B2B growth shouldn’t feel like guesswork.
Yet many businesses hit revenue ceilings. Not because they lack great products or people, but because of hidden bottlenecks in their revenue operations. We’ve seen these patterns play out across hundreds of companies, which is why we’re writing a book to help you spot and solve them.
In the meantime, here are five of the most common (and painful) revenue bottlenecks, and how RevOps can help clear the way for consistent, scalable growth.
First things first: let’s define Revenue Operations. It is a strategic business function that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive predictable revenue growth. It integrates people, processes, technology, and data across the entire customer lifecycle to improve efficiency, transparency, and performance.
At its core, RevOps breaks down organizational silos to create a unified go-to-market strategy. This ensures that all revenue-generating teams are working toward shared goals, using the same data, and operating under consistent systems.
For a more in-depth explanation, check our blog post about what RevOps is. Now, onto those revenue bottlenecks.
Marketing, sales, and customer success often operate in isolation, using different tools, definitions, and KPIs. We’ve seen it so many times: one team doesn’t include the other in meetings or decisions that they should be involved in. It happens much more often than you think, for many different reasons. It leads to fragmented customer journeys and missed opportunities.
Here’s how RevOps can fix it: Centralize data and unify KPIs across go-to-market teams. Implement a shared CRM, or even better, have these different teams work within a platform like HubSpot that does it all. And set up dashboards that make performance transparent and collaborative.
Quick tip: Use a RevOps audit to identify duplicated tools and reporting gaps, then streamline.
Efficiently and effectively handing over leads from marketing to sales plays a big role in your revenue generation. But what often happens, is that marketing hands off MQLs that sales doesn’t trust. And sales doesn’t follow up fast enough, or at all. Qualified leads leak out of the funnel.
Here’s how RevOps can fix it: Build a lead scoring model co-owned by marketing and sales. Set SLAs (service level agreements) and automate alerts to ensure timely follow-ups. And monitor if leads slip through the cracks, and tweak accordingly.
Quick tip: Define and document your lead lifecycle stages clearly to improve alignment.
Sales forecasts tend to vary wildly month to month. And while we do understand that forecasting can be tricky, these variations make it really difficult to generate revenue at a steady pace. Leadership often makes decisions based on gut feel rather than accurate data. And that might be surprising, with all the platforms we have available today you would think that we have enough data available for decision-making.
Here’s how RevOps can fix it: Standardize pipeline stages and win probabilities. Use historical data to model conversion rates and make your forecasts data-driven. And make sure you have all relevant data synced in 1 central platform.
Quick tip: Layer in AI tools that flag deals at risk based on rep behavior and deal velocity.
The problem we often see is that the focus on revenue ends at the sale. There’s no structured plan for upselling, cross-selling, or renewing existing customers. And that’s strange, because everyone in business agrees that the easiest client to convince is the one that is already a happy paying customer.
Here’s how RevOps can fix it: Integrate Customer Service into the revenue engine. Create post-sale playbooks and track expansion pipeline the same way you do new business.
Quick tip: Use account-based insights to tailor expansion offers based on product usage and engagement data.
Far too often, teams are hitting their own KPIs but missing the company revenue target. Why this happens? Simply because their goals are not connected, or worse, in conflict. It’s like different teams each drive in opposite directions, while they should really be moving towards the same destination.
How RevOps can fix it: Align team incentives around shared revenue goals, not isolated functional metrics. And create compensation plans that reward collaboration, instead of operating as a lone wolf.
Quick Tip: Run quarterly RevOps syncs where all GTM leaders align on priorities and metrics.
These five revenue bottlenecks are just the beginning. There are many more big and small issues you can track down and solve to fix your revenue generation challenges. In our upcoming book, we go deeper, sharing step-by-step RevOps strategies and case studies you can use to build a revenue engine that scales.
