Your data problem isn’t a data problem. It’s an ownership problem, and it has a name.
I’ve written about the symptoms before. In “Your CRM Data Dumpster” and “Your Database Is a Liability,” I went after bad data, dirty attribution and dashboards nobody trusts. This edition is about the function that’s supposed to fix all of that.
A while back I walked into a PE-owned HR technology company, about $900 million in revenue, to help them figure out their ideal customer profile. I started with what I thought were simple questions. The Customer Cohort Triangulation questions I ask every client:
1. Which customer segments have the highest win rate on the front end? In other words, which are easiest to acquire?
2. Which segments have the highest gross revenue retention?
3. Which have the highest net revenue retention?
4. Then triangulate the three into the segments that are easiest to get, keep and grow.
Four questions. Every one of them should be answerable from data the company already owns.
It took two and a half months.
Not because the questions were hard. Because the data was dirty, scattered and inaccessible, and it had to be cleaned and categorized before anyone could answer them. And here’s the part that stuck with me: they had a revenue operations function. It just wasn’t set up to answer the questions that matter most to a PE-owned business.
In my experience, that isn’t unusual.
So this edition isn’t about the data. It’s about the function that’s supposed to own it, and why, in many PE portfolio companies I walk into, it either doesn’t exist or exists in name only.
The Gap Nobody Names
Many PE-backed companies I see have some version of this setup. Marketing operations sits inside marketing, selecting the martech stack, supporting budgeting and planning, running analytics and building the attribution model. Sales operations sits inside sales, cleaning CRM data, building territory maps and pulling the forecast together on Thursday nights. Customer success has its own tools and its own renewal spreadsheet.
Three ops teams. Three versions of the truth. And no one who owns the full revenue picture from first touch through renewal and customer growth.
GTM Partners , the go-to-market operating system built by Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown , describes the goal of revenue operations as getting to the truth of the numbers, so the business can make accurate decisions. In their framework it’s the brain of the operation. In practice, that means replacing siloed sources of truth and inconsistent data with one trusted view of GTM health that everyone works from.
They also make a point I think many operating partners miss. Companies build separate marketing ops and sales ops teams because it looks efficient: let each team move fast on its own work. GTM Partners argues you should run operations for effectiveness, not efficiency. Each silo can be efficient on its own while the overall revenue system stays broken.
What the Data Says About the Mandate Problem
This isn’t a fringe issue. Gartner predicted back in 2021 that 75 percent of the highest-growth companies in the world would deploy a RevOps model by 2025. The title spread fast.
The mandate didn’t keep up.
A 2025 study of 400 U.S. revenue operations leaders and executives, commissioned by Salesloft and run by Wakefield Research, found that 73 percent of companies now have a C-suite role dedicated to revenue operations. That sounds like progress. But in the same study, 89 percent said RevOps still lacks clearly defined strategic goals. And according to Demand Gen Report’s coverage of the study, 79 percent still categorize RevOps as sales-adjacent.
It’s a vendor-commissioned study, so treat the exact numbers carefully. But the pattern matches what I see in PE portfolio companies, including that HR technology company. The title shows up before the charter does. RevOps gets promoted without anyone writing down what it owns, and without that, it becomes a reporting team instead of a decision team.
The RevOps Maturity Curve
GTM Partners describes three RevOps models: ad hoc, aligned and centralized. It’s the most useful maturity curve I know, and you can place your own company on it in about thirty seconds.
Ad hoc. Ops lives inside each function. Definitions differ by team. The forecast is a spreadsheet someone rebuilds every week. This is where many companies I walk into actually are, whatever the org chart says.
Aligned. The ops teams still report into their functions, but they’ve agreed on shared definitions, a common funnel and a single CRM architecture. It’s a real step forward, and it depends entirely on goodwill.
Centralized. One revenue operations team, led by one leader, supporting marketing, sales and customer success from a shared set of systems, data, processes and an aligned GTM scorecard. This is where GTM Partners points you, and it’s where the forecast starts being believed.
Their Pillar 7, Revenue Operations, breaks the destination into three parts: a single source of truth (shared metrics and definitions, unified systems and data, a trusted view of GTM health), an executive scorecard and operating rhythm (metric ownership, a review cadence, decisions made from it), and deliberate RevOps model design.
Notice the middle one. RevOps isn’t just the plumbing. It runs the cadence where decisions get made.
What to Centralize, and What to Leave in the Functions
Centralizing doesn’t mean pulling every ops task into one team, or doing away with marketing operations and sales operations. Even with a centralized RevOps function, there’s a lot of work that belongs close to marketing and close to sales, and both functions will still need strong ops teams. The point is narrower than that: put the data, the technology and the definitions in one central place that isn’t biased toward either side. Here’s where I’d draw the line.
Centralize. The definitions: lifecycle stages, opportunity stages, what counts as pipeline or at-risk. The data: CRM architecture, the shared data model and data governance. The technology backbone: the systems of record and the standards every tool has to meet, so you stop buying three tools that do the same thing. The forecast process and the GTM scorecard, with the operating rhythm that reviews it. Territory, quota and compensation operations, where the numbers have to tie to the plan.
Leave in the functions. Marketing operations: selecting and running the martech stack within those shared standards, marketing budgeting and planning, marketing analytics and attribution modeling, and the operational side of campaigns. Sales operations: sales process, pipeline management support, deal support and sales analytics. Customer success operations: playbooks and day-to-day account work.
The test is simple. If two functions have to agree on it for the number to be trusted, it belongs in RevOps. If it’s how one function does its own job, leave it there.
Why Siloed Ops Loses
When marketing ops and sales ops sit apart, the same three things happen. The handoffs leak, because nobody owns the moment a lead becomes an opportunity or an opportunity becomes a renewal. The attribution fight never ends: marketing claims pipeline, sales claims pipeline, and the CFO believes neither. And the forecast becomes an opinion, with each team bringing its own number to a meeting that should be about decisions.
GTM Partners calls out marketing ops sitting in a silo outside RevOps as a trap, and the same is true of sales ops sitting inside sales. The fix isn’t one function giving up its ops team to the other. It’s both of them moving the shared work into one neutral function, so the argument about whose number is right goes away.
The Leader Many Companies Hire Wrong
This is where I see the most expensive mistake. RevOps gets treated as a promotion for the best sales ops manager. Good systems person, knows the CRM, keeps the forecast spreadsheet running. So they get the title.
That’s usually a miscast. The RevOps leader a PE-backed company needs is a different profile:
Commercially fluent. Can sit with the CFO and talk unit economics, CAC payback and NRR, not just dashboards.
Systems and data literate. Understands systems and data without being the person who builds every report.
Independent. GTM Partners is clear that the RevOps leader supports marketing, sales and customer success but has to operate without bias toward any one department. That’s hard to do if you came up in one of them and still report into it.
Willing to say no. To a new tool, a new field, a custom report that breaks the definitions everyone agreed on.
Where they report matters too. In the Salesloft study, RevOps teams said they work most closely with the COO, the CEO and the CFO, in roughly equal measure. I’d go a step further: in a PE-backed company, it’s better for RevOps to report directly to the CFO or the COO. That keeps it neutral, puts it next to the people who own the plan and the forecast, and avoids burying it three levels down inside sales or marketing.
The Hire Sequence in a PE-Backed Company
On a PE clock, you can’t do this in the wrong order. Here’s the sequence I’d follow.
1. Hire the leader first, with a written charter. Before more tools, before more analysts. The charter says what RevOps owns, which decisions it makes, and who breaks the tie when functions disagree.
2. Fix the definitions and the system of record. Stages, lifecycle, one CRM architecture. Nothing else holds until this does.
3. Connect the existing ops teams to one shared model. Marketing ops, sales ops and CS ops keep serving their own functions, but they all work from RevOps’ data, definitions and systems.
4. Add analytics capacity. For the forecast and the scorecard.
5. Then add scale roles. As the business needs them: deal desk, compensation operations, systems administration.
Many companies do this backwards. They buy tools, then hire analysts, then wonder why nobody trusts the numbers.
At the HR technology company, the questions that took ten weeks should have taken an hour. That’s the difference a chartered RevOps function makes.
How RevOps Earns Forecast Credibility
Forecast credibility is the ultimate test, and the reason operating partners should care about this more than anyone. Gartner’s State of Sales Operations research found that only 45 percent of sales leaders are confident in their organization’s forecast accuracy, and just 7 percent hit 90 percent accuracy or better.
In Editions 75 and 76 I wrote about why forecasts lose credibility and how Pipeline Triangulation could rebuild it. What I didn’t say plainly enough is that someone has to own that system. Stage definitions, inspection cadence, data hygiene and the triangulation itself all need an owner who isn’t grading their own homework.
That owner is RevOps. When the forecast comes from a neutral function using definitions everyone signed off on, the board conversation changes. It stops being about whose number is right and starts being about what to do next.
The Bottom Line
Often, the problem in a PE portfolio company isn’t the data. It’s three ops teams, three versions of the truth, and no one who owns the whole revenue system. Some of these companies even have a RevOps function. What they’re often missing is the charter.
RevOps is the fix, but only if it’s built as a real function: centralized where the numbers have to agree, led by a commercially fluent and independent leader, with a written charter and the operating rhythm that turns data into decisions.
Get the title and the charter in the same quarter. Hire the leader before the tools. And stop letting each function grade its own forecast.
One trusted source of truth instead of three, so your people spend their time on decisions, not on reconciling data. That’s the job.
Outcomes and impacts over activities. Every time.
Sources
GTM Partners , the GTM Operating System, Pillar 7: Revenue Operations, and the MOVE framework, Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown .
Gartner , “Gartner Predicts 75% of the Highest Growth Companies in the World Will Deploy a RevOps Model by 2025,” press release, May 17, 2021.
Salesloft and Wakefield Research , The Rise of RevOps to the C-Suite, July 2025, survey of 400 U.S. RevOps leaders and executive decision-makers. Commissioned by Salesloft.
Demand Gen Report , coverage of the Salesloft study, July 28, 2025.
Gartner , State of Sales Operations Survey.
