Revenue Operations (RevOps) sits at the heart of systems integration within businesses, aligning sales, marketing, customer success, finance and other functions.
We look at the value of this emerging executive function and how having the correct system enables it to thrive.
With the ever-expanding and complex software stack that every company can now access, systems integration has become an increasingly important function within most businesses. And as a result, the implementation of Revenue Operations has become just as vital.
Integrating new and current systems effectively into the fabric of a business is as critical as ensuring that the technology communicates well enough to function as a cohesive ecosystem.
The depth of insight into the overall business required to achieve this makes it necessary to manage the change from a human perspective, as well as from a technological one.
Achieving an ROI on the often significant cost of software and applications means that each colleague and each department needs to understand how to use the technology stack in the way the business wants, to achieve the greatest benefit. Reducing the likelihood of data silos and inefficiencies caused by disjointed systems can build towards capturing some of that value.
What is Revenue Operations?
This is very relevant when looking at the role of Revenue Operations (RevOps), which sits at the heart of systems integration as it aligns sales, marketing, and customer success, with the aim of increasing revenue potential.
According to Dini Mehta, ex-Chief Revenue Officer at Lattice (the people management platform), RevOps is a strategic framework that brings together all revenue-related activities across an organisation, acting as the glue that holds different departments together. In this way, RevOps can be viewed as the foundation of revenue management and growth.
The role of RevOps has been around since the early 2000s, as businesses aimed to create a holistic view of the sales cycle and instil an efficient order-to-cash process that enhanced marketing, sales and finance teams.
It has been codified in recent years, often with a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) being installed to lead this process.
According to recent data, in 2025 the CRO is the sixth fastest-growing role in the UK on LinkedIn as businesses look to drive revenue growth and improve financial performance in difficult trading conditions.
Typically, successful individuals have previous experience as Commercial Directors, given the requirement for strategic thinking and financial acumen. This experience provides a customer-centric approach and 360-degree view of the sales cycle through prior marketing insight, sales expertise, and, crucially, digital awareness.
Intuitively, the team that sits below the CRO is comprised of the departments that are directly generating revenue, i.e. sales, marketing and customer success. Centralising these departments around the correct technology to ensure effective knowledge sharing and operational efficiency enables productivity and, therefore, greater revenue growth.
Why is the role of RevOps important?
Alongside the growing buzz around integrating AI into business practices, businesses must also reflect on how they are using current tools and whether they are getting value for money.
Establishing best practices to integrate these tools has a multitude of benefits across data analysis, growth and revenue potential, as well as highlighting the effectiveness of a particular software for your business.
A holistic approach ensures that leaders can have more confidence that their organisation is adopting the tool appropriately and is fundamentally improving productivity. This will lead to better decision-making that can improve the scalability of a business.
In-house Integration – Common Practices and Pitfalls
Integrating any system across a business, whether that be in a start-up or a publicly listed company, is hard. It is not a side-of-desk task. The stakeholder assigned to lead the systems integration will likely already have a day job to do, so to expect them to effectively deliver a holistic integration programme at the same time is ambitious.
Getting a new application integrated technologically can outweigh the need to make sure colleagues really understand how to use it. This creates a reliance on manual processes and misalignment between teams as they hope to ‘pick it up as they go along.’
Not only this, but revenue growth management continues to rise in importance given the inflationary market conditions and difficulty of supply chains. This is particularly prevalent within the offshore wind market, where we are seeing a rollback in the development of wind farms in order to manage revenue growth in the near term. What this industry has done well is to implement appropriate systems to grow revenues, and it is amongst the best at investing in capability building. Companies that do this are 2.4 times more likely to capture and sustain value.
The financial services sector has also been an early adopter of the RevOps model, given the importance of real-time data collection and analysis to their bottom lines.
Tight management of revenue streams is crucial, and ensuring these functions are aligned has enabled the industry to combat the growth of FinTech and stabilise profitability.
McKinsey states that a key challenge to revenue growth management and the systems that are required for this management are the levels of proficiency that exist across a business. With knowledge often centralised, it is often difficult to scale the operation.
Having an efficient system that people can understand and that has been properly implemented is an excellent enabler to reduce this centralisation.
Coupled with this, to scale revenue operations systems integration, it is important to ensure there is an effective knowledge-sharing process. This can be a train-the-trainer approach that implements a top-down methodology; however, this can limit the effectiveness as the information gets passed down.
With AI’s growing importance within business operations, this can assist in having a robust and well-established blueprint for implementing complex systems. This will allow you to truly see the ROI on any systems you are looking at bringing in. A dedicated RevOps function goes a long way to managing these functions and systems, but it is critically important to ensure that the technology used is implemented effectively and utilised proficiently, which is best achieved through external operators.
External Partner Integration – Why Bring in Experts
Given the difficulty of implementing systems internally, bringing in external expertise can be a sure fire way to ensure that the system you are looking to implement is done so effectively from the beginning, and has the best chance of uptake across the business.
It doesn’t always make sense to commit to full-time, permanent expertise, given the frequency that systems are implemented. Being able to flexibly pull on external resources can enable an implementation project to be conducted efficiently and effectively.
The benefit of having an external project team also lends itself to having a fleshed-out project plan and timeline. This will often mean that there is a better understanding of the goals of the integration process, as the team can act as a sparring partner to senior leadership who are looking to implement the system.
Getting a very clear view of what you are looking to implement will ratify your decision to integrate and help align stakeholders around the need for the system. This can be for a myriad of reasons, including cost reduction, automation of business processes to unlock human resources reallocated to more important tasks that require decision-making, and improving productivity.
Experienced external experts are likely to understand the pitfalls of these programmes, having managed them before. An external perspective can also be helpful in recognising the specificities of the implementation to the organisation and ensuring that the project sticks to its initial objectives, given that it is their sole responsibility.
Freshminds takes a bespoke approach to finding the correct consultant or consulting team to support your systems integration from audit to implementation. Ensuringthat you have the right external support that understands how to effectively deliver these programmes, garners your business the best chance of the greatest ROI. Your employees will have the greatest possible chance of understanding how to use the new system effectively, and the ecosystem communicates to bring you the greatest view of your customers.
With better data, you can improve customer acquisition and retention: increasing your pool of customers through unified data improves the impact and productivity of marketing and sales to improve conversion.
Jack Boyce is a senior consultant in the Freshminds On Demand team. Contact Jack for more information about Revenue Operations roles, and how Freshminds can support businesses.
