Challenges and problems

RevTech programs often create headaches for modern organizations across all sizes, industries, and business models. The landscape constantly evolves, and RevTech stacks must stay current to serve the business and support teams effectively.

Here are three main pain points we see when managing RevTech:

1. Non-technical ownership: The confusion between revenue operations and revenue technology often leads to non technical staff overseeing critical technical systems that they might not fully understand.
2. Random decision making: Without a dedicated RevTech owner, companies make inconsistent and non strategic decisions, creating messy processes and missing out on growth opportunities.
3. Competing stakeholder priorities: Different leaders in the organization, including the CRO, CFO, and CMO, have varying and often conflicting RevTech priorities. When no one manages these competing needs, you end up with wasted resources and slow output.

Getting a handle on these challenges helps organizations make the most of their RevTech investments and build lasting growth. Let's dive deeper into each one.

1. Non-technical ownership of RevTech programs due to confusion between RevOps and RevTech

One of the primary issues in the RevTech space is the conflation of RevOps and RevTech, often leading to non-technical ownership. Let's take a look at how they compare, relate, and differ across key functions and ownership.

[Image M1.2: A side-by-side comparison of RevOps and RevTech functions, possibly in the form of two columns or interconnected circles]

RevOps

RevOps is the engine that powers your company's growth by connecting marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Think of it as the conductor making sure every part of your revenue machine works together smoothly and efficiently.

Here's what RevOps teams actually do:

• Handle your data: Keep your numbers clean, consistent, and available to everyone who needs them across systems.
• Make processes better: Cut out the busywork and create standard ways of doing things so marketing, sales, and customer success teams can focus on results.
• Create useful reports: Build dashboards and analyze data to show what's working, what isn't, and where to focus next.
• Analyze data: Turn numbers into insights you can act on, using advanced tools like predictive analytics and machine learning.
• Keep everyone on track: Make sure all teams working on revenue know the company's goals and are moving in the same direction.

While RevOps teams are often led by sharp, early career analysts, they sometimes face challenges. Many are still building their technical expertise and learning the nuances of marketing and sales funnels. Their work covers everything from managing data and improving processes to coordinating efforts across marketing, sales, and customer success teams.

RevTech

RevTech includes all the tools and systems that power RevOps workflows. These technologies help companies make smarter decisions, automate routine tasks, and connect strategies across marketing, sales, and customer success.

Here's what RevTech actually does:

• Automate work: Take care of repetitive tasks like sending marketing emails, scoring leads, and updating data.
• Connect systems: Link your essential tools (like CRM, marketing platforms, and customer success systems) so data flows smoothly and everyone sees the same customer information.
• Manage your tech: Choose, connect, and optimize the tools teams use to bring in revenue.
• Centralize the data: Keep all customer data and interactions in one place to build stronger connections and improve sales.
• Support sales: Give your sales team better tools for managing content, training, and tracking performance.

Unlike RevOps, which has a clear home in most companies, RevTech ownership is more complicated. Very few companies have an individual with the title “Head of RevTech.” It's usually managed by a special projects team made up of people who care most about revenue, including RevOps. The most common owner will also depend of the company and tends to follow this evolution:

• Starting out: Co-founders or chiefs of staff often build the first RevTech systems, working with engineering or product leaders. At Clarify, Austin filled this role. He started with just the essentials: their own CRM product, Customer.io for emails, and PostHog for analytics. This lean approach let them move fast and adapt as they learned.
• Growing up: As companies expand, RevTech projects often land with sales leaders or analysts, getting input from marketing heads and COOs.
• Scaling up: Companies create dedicated RevOps teams that report to the CRO, CFO, or COO. But there's a catch: many first RevOps hires come from consulting and haven't built tools before. This means RevTech often needs both a RevOps leader, a C-suite champion and either a temporary product and engineering team or outside consultants to make it work.

The big challenge? Typically, the people listed above aren’t technical in nature. As a result, a non-technical consortium of Revenue or GTM leaders may have a vision for what they want, but ultimately need to lean cross-functionally or externally to build it. This leads to two main problems:

1. Product and engineering teams brought in to help build RevTech systems often don't understand what sales teams actually need. They have different priorities and might miss crucial pain points that sales faces every day.
2. Outside consultants can bring great expertise, but they eventually leave. When they do, the systems they built often start breaking down without someone inside the company to maintain them.

2. Ad hoc and non-strategic decisions because of ownership gap

Look back at that ownership breakdown. Notice how many different people we listed? You rarely see someone with the title "Head of RevTech." While we've started seeing Heads of Marketing Technology in recent years, that shift hasn't reached further down the funnel to open positions dedicated to RevTech.

When no one clearly owns RevTech, efforts splinter and results suffer. Without a qualified champion leading the charge, companies often miss RevTech's strategic value, leading to lost opportunities and widespread inefficiency.

It’s worth noting that the Head of RevTech and Head of Marketing Technology serve different purposes. Marketing technology focuses on top of funnel activities like lead generation and nurturing, while RevTech spans the entire revenue process, including sales operations, deal management, and customer success. These roles require different expertise and focus areas, which is why they're typically separate positions.

When ownership of RevTech is unclear, two problems can occur:

1. RevTech becomes a one-off project that turns into a patchwork of solutions rather than a thoughtfully evolving system.

Fortunately, Sri Srikumar, head of RevOps at Notion, illustrated the ideal case perfectly during one of our expert interview sessions with her. Notion started with basic tools and focused on product data for scoring. As they grew into enterprise sales, they carefully built their tech stack, emphasizing flexibility and iteration over rushing to add complex tools. At every step, RevTech had a clear owner to ensure that the stack development was in line with the company’s growth.

Unfortunately, many startups don’t have the same experience as Notion.

2. RevTech changes direction every time a new sales leader arrives.

Here's a real example: Austin worked with a midsized startup that hired four sales leaders in four years. Each change brought a system overhaul. The first leader used HubSpot. The second switched to Salesforce. The third found their team missed HubSpot and switched back. The fourth had a clear vision for Salesforce and switched again.

This constant change isn't just inefficient, it's exhausting for teams. While every tool has its strengths, no single platform guarantees RevTech success. Any tool can fail without proper implementation. Success depends on how you use the tool, what you connect it to, and how you maintain consistent processes around both.

This was something Kiki learned first hand at Plaid. Her team focused heavily on proper implementation and maintenance, particularly around lead routing and scoring. As a result, they found even basic tools can deliver strong results when supported by well designed processes and consistent governance.

3. Different stakeholders have varying, competing priorities

Even with great collaboration, every team has different RevTech priorities. Without careful planning, balancing the needs of your CRO, CFO, and CMO can create a three-headed dragon that devours time, money, and energy.

The reporting structure makes this even trickier. While RevOps typically reports to the head of sales, CRO, or COO, they often have to answer to others too. The CFO needs RevOps data to understand the business, pulling work in one direction. In many companies, sales reports to the CMO, pulling work another way.

Here's what matters most to each leader:

1. Chief Marketing Officer:
   1. Top priority: "Generate" - Build the pipeline
   2. Goals: Strong lead generation, engaged customers, measurable marketing campaigns
2. Chief Revenue Officer (or head of sales/COO in smaller companies):
   1. Top priority: "Close" - Get deals done efficiently
   2. Goals: Better close rates, higher conversions, systems that drive efficiency
3. Chief Financial Officer:
   1. Top priority: "Report" - Get the numbers right
   2. Goals: Accurate board reports, precise commission payments, solid financial data

When all these leaders care about RevTech, priorities can clash. When one stays hands off, blind spots develop.

For example: Without CFO involvement, data gets messy. Without enough CRO attention, you might build a system that's so complex your sales teams either hate it or ignore it completely.

At Ramp, Austin saw these challenges firsthand. RevTech started under Growth Engineering, moved to Business Operations, then landed with the CRO. Growth Engineering's early ownership worked well because they were separate from day to day revenue demands. When marketing technology and RevTech merged, but Sales Operations stayed separate, problems arose. The team managing tools was disconnected from the people using them. Later, moving RevTech under the CRO created a new issue: losing easy access to engineering support. The RevTech roadmap got stuck handling administrative tasks instead of improving the system.

♻️ To recap: RevTech usually struggles with three main issues:

1. Non technical owners conflate RevOps with RevTech
2. No clear owner leads to scattered decisions
3. Different stakeholders (CRO, CFO, CMO) pull in different directions

Now, let's explore how to fix these problems and get more value from RevTech.