Revenue Intelligence vs RevOps

RevOps, short for revenue operations, is a function: people and processes that make sales, marketing, customer success and finance work as one revenue chain. Revenue Intelligence is software that reads the data from that chain, compares it and shows where revenue is leaking. RevOps decides how the process should run. Revenue Intelligence shows where it runs differently in practice. Neither replaces the other.

What is RevOps?

In many B2B companies, every department has its own systems, its own definitions and its own targets. Marketing measures leads, sales measures won deals, finance measures invoiced revenue, service measures tickets. Every department can hit its own targets while revenue as a whole leaks, because nobody is responsible for the handovers in between.

RevOps is the answer to that. A RevOps function is responsible for:

• Processes across departments. How a lead becomes a deal, a deal an order, an order an invoice.
• Systems and data. Which systems exist, how they are connected, which fields are mandatory, which definitions apply.
• Reporting. One set of numbers everyone agrees on.
• Rules. Who may give which discount, when a deal goes to finance, what the approval route is.

In large companies, RevOps is a team. In a company with EUR 2M to EUR 20M in revenue, it is often one person, or a collection of tasks spread across the sales manager, the financial controller and someone who is "good with the CRM".

What is Revenue Intelligence?

Revenue Intelligence is software. It connects to the systems in the revenue chain, such as CRM, ERP, billing and support, and puts their data side by side. It looks for differences: a deal without an invoice, a contract without indexation, a customer buying less. It puts an amount on each one and brings it to the right person. A full explanation is in What is Revenue Intelligence?.

Revenue Intelligence platform vs RevOps team

The confusion arises because both have "the revenue chain" as their subject. The difference is in what they do.

A RevOps team cannot put 4,000 invoices a month next to the orders. Software can, but software cannot decide whether a deviation is an error or a legitimate exception, and it cannot agree with sales how discounts will be approved from now on.

How do RevOps and Revenue Intelligence work together?

The combination works as a loop.

1. RevOps sets out how it should work. Every won deal must have an order within five working days. Discounts above 10 percent require approval. Contracts with indexation are adjusted from 1 January.
2. Revenue Intelligence checks whether it happens that way. Which deals still have no order after five days? Which invoices carry a discount above 10 percent without approval? Which contracts have not been indexed?
3. RevOps looks for the cause. Is it a process error, a system error, a training issue? Or is the rule not realistic?
4. RevOps adjusts the process. And Revenue Intelligence measures whether the adjustment works.

Without RevOps, Revenue Intelligence produces a list nobody owns. Without Revenue Intelligence, RevOps designs processes without knowing where they fail.

Where it goes wrong without one or the other

RevOps without checks

A RevOps function spends a lot of time building reports and investigating differences. Every month an export from the CRM, an export from the accounts, a spreadsheet in between. That takes days, and it only covers what someone thought to check. Deviations that do not fit the spreadsheet are left lying. And as soon as the person who built the spreadsheet leaves, the checking stops.

Checks without RevOps

The software flags 60 deals without an invoice. Sales says it is finance. Finance says sales did not pass the order through properly. Nobody picks it up, and after three months nobody looks at the alerts any more. The question of who should own this is worked out in Who is responsible for revenue leakage?.

Worked example: where RevOps time goes

Worked example: suppose a company with EUR 12M in revenue has one RevOps employee. That person spends about four days a month producing and checking revenue reports: running exports, matching them in Excel, investigating differences, formatting the report.

• Four days a month is 48 days a year, more than two months of work.
• In that time, the employee checks the 30 largest customers thoroughly. The other 270 customers are only sampled.
• A missed indexation of EUR 1,200 a year at a smaller customer therefore stays out of view. Twenty such cases together come to EUR 24,000.

When the comparison happens automatically, the time shifts to what a person does better: working out why things go wrong and adjusting the process. The amounts are made up to show the proportions; actual time spent varies widely from company to company.

Which comes first: RevOps or Revenue Intelligence?

That depends on where you stand.

Start with RevOps if there is no agreed process. If nobody knows when a deal goes to finance, what the approval rules are or which system is leading, software mainly produces a long list of differences with no direction. Make the agreements first.

Start with Revenue Intelligence if there are agreements, but nobody knows whether they are followed. Software then quickly shows where things actually go wrong, and that helps RevOps prioritise.

Start with insight if you do not know where you stand. A one-off review shows where the biggest leaks are, and so whether the problem lies in processes, systems or data.

The wider place of RevOps among other software and functions is covered in Revenue Intelligence vs Business Intelligence, the overview article of this series. The difference with specific RevOps tooling is in Revenue Intelligence vs Revenue Operations Software.

Checklist for a RevOps function

Use these questions to decide whether your RevOps function has the control it needs:

• For every handover in the chain (lead to deal, deal to order, order to invoice), is it written down what must happen and within what timeframe?
• For every handover, is it measured whether that happens, and how often it does not?
• Is there an owner for each type of deviation?
• How much time a month goes into merging data by hand?
• What happens to the checking when the person who does it is on holiday for two weeks?
• Are contract terms such as indexation and minimum volumes checked anywhere, or only for the largest customers?

Frequently asked questions

Does Revenue Intelligence replace a RevOps employee?

No. It takes over the repetitive comparison work, so that person has time for causes and process improvements. Judgement and agreements between departments remain human work.

Does a EUR 5M company need a RevOps team?

Rarely a whole team. It does need someone responsible for the revenue chain as a whole. That can be a financial controller, an operations manager or the managing director. What matters is that the role is explicit.

Is RevOps the same as sales operations?

No. Sales operations focuses on the sales team: CRM, pipeline, targets. RevOps covers the whole chain, including marketing, service and finance. The handover to finance is precisely where a lot of revenue leaks.

What does Revenue Intelligence give a RevOps function?

Continuous visibility of where processes deviate, with an amount per deviation. That lets RevOps prioritise on euros rather than on who complains loudest.