Sales vs RevOps: Go from turf war to teamwork

Breaking silos, bridging gaps, and building a revenue engine that actually works.
February 3, 2025
Gowri N Kishore
Author
Gowri is an independent content strategist who believes that good writing is clear thinking made visible. She is always curious about the workflows and everyday decisions that influence how businesses are built and scaled. For DataviCloud, she writes about data culture and business intelligence for startups and SMEs.

As a CRO or CEO, you know that alignment between Sales and Revenue Operations (RevOps) is critical for driving growth. But the relationship between these two teams hasn’t always been smooth. Sales leaders often view RevOps as a policing function, while RevOps teams can feel underutilized or undervalued. This tension not only creates friction but also prevents your company from reaching its full revenue potential.

When RevOps and Sales functions collaborate effectively, you get a high-performing engine that fuels predictable, scalable revenue growth. Deals get closed faster. Campaigns perform better. Pipelines stay healthy. Revenue becomes more predictable.

But all too often, this isn’t evident to the teams themselves and they tend to work in silos. So how do you call an end to the conflict and create a partnership that works? 

As a CRO or CEO, you have the power to position RevOps as the ultimate growth enabler. By fostering a stronger partnership between Sales and RevOps, you can ensure alignment, eliminate inefficiencies, and unlock the full potential of your revenue engine. In this essay, we suggest six ideas for how you can make this happen.

1. Deliver Better Revenue Visibility

Sales leaders thrive on data, but inconsistent or siloed data and insights not reaching them in a timely fashion leads to confusion and delays. RevOps eliminates this problem by consolidating data from CRMs, marketing platforms, customer success tools, and financial systems into a single source of truth.

With real-time insights into metrics like MRR, churn, deal velocity, campaign performance, and customer health scores, sales leaders can make confident, data-backed decisions without second-guessing their numbers.

What you can do: To show Sales leaders the value of RevOps in driving revenue visibility, consider creating a collaborative dashboard review. In these sessions, Sales and RevOps teams can explore metrics together, such as win rates across pipeline stages or average deal velocity, and see for themselves how these directly influence deal prioritization, pipeline accuracy, and growth strategy adjustments. Nothing beats being in the same room and working towards the same goals to foster a sense of collaboration.

2. Reposition RevOps as a Strategic Enabler

Too often, RevOps is viewed as the team that polices CRM cleanliness and churns out reports. But in reality, RevOps’ role is far more strategic. They’re the ones who remove bottlenecks, streamline processes, and ensure that your revenue engine is always running smoothly.

“The customer journey has expanded and today, people understand that everything in the GTM journey is interconnected. Marketing impacts sales and customer success. You really need to tie all those areas together and see them all as revenue-generating and all part of one continuum that impacts the customer all the way through. I am excited that RevOps has moved into this larger revenue engine, looking at things beyond sales but also expansion revenue and retention and bringing all that together.” 
Katerina Ostrovsky, Chief Revenue Officer at Jellysmack | Source

By partnering with RevOps, revenue leaders can focus more on their core activities while RevOps ensures smooth processes, accurate data, and alignment across teams. This enables Sales to spend more time closing deals, Marketing to run high-performing campaigns, and Customer Success to improve retention.

What you can do: Create a quarterly RevOps Impact Report. This could help reframe RevOps as a strategic enabler at the organisation-level. This report can showcase how RevOps directly influences pipeline health, accelerates deal velocity, and improves win rates, making it clear how their work empowers Sales and Growth teams to succeed.

3. Rejig Operational Responsibilities

Forecasting, CRM updates, pipeline reviews, campaign tracking—these tasks are often carried out by Sales teams. In the absence of a dedicated Sales Ops person, these eat into the valuable time and energy of salespersons and take them away from their core activities. This is where RevOps can step in as a critical operations partner. 

What you can do: Design workflows such that RevOps takes the lead on tasks like creating reports, running forecasts, and managing CRM data. This helps Sales and Growth teams reclaim hours of effort, which they can refocus to drive high-value activities like following up with prospects, building relationships with key accounts, delivering impactful demos, and closing deals more effectively.

4. Align on Shared Goals and Metrics

When revenue teams such as Sales and Growth work in silos, conflicting priorities often arise. Aligning all teams around shared objectives such as revenue targets, pipeline growth, and retention goals.

What you can do: RevOps can set up dashboards and processes that clearly map progress toward these goals for all teams. This alignment ensures that everyone—from sales reps to marketers to customer success managers—is rowing in the same direction.For instance, the CRM Dashboard in DataviCloud shows you overall pipeline health with win rates, comparison to previous months or weeks, deal movement insights and more. You can click on any of the indicators to get a deeper view at a prospect/account level. 

Screengrab from the DataviCloud CRM Dashboard

 

5. Proactively Identify and Prevent Revenue Leaks

Revenue leaks—like unconverted pipeline opportunities, underperforming marketing campaigns, or low renewal rates—can cripple growth. But these leaks are preventable with the right operational insights.RevOps can identify and fix these issues early through regular pipeline inspections, campaign performance reviews, win-loss analyses, etc. This is exactly the kind of intel that helps your Sales team take action on deals-in-danger before they stall. Of course, this requires looking at hundreds of signals from different fields within your CRM, marketing data, and sometimes chat support. If you have a tiny RevOps team, your analysts might already be juggling a dozen spreadsheets and writing SQL queries to get what they need. Which means they may not be able to keep up with the needs of the Sales team. 

What you can do:  This is where leaning on a platform like DataviCloud can make a huge difference. DataviCloud pushes real-time insights to your revenue and sales teams. For e.g. the next action needed to engage a prospect or a deal that’s moving slower than usual. Even better, it is designed as a collaborative workspace that can be easily used by both tech and business users. The setup and linking of sources takes just a few clicks and you’ll start seeing value in a matter of days.

6. Create Joint Cadences for Collaboration

One reason for misalignment between revenue teams is the lack of structured communication that goes out at the right time to everyone concerned. Some issues are tactical and need addressing right now whereas others set you up for success in the upcoming quarters. But if the teams are looking at different priorities, general catchups may not be enough. 

What you can do: Fix this by creating joint cadences with ‘here & now’ agendas (e.g. tracking a campaign ROI, resolving bottlenecks) and others with long-term views (e.g. forecast reviews, pipeline health inspection). Over time, these touchpoints will build trust and create a collaborative culture where all growth and revenue teams feel heard and empowered.

A 3-Pronged Strategy

In essence, we are suggesting a 3-pronged strategy:

  • Positioning RevOps as a Sales ally
  • Enabling communication and collaboration
  • Leveraging technology to simplify RevOps work and amplify Sales’ impact  

Now, sales leaders are often wary of new tools recommended by RevOps, fearing they’ll add unnecessary complexity. But when RevOps introduces intuitive, impactful technology that is easy to implement and lightning-fast to show value, the resistance fades quickly. That's why we're building DataviCloud to be like an operating system for your revenue intelligence teams, offering actionable insights into deal progression, identifying bottlenecks, delivering root cause analysis, and enabling accurate revenue forecasting. It also provides retrospective insights for the continuous improvement of sales strategies and processes.Even better, it sits easily on top of your existing CRM and product/marketing stack and requires no complex coding or setup. When Sales teams see how it empowers them to plug revenue leakage and close deals faster, they'll become power-users in no time! Intrigued? Get a demo and see for yourself.

Gowri N Kishore
Author
Gowri is an independent content strategist who believes that good writing is clear thinking made visible. She is always curious about the workflows and everyday decisions that influence how businesses are built and scaled. For DataviCloud, she writes about data culture and business intelligence for startups and SMEs.
Gowri N Kishore
Author
Gowri is an independent content strategist who believes that good writing is clear thinking made visible. She is always curious about the workflows and everyday decisions that influence how businesses are built and scaled. For DataviCloud, she writes about data culture and business intelligence for startups and SMEs.