The new RevTech playbook: Treat your revenue team like a customer

(And most RevTech operators forget that.)

RevTech has a focus problem.

We’ve spent years obsessing over tooling decisions, integration complexity, and architectural purity — all in the name of helping "the business" operate more efficiently. And when I say "we," I’m talking about the RevTech operators. The builders, the systems thinkers, the people behind the stack. The folks who’ve spent years optimizing tools, integrations, and data flows with the best intentions, but sometimes focus on the wrong north star. That includes me. And if you’ve ever sat between sales and systems, trying to make both happy, it probably includes you, too. But in most companies, the people on the receiving end of these systems — the revenue team — don’t feel empowered. They feel burdened.

And that’s because most RevTech orgs are built backward.

The most effective operators I know — the ones who consistently improve sales performance, reduce friction, and actually drive growth — treat their revenue team as the customer. Not in a "vague stakeholder" kind of way. In a product-led, design-for-your-user kind of way.

This mindset shift changes everything. It reorients your roadmap. It changes how you evaluate tools. And most importantly, it helps you deliver systems people actually want to use.

The shift that changed everything

Early in my career, I made the same mistake most RevTech folks do. I thought success meant building clean systems, making good tooling choices, and keeping the architecture from falling over. I thought that if the stack worked, the team would work.

Then, I joined Ramp. And everything changed.

My college Justin and I spent months trying to answer a deceptively simple question: Who are we actually building for?

Externally, the answer was obvious: companies using our corporate cards. But internally? Our real customer was the sales team.

Not the CRO. Not "revenue leadership." But the actual reps trying to hit quota every month.

That shift — from systems-first to user-first — flipped how we made every decision. Instead of asking, "What should we implement?" we started asking, "What do they need to win?" It wasn’t about tools. It was about outcomes. And once we made this shift, everything else — adoption, speed, trust — got easier.

We started sitting in on pipeline reviews. We shadowed reps on discovery calls. We watched where they clicked, where they stalled, and where they bailed. And what we learned was humbling: Most of our stack worked technically, but not practically. Tools weren’t broken — they were just disconnected from how people actually sell.

From tool manager to product thinker

Here’s the core difference between most RevTech operators and the best ones I’ve worked with:

Most are focused on managing systems. The best are focused on solving user problems.

You can hear it in how they describe their job. Ask an average operator what they do, and they’ll say:

• I manage the CRM.
• I handle integrations.
• I build dashboards.
• I keep the data clean.

Now ask a product manager:

• I help users do their jobs.
• I eliminate friction.
• I ship features people actually use.
• I measure success based on outcomes, not uptime.

That’s the mindset RevTech needs to borrow.

Your stack is a product. Your revenue team is the user. And your job isn’t just to make sure everything works. Your job is to make selling easier, faster, and less painful for the people on the front lines.

Once you internalize that, a few things become clear. You stop implementing tools that look good on paper but don’t fit real workflows. You stop optimizing for data purity and start optimizing for usability. And you stop trying to build for leadership optics — and start building for user behavior.

At Ramp, this meant killing off a few tools we loved, because reps avoided them. It meant simplifying our forecasting workflow, even if that meant sacrificing granularity. It meant treating every rep complaint like a bug report — not an edge case.

The three pillars of customer-centric RevTech

Every RevTech stack is built to do three things: generate pipeline, close deals, and report on performance. Most people know this. But very few teams operationalize it from the perspective of their users.

When you treat your revenue team as the customer, these pillars don’t change — but your approach to them does.

Generate pipeline

Generating stops being about routing efficiency and lead-scoring logic. It becomes about getting the right people in front of your reps at the right time — and freeing up their time to sell instead of triage.

One of the first things we did post-mindset shift was map out how long it took for inbound leads to reach a rep. The answer: too long. Leads sat in routing queues, waiting for assignment logic to run. We simplified the routing. We skipped enrichment steps. We cut the time to rep contact in half.

Close deals

Closing stops being about forecasting hygiene. It becomes about eliminating friction in the buying process and giving your reps the tools, context, and workflows to move fast and win more.

We realized our reps were spending too much time hunting for context: deal history, product usage, past emails. Instead of asking them to dig through five tabs, we pulled everything into a single-pane view inside the customer relationship management (CRM) system. Adoption went up. Deal velocity improved. No fancy tooling — just thoughtful integration.

Report on performance

Reporting stops being about dashboards that look good in board decks. It becomes about surfacing insights that help your team prioritize better, coach smarter, and focus on the activities that actually move pipeline.

The framing stays the same. The orientation changes. Because it’s not about how clean your architecture is — it’s about how confidently your reps can operate inside it.

Power = capabilities ÷ resources

Let me put this another way.

I’m training for an Ironman right now. On the bike, your power is measured in watts. But it’s not just about having stronger legs. It’s about riding in a way that maximizes output with the least effort: getting the right gear ratios, the right helmet, the right frame, even adjusting the position of your water bottle to cut drag.

Power, in that world, is a ratio: what you can do ÷ what it takes to do it.

That’s how RevTech works, too.

Your job isn’t to build the most technically sophisticated stack. It’s to build the stack that gives your team the most leverage. This means:

• Saying no to tools that create extra steps, even if they’re best-in-class.
• Automating the annoying stuff so reps can stay focused on selling.
• Building workflows that align with actual human behavior, not idealized process maps.

Great RevTech isn’t just functional. It’s efficient. It’s tailored. It helps your team do more with less. And in a world where headcount is tight and pipeline is king, that’s the kind of power that wins.

The same way you wouldn’t show up to a triathlon with a rusty bike and no plan, you can’t scale a sales team on duct-taped workflows. Maximizing output doesn’t mean spending more — it means spending smarter. The best stacks feel invisible to the user but make everything around them easier.

Your reps don’t need perfect. They need better.

There’s a myth in RevTech — that the end state is a perfect stack. That if you buy the right tools, connect the right systems, and build the right dashboards, the whole machine will run like clockwork.

That’s not how this works.

In every company I’ve worked with — from startups to enterprises — the stack is always a little bit broken. And that’s OK.

Perfection isn’t the goal. Progress is.

What your team needs isn’t elegance. It’s momentum. They need you to keep chipping away at friction points. They need you to fix the one thing that’s slowing them down this week — even if you can’t fix all the things yet.

Customer-centric RevTech isn’t about polishing a system for its own sake. It’s about making life easier for your team, one improvement at a time.

The “in service” test

If you want to know how customer-centric your RevTech team really is, ask yourself this:

• When a tool breaks, do we fix the workflow or just close the ticket?
• When someone struggles with adoption, do we dig into their use case or just send them the how-to doc?
• When planning roadmap items, are we prioritizing system stability — or the actual pain points our reps talk about every week?

RevTech should be in service to the team. Not the other way around.

At Ramp, we used to ask one simple question before launching anything: Will this make the rep’s day easier? If the answer was no — or if we couldn’t confidently say yes — we didn’t ship it.

That test was humbling. It killed a lot of projects. But it also made our team better.

The new RevTech operator playbook

The operators who win in the next decade won’t be the ones with the deepest technical expertise. They’ll be the ones who act like product managers.

They’ll start with user interviews. Sit in on calls. Build a sense of what success feels like for the people they support.

They’ll design systems that reduce complexity — not showcase technical cleverness.

And they’ll measure success not by dashboards delivered or uptime maintained, but by how well their sales team is performing. How often reps say, “Yeah, that actually helped.”

This is the new bar for RevTech. And it starts with one shift: Treat your revenue team like your customer.

Everything else follows.