needs.
So the salesperson is no longer the one who simply takes down the order. They arrive with knowledge of their customer’s business: which products earn them the best margin, what is working for similar customers, which good practices they could adopt. They help the customer sell more and earn more. That visit is no longer a courtesy call. It is a reason to keep buying from you.
And we measure. How long an order takes, what it costs to serve, what incidents it creates, what margin it leaves. That tells you whether growth is making better use of your structure, or simply making it work harder.
What we learnt building a channel that sells on its own
A channel that sells almost without human intervention looks like magic from outside. It is anything but.
Every decision a salesperson makes in conversation has to become explicit. Which product suits this customer. Which price applies. When to suggest something more. What happens when a payment fails. When, despite everything, a person should step in.
The more than €15 million that channel brings in each year is the visible part. Underneath sits a lesson we apply in every project. Automation only works once you understand the business. First comes understanding how the company sells, and turning that knowledge into rules, data and systems. Technology comes second.
The channel never worked alone, either. Account managers looked after large clients and service packages that needed direct attention. The website let customers buy smaller products on their own. And the sales team itself steered customers online whenever that was the right route. That freed their time for the accounts that needed them.
That is efficiency taken to its limit: a sale that barely needs anyone’s hands, alongside a team that spends its time where judgement counts. If you are considering a digital channel, this is the real design work. What will it handle? How will it live alongside your sales team? Incentives, account allocation and responsibilities have to be designed too. Otherwise the channel competes with the people it was meant to help.
Two ways to work: with your suppliers, or building it ourselves
You probably already have an ERP partner, a web developer and perhaps a marketing agency. Revenue operations does not mean replacing any of them.
We can lead the change with your current suppliers. We define what your business needs. We design the architecture, set the requirements and coordinate the providers. We make sure everything works together. Your ERP partner extends the system it knows. Your agency keeps its campaigns.
Or we can build the software ourselves. When a specific tool would give you an edge, or no supplier fits, we develop it. An integration. A sales intelligence tool. An AI workflow.
Most projects mix the two. We might oversee an extension your ERP partner is building, while developing a tool of our own alongside it.
Two rules keep this honest. First, recommendation comes before delivery. We keep our role as advisers apart from our role as developers. So you can see why we propose one route over another. Second, you decide how deep we go. Want us to review your suppliers’ architecture, integrations and code? We will, and we will set quality and maintenance criteria too. If not, we stay with processes and results. Either way, we agree the scope with you, along with the authority to set priorities. Without that mandate, decisions never reach execution.
Where to start
Not with a tool. With questions. Try them on your own company.
How do your orders come in? Where does an enquiry wait, and for how long? What would your marketing team do tomorrow with the right data? What worries your sales director most?
Then we interpret what we hear. Your reps enter orders late? The next question is what that delay costs you. If nobody knows, the first job is to measure it. Before anything is automated.
Sometimes the answer is software. Sometimes it is a clearer process, or a decision about who owns what. Sometimes the right move is to leave well alone. AI comes in when it earns its place. Not before.
How you will know it is working
We can start with a focused diagnosis, support an implementation or take on the ongoing running of your revenue operations. In every case we agree three things before we begin: the problem, the starting point and the change we expect to see.
Then we go back to your business questions. Is your team spending more time on the opportunities that matter? Does each sale take less work, without the service suffering? Do you know your customers better, and act in time?
We choose indicators that answer those questions and compare them with the starting point. Implementation includes training your teams, documentation and deciding who maintains each piece. You need to be able to run the system yourself. And to notice when something drifts.
Questions leaders ask about RevOps
Is RevOps only for software companies?
No. If your revenue depends on marketing, sales and service working together, it applies to you. Distributors, manufacturers and professional services firms included.
Do we need to hire a RevOps team?
Not necessarily. In a mid-sized company, an external partner can take on much of the function. Commercial decisions stay firmly with you.
Can RevOps help us sell more without hiring more salespeople?
That is often the point. When routine sales and follow-ups stop depending on someone’s hands, revenue can grow faster than headcount. The aim is not a smaller team. It is a team that spends its time where it counts.
Do we have to replace our CRM or ERP?
Rarely. Most of the value comes from connecting what you already have, and using it better. Replacing it makes sense only when your current system is the real constraint.
Revenue already crosses every department in your company. The question is whether it does so by design. Or by hand.
Evidence
Sources cited
- Gartner — Gartner Predicts 75% of the Highest Growth Companies in the World Will Deploy a RevOps Model by 2025 (17 May 2021).
- Forrester — Revenue Operations: Driving Better Customer Experiences And Growth (undated; checked 11 October 2026).
- Salesforce — State of Sales, sixth edition: sales AI statistics (25 July 2024; survey of 5,500 sales professionals, March–April 2024).
- CNBC — The 10 fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. right now (18 January 2023; LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise 2023 data, January 2018 to July 2022).