RevOps is meant to bridge strategy and execution by uniting data, technology, and teams around shared revenue objectives. In practice, though, many leaders find themselves spending more time fixing issues than accelerating growth.
Here are the blockers that most often slow down enterprise RevOps:
This guide shows how to remove those roadblocks with a clear RevOps framework that helps you plan better, move faster, and build consistent growth.
Across enterprise teams, "RevOps" can mean everything from quota-setting support to end-to-end revenue strategy. When each department defines the role differently, ownership can become blurred; some expect long-range planning, while others call for day-to-day tooling or deal support.
Without a clear charter, RevOps can end up taking on ad-hoc tasks, losing influence, and struggling to provide the alignment executives often look for.
An unclear RevOps scope can eventually slow down the entire revenue engine.
In short, an undefined RevOps scope doesn't just frustrate the team, it undermines collaboration, distorts performance metrics, and puts predictable revenue growth at risk.
To gain clarity around the scope of their responsibilities, RevOps leaders should start by securing formal buy-in from Sales leadership on what the function is expected to own, influence, and deliver. Since expectations vary across organizations, alignment should focus on removing ambiguity and creating clear accountability.
The conversation might cover:
Picture this: Your marketing team tracks lead engagement in their automation platform while sales relies on completely different scoring criteria in the CRM. Customer success has its own view of account health, and finance operates from yet another system. Each department thinks they have the complete picture, but they're all working with fragments.
Data living in disparate systems, like customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and customer success (CS) platforms, leads to myopic views of the customer journey, inconsistent reporting, and unreliable forecasts.
Inaccurate or incomplete data due to poor data hygiene or lack of data governance contributes to the problem.
When revenue data lives in disconnected systems, your team spends hours reconciling numbers instead of driving strategy. Sales and Marketing debate which pipeline figure is correct. Customer success presents one view of account health, while finance presents another. You end up explaining conflicting KPIs on forecast calls.
For RevOps, incomplete or inaccurate data erodes credibility fast. It becomes increasingly challenging to model territories, establish defensible quotas, justify headcount, or demonstrate the ROI of compensation programs. Leaders may stop trusting dashboards and default to gut decisions. Careful planning can turn into a series of reactions.
The enterprise-level consequences are often costly:
Unify definitions and inputs. Establish a shared data dictionary across CRM, Customer Success, and Finance so that core fields have consistent meanings everywhere, including account hierarchy, product catalog, stage definitions, owner/crediting logic, effective dates, territory IDs, and quota attributes.
Partner with sales compensation leaders to integrate plan components and rules, including crediting policies, payout curves and caps, accelerators/SPIFFs, draw terms, clawbacks, and attainment logic, ensuring performance and payout calculations align.
Assign clear ownership and governance. Name data stewards by system or data type and define what they own:
Provide stewards with SLAs for data quality, certify key datasets, document lineage, and maintain an exception queue for fixes. This reduces rework, speeds root-cause analysis, and improves audit readiness.
Align on the KPIs that drive decisions and make them visible. Standardize a short list of operating metrics and why each matters:
Use shared dashboards so everyone is looking at the exact numbers. The payoff: less time reconciling spreadsheets, more productive forecast calls, and tighter GTM execution.
Build trust with automated quality controls and a fixed cadence. Here are some recommendations to put validation rules and audits on a schedule:
Clean, connected data lets RevOps produce forecasts that hold up in the boardroom, analyze performance with confidence, and support strategic decisions without second-guessing the numbers.
Varicent Sales Planning helps by unifying disconnected data from RevOps, Sales Compensation, and Planning to produce accurate, decision-ready KPIs and scenarios. Explore Sales Planning.
In enterprise orgs, teams often run on different clocks and definitions, so alignment breaks in predictable ways:
Why does this happen? It could be for a couple of reasons:
The result can be that each function optimizes for its own scorecard instead of shared revenue outcomes.
A lack of cross-functional alignment in revenue objectives results in disjointed customer experience, revenue leakage, extended sales cycles, reduced customer retention, and internal inefficiencies.
In Varicent's SPM Market Spotlight Report, 92% of revenue leaders say internal misalignment is costing them between 6% and 15% of their revenue. But, only 21% say they are actively working to fix the problem.
Over time, teams stop questioning misalignment. Fixing it feels overwhelming, with too many owners, systems, and steps. The friction gets absorbed into daily work, and performance declines.
Teams adapt to inefficiencies, and the system absorbs the strain. Without benchmarks for systemic efficiency, teams might assume performance is near optimal when it's actually far from it.
Meanwhile, misalignment between functions creates cracks between teams that often lack ownership or accountability. Everyone sees the problem, but no one's accountable for solving it. Success at the departmental level could mask broader inefficiency across the revenue engine.
RevOps best practices show that top-performing companies don't treat alignment as a secondary concern, addressed only after strategy is set and targets are in motion. In Varicent's SPM Market Spotlight study, 50% of C-suite leaders said cross-functional alignment is just as critical to hitting quota as the quota itself.
Top performers view alignment as a primary driver of commercial performance. They don't optimize function by function. Instead, they build operating models that coordinate across teams and translate strategy into execution with greater speed, consistency, and scale.
Practical steps to consider:
The key is diagnosing where friction exists, estimating the revenue at risk from previous delays or execution gaps, and then implementing structural fixes that align planning calendars and shared dashboards across teams.
Picture the enterprise software graveyard: expensive tools that promise transformation but end up as glorified spreadsheet replacements. Teams revert to manual workarounds because the "revolutionary" platform cannot integrate with their CRM, or the steep learning curve stalls adoption.
This is what happens when RevOps teams are given powerful technology without the necessary integration, enablement, or alignment to make it work. Instead of driving automation and performance, tech stacks trend toward becoming bloated and underused. The result is high costs, fragmented systems, and tools that fail to meet their promise.
As underutilized technology stacks up, the organization takes on high operational costs, poor return on investment (ROI) on tech investments, the inability to automate key processes, and time-consuming manual workarounds.
These technology failures ripple through the entire organization, potentially reducing overall profitability and creating distrust for future software solutions that could actually be beneficial.
When the last three "game-changing" platforms failed to deliver, getting buy-in for the next one can be exponentially harder.
Enterprise teams invest heavily in tools, but without integration and adaptability, the impact stalls. Planning drifts from execution, manual handoffs multiply, and forecast accuracy suffers.
Here's what a well-integrated RevOps environment can look like:
Varicent can help you build that reality.
The result is a RevOps rhythm where planning and execution stay in lockstep, manual steps shrink, and forecasts hold up under scrutiny.
A lack of standardized processes and poor change management can lead to a multitude of challenges:
From a change management perspective, implementing new processes, tools, or structures across a large enterprise can face resistance from entrenched teams and leadership. Getting user buy-in and sustained adoption requires careful planning and execution.
Here's what this looks like in practice: Territory planning happens differently in each region. Quota calculations involve mysterious spreadsheets that only two people understand. New hires spend months figuring out workflows that should take days to learn. When you try to standardize, some team members push back with responses like, "Yeah, that's too much work. Our system works well enough."
For RevOps leaders, weak processes often manifest as real, daily pain: hours lost stitching together territory data before a Q1 kickoff; regional managers spinning up their own spreadsheets because the central model lags; and headcount plans stalled because workflows can't scale.
Work gets duplicated, errors slip through, and quarters start with a reconciliation fire drill instead of proactive growth planning. The hidden costs can include higher operating expenses, slower time-to-market, and mounting fatigue that pushes top talent to the exit.
The same technology solutions that address underutilized tech stacks could help standardize processes across the organization. Advanced RevOps platforms like Varicent enable consistent workflows while providing the flexibility teams need to handle unique situations.
Purpose-built technology could reduce resistance to change by automating the manual, repetitive tasks people hate doing anyway. When new processes actually make work easier rather than adding complexity, adoption becomes easier to achieve.
The key is implementing solutions that standardize the underlying infrastructure while allowing teams to maintain their preferred interfaces and workflows. This approach could reduce change management friction while delivering the consistency and scalability enterprise RevOps requires.
Enterprise RevOps teams are often tasked with owning everything, from data architecture and tech stack governance to forecasting, capacity models, and GTM strategy. Yet many teams are staffed like a small support desk.
One role is expected to blend the skills of a data scientist, systems architect, process engineer, and P&L owner. With no defined career paths or enablement budget, even the best hires struggle to gain depth in every domain.
The talent gap may show up like this:
Organizations that can't find RevOps talent to fill skills gaps face a limited ability to execute strategic initiatives, overreliance on external consultants, and burnout within the team.
These talent gaps could create broader organizational challenges, too, including reduced profitability, slower speed-to-market, and increased employee frustration. When RevOps teams can't execute on strategic initiatives, the entire revenue engine might suffer.
Investing in RevOps talent and enablement is key. The coaching problem extends beyond RevOps teams.
Varicent's SPM Market Spotlight Report found that 79% of sellers say real-time, personalized coaching helps them perform better. Only 25% say they receive coaching that meets that standard. The same gap exists in RevOps development.
To close those gaps, you can:
RevOps is increasingly earning a seat at the table. Gartner projects that by 2026, 75% of the highest-growth companies will adopt a RevOps model, up from less than 30% today — a clear signal that RevOps is shifting from back-office support to strategic growth partner.
However, proving its long-term impact and justifying continued investment remains a challenge.
RevOps teams often find themselves in a frustrating position. They know they're driving value, but quantifying that value in terms that executives care about is hard. When budget season arrives, RevOps initiatives might get cut because the ROI isn't immediately obvious.
The challenge is compounded by the nature of RevOps success itself. When RevOps does its job well, salespeople get celebrated as heroes. But, that success depends entirely on RevOps setting those salespeople up to succeed. When RevOps tightens data, processes, and plans, the benefits are evident in sales and finance metrics. Unless you track and share those successes, the credit goes elsewhere.
The lack of visibility in RevOps success often leads to underinvestment in critical RevOps initiatives and the perception of RevOps as a cost center rather than a growth driver.
When RevOps is viewed as overhead rather than a revenue engine, strategic initiatives may be starved of resources just when they're needed most. This could lead to missed opportunities to grow revenue and a slower time to market for new initiatives.
Varicent's SPM Market Spotlight Report reveals a telling statistic. Only 27% of sales managers say they understand the planning inputs behind a rep's number. The rest are left to coach without visibility into the structure behind the expectations.
Demonstrate RevOps value by sharing key information about territories and quotas with mid-level sales leaders to enable their coaching.
When sales managers understand why territories are structured a certain way, what factors influence quota calculations, and how capacity planning affects their team's targets, they can coach more effectively.
Better coaching leads to improved performance, which drives higher quota attainment.
When RevOps can show direct connections between their work and sales results, the value proposition becomes clear to executives who might have previously viewed RevOps as a necessary cost rather than a growth driver.
Varicent's sales performance management software could address many of the core challenges that limit enterprise RevOps teams. The platform offers three integrated capabilities that work together:
Book a demo to see how Varicent's integrated platform addresses your specific RevOps challenges.
For deeper insights into revenue leadership challenges and RevOps best practices, our SPM Market Spotlight Report provides additional research from enterprise revenue leaders.