How to fix common issues with RevTech

Now that we all have a base-level understanding of the core components of RevTech, and how to look at the various diagrams, let’s start addressing the issues we covered at the beginning of the module.

To solve the issues that typically plague RevTech, focus on two key areas: getting the right leader and matching your goals to your company's size.

Let's explore how to fix RevTech by:

1. Empowering your RevTech champion: We'll look at the trade offs between hiring someone with technical skills versus sales experience, and discuss what level of seniority you really need.
2. Setting goals that match your size: Later we’ll use Nikhyl Singhal's company stages framework to help you create realistic expectations that align with your growth phase.

Jay Filiatrault, director of growth at Chameleon, took this approach when improving their lead qualification process. By matching their RevTech investment to their company stage and having clear ownership, they successfully balanced data accuracy with budget constraints while improving their ideal customer profile coverage.

Getting both elements right helps your tech stack grow alongside your company, avoiding the pain of building systems you're not ready for or missing tools you actually need.

1. Assign a dedicated RevTech leader

Your RevTech leader needs to connect technical know-how with sales strategy, making sure your tech stack drives revenue growth. They should deeply understand your business and unite your revenue operations.

This role differs significantly from a head of marketing technology. Marketing technology focuses on standard data tasks like segmentation and CRM integration. RevTech requires understanding the nuances of your business, like how different products perform across verticals and lead sources.

A great RevTech leader balances stakeholder needs while building and protecting a vision that boosts sales performance.

Kiki can speak strongly to why this balance matters in day-to-day decisions. As Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Plaid, she needed both technical knowledge to manage their complex lead routing system and sales expertise to understand what their SDRs actually needed. Finding this balance helped them efficiently route high quality leads while maintaining automated nurture programs for others.

However, like all strategic decisions, there are some trade offs to consider when choosing the best RevTech leader for your company. The main two to think about are:

1. Do you need a leader who is more technical and more sales savvy?
2. How senior should your leader be?

Let’s look at both in a bit more detail.

The technical vs. sales experience tradeoff

The perfect RevTech leader is someone who understands both the technical and human sides of the business. They should be able to write SQL queries one minute and empathize with sales frustrations the next.

While rare, these unicorns do exist: technical experts who have worked across sales and marketing, understanding everything from pipeline management to marketing automation. They combine systems expertise with real empathy for the diverse challenges facing both teams.

If you can't find this ideal mix, here's how to make different backgrounds work:

1. (Best option from our perspective) Sales expert learning tech: Pair them with a product person who can mentor them on the technical side. This course will help fill knowledge gaps.
2. Technical expert learning sales: Give them three weeks to shadow your sales team. Let them see the daily challenges, sit in on calls, and understand the human side of the tools they'll manage.
3. (Avoid) Neither technical nor sales background: This usually creates more problems than it solves, unless you have lots of time for training. The pure ex-consultant profile can be great for RevOps, but is unlikely the right fit for a RevTech ownership role.

The seniority tradeoff

Great RevTech leaders exist at all experience levels, but each comes with trade offs:

1. Senior leaders: Often spread too thin across multiple responsibilities. They might manage RevTech reactively, creating future headaches. Many lack the time and focus needed to develop technical understanding of modern systems.
2. Junior leaders: Usually smart analysts who grasp the technology but may struggle with strategic decisions or getting buy in from senior stakeholders.

The sweet spot? Mid level leaders with enough experience to make strategic calls and command respect, but not so senior that RevTech becomes an afterthought in a packed portfolio.

2. Set realistic expectations based on your company stage

What constitutes "great" in RevTech looks different at every stage of a company's growth and will dictate what RevOps looks like, who owns RevTech, and what the minimum viable RevTech stack looks. We’re big fans of Nikhyl Singhal's Stage of Company framework as a way to think about this.

Source

Nikhyl breaks company growth into four key stages:

1. Pre-product fit (drunken walk): You're probably seed or series A funded, asking "Will anyone buy this?" Your days involve quick experiments, learning from failures, and doing whatever works. Think scrappy startup energy.
2. Post-product fit: Welcome to series B. You've got dozens of employees and your first happy customers. Now that you know your product works, you need to build the right foundation to help it grow. Time to add some structure.
3. Growth (hypergrowth): You're over 100 employees with dozens of customers who love your product. Demand is exploding. You're scaling everything: capabilities, product lines, customer base, and team size. There's pressure to grow fast while building the right systems.
4. Scale: You're a tech giant like Apple, Google, or Salesforce. You've got multiple successful products, established management layers, and refined processes that keep everything running smoothly at massive scale.

Let’s take a look at what RevOps and RevTech look like at each stage.

1. Pre-product fit (drunken walk)

At this stage, keep RevOps simple. Your co-founders or chief of staff should handle basic data tracking and analytics. Usually, the cofounder who cares most about sales (often the CEO, COO, CRO, or CBDO) should own RevTech.

Your tech stack should be basic:

• A simple CRM
• Basic analytics tools
• Minimal automation
• One dedicated owner (ideally a cofounder)

Austin's experience at Clarify shows this perfectly. They started lean with just their own CRM product, Customer.io for emails, and PostHog for analytics. By keeping it simple, they could move fast and adapt their systems as they learned what worked. As Austin said, "We intentionally stayed minimal. When you're still figuring out product fit, complex systems just slow you down. We focused on tracking the essential data we needed to understand our customers and iterate quickly."

2. Post-product fit

RevOps teams typically form here. You'll build better processes, get sales and marketing working together, and manage data more carefully. Usually, your head of sales, CRO, or a tech-savvy sales pro owns RevTech.

Your tech stack grows too:

• More powerful CRM systems
• Marketing automation tools
• Connected analytics platforms

This often means rebuilding what you created in the drunken walk phase. That's okay – you know more now.

Kiki faced this challenge early on at Plaid while building their lead routing system. "We waited until we were confident in our product fit before investing in sophisticated routing," she said. "Then we built a system that could grow with us – using Mad Kudu for scoring, Salesforce for tracking, and automated nurture programs for lower-quality leads. If we'd built this earlier, we would have had to rebuild it multiple times as we figured out our ideal customer."

3. Growth (hypergrowth)

RevOps shifts into high gear. You're running advanced processes, deep analytics, serious forecasting, and detailed performance tracking. By now, you need a dedicated RevTech expert who loves building systems and knows how to scale them.

Your tech stack becomes sophisticated:

• Fully connected systems
• Advanced automation
• AI and machine learning for predictions
• Comprehensive tracking tools

At Ramp, Austin saw this evolution firsthand: "We had to build systems that could handle explosive growth. We used Salesforce as our core, connected it to HubSpot for marketing, added Redshift for data, and layered in tools like Chili Piper and Gong for sales efficiency. The key was making sure everything talked to each other – when you're growing fast, data silos kill productivity."

4. Scale

Welcome to the big leagues. RevOps now spans your entire revenue machine with long-term strategic planning and robust governance. You need a head of RevTech with their own team (usually 1-2 people).

Your tech stack reaches its final form:

• Enterprise-grade CRM
• Advanced automation everywhere
• Comprehensive analytics
• Fully integrated systems
• Custom solutions for unique needs

Kiki's team at Plaid shows what this looks like in action. They built a sophisticated system connecting Mad Kudu, Salesforce, Salesloft, Gong, Marketo, and HighSpot, all feeding data into Redshift. "At this scale," she shared, "the challenge isn't just having powerful tools – it's making sure they work together seamlessly while maintaining data quality and user adoption. We're constantly balancing automation with flexibility, and speed with accuracy."

♻️ To recap: Here’s what you need focus on to fix common RevTech issues:

1. Assign a dedicated RevTech leader, balancing technical skills with sales experience and appropriate seniority.
2. Align your RevTech strategy with your company's growth stage:
   • Pre-product fit: Basic CRM and analytics, managed by founders
   • Post-product fit: Enhanced CRM and marketing automation
   • Growth: Advanced analytics and automation, dedicated RevTech team
   • Scale: Enterprise-level, fully integrated tech ecosystem