Here’s Why RevOps and Sales Are Misaligned (and How to Get on the Same Page)

RevOps – the business framework that unifies marketing, sales, and customer success – is catching on. In fact, Gartner recently predicted that, by 2025, “75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy a RevOps model.” The benefits of RevOps are clear. By bringing together these often-siloed departments, companies can identify strategies and tools that improve internal alignment and the customer experience, ultimately driving growth. 

However, the increased adoption of RevOps reveals a crucial misconception: that sales professionals must do their work within a customer relationship management (CRM) application. Most organizations have been conditioned to think this way because their business depends on data in CRM, so it follows that salespeople should be working in the CRM as well. But that’s just not true. 

If you ask salespeople how they actually work, they’ll tell you that their job is spread across several applications that are mostly disconnected from CRM. This is a recipe for negative outcomes. It leads to unhappy and underproductive salespeople who must navigate disparate tools and business issues regarding process adherence and data hygiene. 

Simply put, traditional CRMs were never designed with salespeople’s workflows in mind. Consequently, actual adoption by salespeople of CRMs and such tools as Salesforce remains low. To combat this, RevOps might insist salespeople work in the CRM, or create overly rigid workflows to drive process adherence, but neither of these strategies sets salespeople up for success. 

Thus, a vicious cycle emerges: RevOps leaders create guardrails to drive adoption and process adherence to ensure data is flowing into the CRM. But because the CRM isn’t where salespeople are working, those guardrails only generate busy-work and make it harder for reps to do their jobs.

The outcome of this cycle? Sales reps spend a disproportionate amount of time on non-revenue-generating activities, and RevOps leaders are left feeling even more frustrated with the lack of CRM adoption in their organizations.

It’s time to get RevOps leaders and sales teams on the same page to begin truly reaping the benefits of RevOps. Here are a few tips for how to go about it. 

1. Build empathy for your sales team

Not all RevOps leaders have a background in sales, so understanding the struggles reps face at work may not come intuitively. Therefore, it’s essential that RevOps leaders take the time to talk with salespeople and observe how they work within the organization. What are their biggest pain points? Where are they doing most of their work? Which tools or processes would help them become more efficient? Which tools can be consolidated into a revenue team workspace? Regularly connecting with sales reps to discuss their needs and concerns builds empathy and understanding between teams.

2. Adopt the right tools (and then put them in one place)

Similar to the days of shadow IT – where developers were buying cloud services because they couldn’t get what they needed on-premises from central IT – salespeople are turning to other apps because they can’t get their work done in CRM like Salesforce. It’s important that RevOps not only determine which tools reps need, but that they then consolidate them into a unified revenue team workspace that’s connected to CRM. This ensures salespeople have all the tools they need in one place, and that data is flowing into the CRM.

3. Be flexible when it comes to process adherence

RevOps leaders should be focused on building empathy for reps and improving the speed of their workflows – not creating rigid rules that frustrate or slow them down. Being flexible when it comes to tools and processes is the key to empowering sales teams to perform at their highest level. RevOps needs to come to terms with the fact that salespeople’s workflows oftentimes won’t include CRM directly. Accordingly, RevOps team members should be prepared to handle some (or all) of the CRM data input that would otherwise disrupt reps’ workflows.

4. Require better data hygiene

Data has become more valuable than ever, and is a vital element for making business decisions regarding things like forecasting. But if your salespeople aren’t entering data, then forecasting becomes impossible (or inaccurate, at best) for sales managers. Getting reps to be better about data hygiene starts with creating a workspace they genuinely love to work in that is connected to CRM. It’s up to RevOps to make good data hygiene an easy practice for salespeople. 

Despite the fact that most organizations struggle with RevOps and sales misalignment, it’s not too late to turn things around. By implementing the strategies above, companies can eliminate workflow drag and friction between teams and empower every member of the organization to be successful in their role.