Introduction

In the past few years, RevOps has become a trendy term in the startup space.

Chances are, if you've been anywhere near the startup scene lately, you’ve heard this phrase thrown around just as much as terms like "AI-powered" or "Metaverse." LinkedIn has suddenly become flooded with RevOps leaders, and investors have started asking about it, even in early pitch meetings.

However, despite all the buzz, only a few people seem to understand what RevOps is supposed to do—and, most importantly, whether it is worth the hype, especially for early-stage startups.

Here’s what startups need to know about RevOps, from why it’s critical to startup success to how to implement it, even in the early stages of the business.

What is RevOps, and does your startup need it?

While each startup’s scaling journey is unique, these journeys do tend to have some similarities.

The startup starts gaining traction—sales are accelerating, and founders are desperately trying to find a system to keep all the sales processes and prospects in one place. At the same time, the marketing team uses its own tools and solutions to keep track of incoming leads, and the customer support team probably relies on a bunch of spreadsheets to track interactions with customers. 

Meanwhile, investors are asking about the KPIs and operational data, but integrating everything seems impossible, and no one is quite sure if the numbers are actually correct.

If this sounds painfully familiar, you're not alone, and this is exactly what the Revenue Operations (RevOps) function is supposed to resolve. 

Essentially, the RevOps function is the operating system for modern revenue teams. In simple terms, it’s like the glue that holds your sales, marketing, and customer success teams together. It ensures they are working in sync by seamlessly coordinating the customer journey, data flow, and revenue processes.

Although it might not seem important in the early stages, establishing a comprehensive system like RevOps earlier will allow the company to establish healthy practices from the start. If a company still ignores the RevOps function at $10M+ ARR, misalignment between commercial team processes and data will become an extremely expensive and complex issue that can massively hamper growth. 

"We're too small for RevOps" is the startup equivalent of "I'll start going to the gym next month." By the time you desperately need it, you're already behind. Here are three key reasons to care about RevOps as an early-stage startup:

1. Bad habits scale. The manual process that typically takes 15 minutes when you have five customers can take 15 hours or more when you scale to 100+ clients. Those early data discrepancies between sales and marketing may become revenue-killing monsters as you grow.
2. Fixing bad habits early on is much cheaper than rebuilding in a few years. Think about implementing RevOps like building a house—it’s easier and much more cost-efficient to consider the structure, plumbing, and communications before the house is actually built versus tearing up the entire structure a few years later because things simply don't work.
3. Having the right data is mission-critical for any startup. It’s hard to make the right decisions on growth if you have no idea about your sales cycle, channel conversion accuracy, or true customer acquisition costs. Similarly, it might be impossible to secure your Series A round if you don’t have a single view of your commercial metrics and confidence in reporting them to the investor. Last year, Waveup helped to support over 120 different projects across seed to Series A fundraising. However, the lack of reliable, accurate data was an issue in many deals, delaying investor term sheets and causing confusion around where and how to prioritize growth.

RevOps statistics

The numbers tend to support the criticality of the RevOps function. A typical startup without RevOps can face the following:

• 20-30% revenue leakage from process gaps
• 20%+ longer sales cycles due to manual processes
• 15-20% decreased win rates from poor data hygiene

These issues add to countless hours spent reconciling the data between various systems. Plus, startups miss multiple opportunities due to revenue leakage and a lack of understanding of where the company is winning and losing. No wonder that in 2025, 75% of the world's fastest-growing companies will adopt RevOps strategies, according to Gartner. 

Starting a RevOps function: a practical guide

If the evidence has convinced you that your startup needs RevOps, you’re probably now wondering when and how to start (and how to launch the RevOps function without raising an extra round to finance it).

Here are some early signs you might need a RevOps function:

• Your team and tech stack are growing.
• Your workflows are unmatched, and employee responsibilities are not always clear.
• Your go-to-market teams are operating in silos or are not speaking the same language.
• You have different metrics that matter for each team (marketing reports on MQLs versus sales looks at SQLs).
• Your teams use different tools to track customer and lead interactions.
• Your CRM is unorganized, with no standards, and full of duplicates.

If this sounds like your company, it’s probably a good time to start building the RevOps team. The good news is you don’t have to do it overnight. Even better—many startups can build a RevOps function without hiring expensive RevOps leaders right away.

Phase 1: Foundation (months 0-3)

Start with process mapping. Document how a lead becomes a customer, identifying every touchpoint and handoff. This exercise alone often reveals immediate opportunities for improvement.

Often, the founder or executive team can handle process mapping and initial structure/mapping. Later, as you grow, you might hire a RevOps generalist who can:

• Create basic sales and revenue reporting,
• Define roles and responsibilities of all GTM functions,
• Identify essential revenue process milestones and make sure each team is clear on what are their priorities and core metrics,
• Implement and manage a CRM system (HubSpot or similar),
• Identify and implement other high-impact tools to manage your revenue operations,
• Implement basic automation for repetitive and/or manual tasks,
• Manage the RevOps tech stack, and
• Create and maintain sales process documentation.

Phase 2: Optimization (months 4-8)

Once the startup sets the RevOps foundation, focus on:

• Implementing standardized sales processes,
• Optimizing handoffs between departments,
• Establishing data hygiene practices to ensure data-driven over gut-driven decisions,
• Setting a few critical KPIs for each function as well as a “North Star” or overarching goal that brings alignment to different teams’ reporting,
• Making sure all teams are working on a unified methodology and operate from the same, unified data set, and
• Creating unified detailed reporting dashboards to manage progress and success.

At this stage, you start seeing the real benefits of RevOps, including more accurate forecasting, faster sales cycles, and fewer dropped balls.

Phase 3: Scale (months 9+)

After establishing the right infrastructure, processes, and data foundation, you can start getting into the advanced RevOps tasks. 

These tasks can include:

• Building forecasting models and utilizing predictive modeling,
• Implementing advanced analytics, 
• Creating complex automation workflows for further process optimization, and 
• Adding more tools and systems for further impact.

Common pitfalls to avoid

While establishing a RevOps function is sure to improve communication and scaling for your startup, some mistakes can hinder progress. Here are the top mistakes startups make in building RevOps:

• Tool overload: Don't be tempted to buy every shiny tool. Think about the core solutions you really need, and add the rest later when the processes demand them. Consider how different technologies will work together before buying them. Adding a tool is always easy, but removing it later on can be a nightmare. That’s why you must carefully plan how you will drive the usage of each tool within your teams. 

• Forgetting about people: RevOps isn't just about systems and processes. It's about people. No scalable RevOps blueprints will work unless people actually use them day-to-day. Invest time in training, getting buy-in from teams, tracking the progress early on, and ensuring everyone is aligned on the processes and execution consistently.
  
  
• Perfect over progress: It’s difficult to get the system perfect (if not impossible). Every new day and every new customer interaction will bring fresh changes and challenges to your processes. There will always be new data points and new angles to consider. Thus, don't wait to perfect the system process. Start with “good enough” and iterate from there. Also, make sure to regularly check and align if the system still works well by looking at things like forecast accuracy, revenue leakage, process adoption rates, lead response times, or customer handoff satisfaction.

Build RevOps for comprehensive startup growth

The final, and probably most common, pitfall is thinking about RevOps as a corporate function. You don’t need an entire RevOps department or thousands of documents and SLAs on how to manage things. You don’t need a full team of analysts and revenue specialists, either.

All you need is one person early on to think about revenue holistically. Map your processes, consider the customer journey, clean up your data, and align the tools and KPIs across the commercial departments. 

Implementing RevOps will be the difference between growing with intention and growing with chaos—and your future self (and your investors) will thank you.

Remember: the best time to start RevOps was when you founded your company. The second best time is now.

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