January 9, 2025
Remember the chaos of managing spreadsheets for sales forecasts, keeping marketing leads in separate databases, and tracking customer renewals elsewhere? It felt like piecing together a puzzle without a single source of truth. For many organizations, this disjointed approach is still the reality.
Revenue operations platforms are here to change that. They bridge the gaps between sales, marketing, and customer success, enabling revenue teams to work cohesively. No more toggling between tools to validate pipelines, update forecasts, or track deals. These platforms empower teams to spend less time on admin tasks and more time driving revenue.
This article will explore how revenue operations platforms streamline processes, improve collaboration, and drive growth. Whether you're a sales rep looking to exceed quota, a manager aiming for accurate forecasts, or a revenue leader planning for scale, these platforms have something for everyone.
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is a business function that aligns the sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth and efficiency. It focuses on streamlining processes, improving collaboration, and leveraging data to deliver consistent, predictable revenue outcomes.
Revenue operations planning breaks down silos between departments, enabling a unified strategy to improve customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and drive sustainable growth. It drives full-funnel accountability where revenue-generating teams sync with shared objectives, tools, and metrics. It accelerates the sales cycle to foster a customer-centric culture that improves retention and upsell opportunities.
RevOps is being adopted for the following reasons:
The classic workplace drama involves sales operations blaming marketing operations for poor lead quality. Marketing operations defend their MQL criteria like it's the holy grail, and customer success wonders why they're always the last to know about... well, everything. It's like a corporate reality show minus the entertainment value.
Revenue operations step in, eliminate the chaos, and get everyone to work towards a common goal: drive revenue growth. While all these teams aim toward the same goal, they differ in scope, focus, and execution.
The sales operations focus on optimizing the sales process. It involves managing tools, training sales teams, and improving workflows for closing deals. Traditionally, they focus on:
The marketing operations ensure marketing campaigns focus on lead generation, campaign management, and marketing analytics. They are responsible for:
Revenue operations take a holistic approach while bridging the gap between sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. It takes a broader, more integrated approach by:
A revenue operations platform is designed to centralize, automate, and optimize revenue-related processes across all revenue-impacting teams. These platforms integrate with CRMs, marketing automation software, and analytics tools to provide a holistic view of the revenue lifecycle.
The most critical features of a Revenue Operations Platform include:
A B2B software company had a running joke about their Monday forecast meetings – they called it "Story Time" because every department came with a different narrative about the quarter's outlook. After implementing RevOps, they renamed it "Revenue Reality Check" because, finally, everyone was working from the same plot line.
Adopting RevOps isn't just a trend but a competitive necessity. Organizations that resist this change are at a significant disadvantage, like companies that initially resisted adopting CRM systems. The question is no longer whether to adopt revenue operations platforms but how quickly you can optimize your revenue process to stay competitive in the data-driven marketplace.
Here’s a list of the top revenue operations platforms that can help you drive growth faster:
Clari has established itself as the revenue operations platform for enterprise organizations. It helps eliminate guesswork from forecasting, analyzing, and executing revenue strategies. With AI-driven insights, Clari offers unparalleled visibility into your pipeline, allowing sales reps to focus on the deals that matter most.
Suitable for: Enterprise-level companies with complex sales cycles
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom pricing
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
What Reddit Says: Reddit users appreciate Clari’s ability to provide clear, actionable insights. One user shared, "The platform is great in that you can get a holistic view of your business."
Gong is a revolutionary revenue intelligence platform for sales, customer success, and marketing teams that analyze customer interactions. It empowers sales teams to replicate success by improving talk-to-listen ratios and identifying winning phrases.
Suitable for: Revenue teams that want to clone their top performers
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom pricing
G2 Rating: 4.8/5
What Reddit Says: Gong is praised for its conversation analytics. “I love Gong. I’m a terrible note-taker during calls, and Gong does it for me." one Redditor remarked.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is perfect for organizations with intricate sales processes. Its CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) capabilities save time and reduce errors in deal structuring. With powerful analytics, Salesforce ensures your revenue processes are efficient and adaptable to market changes.
Suitable for: Salesforce-native organizations looking for deep integration
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: 3-tier pricing
G2 Rating: 4.2/5
What Reddit Says: "The CPQ feature saves us hours every week," noted a Reddit user.
Revenue.io stands out for its ability to provide in-the-moment guidance to revenue teams, making it particularly valuable for organizations with remote or distributed teams. Its smart suggestions ensure sales teams are one step ahead, making it a preferred option for organizations with heavy phone-based sales operations.
Suitable for: Teams looking to scale revenue operations with AI-powered insights
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
What Reddit Says: "Their AI suggestions are spot-on," noted a user.
Productive distinguishes itself in RevOps by focusing on revenue team productivity and performance optimization. It automates traditional manual processes like territory planning and compensation management, turning them into strategic advantages.
Suitable for: Optimizing revenue team performance and productivity
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: 3-tier pricing
G2 Rating: NA
What Reddit Says: “We have been using Productive for a long time in the company, and it is a great tool, although it has a slightly higher learning curve.” says a Reddit user.
SalesLoft has created a complete revenue operations solution to build consistency with productive workflows. It balances automation with a human touch to drive engaging interactions and conversions.
Suitable for: Revenue teams looking to standardize their sales processes
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.5/5
What Reddit Says: “Overall, the feedback from the team members is that it's a lot more user-friendly, and I have found it to be just as functional.” a user claimed.
6sense revenue AI offers unique revenue operations capabilities for both sales and marketing teams. For marketing, it provides capabilities such as data enrichment and audience building, while the sales solution offers account intelligence and workflow prospecting.
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.3/5
What Reddit Says: “6sense data is usually more accurate in the sense that they tell you exactly which page someone at your target account is visiting and which keywords they are searching for,” reported one user.
Using only a CRM to manage revenue is like trying to drive a car by just looking in the rearview mirror. You can see where you've been, but you'll crash if you don't know what's ahead. It perfectly captures the relationship between CRM and Revenue Operations platforms in modern business.
Think of CRM as your customer database and RevOps as the intelligence layer that makes sense of it all. The CRM will tell you how many deals were closed last quarter. Revenue operations platforms tell you how many will likely close next quarter and what you can do differently to improve that number.
Picture this: You’re part of a sales team at a fast-growing tech company. The marketing team is running a brilliant campaign and generating leads. Meanwhile, customer success is handling critical renewals with strategic upsell opportunities. But when it's time to develop a full-funnel report, chaos ensues. When individual teams scramble to piece the puzzle together, the moment to make informed decisions has passed.
Despite its importance, a CRM system is not without its flaws. Here are some of the key limitations that often hinder businesses:
Data silos in many organizations result in CRMs only storing a portion of customer journeys, leaving teams disconnected. The sales team stores data while the marketing team may update a separate tool, and the customer success team would have a different system. The lack of integrations leads to silos where teams don’t have a complete picture of the customer journey.
For example, a sales rep might not know that a prospect recently downloaded an eBook or attended a webinar because that information is in a separate marketing tool.
CRMs are great for capturing historical data but usually cannot forecast future outcomes. For instance, a CRM can show you how many deals were closed last quarter, but it doesn’t predict which deals in the pipeline are most likely to close next quarter. This reactive approach limits strategic decision-making.
A CRM’s sales-centric design isn't just an inconvenience – it's leaving money on the table. When marketing can't see how their campaigns influence deal progression, when customer success lacks visibility into sales commitments, and when sales remain unaware of customer health signals, you're not just dealing with a communication gap. You're looking at a revenue leak.
Many CRMs depend heavily on manual data entry and processes, making them time-intensive and prone to human error. Routine tasks such as updating deal stages, generating forecasts, and routing leads often demand considerable effort, slowing operations and hindering scalability.
While CRMs are essential for managing customer relationships and tracking sales activities, they often operate in isolation, focusing primarily on historical data and sales-specific tasks. On the other hand, revenue operations platforms bridge the gaps and elevate CRM functionality by providing a comprehensive, forward-looking approach to revenue management.
Here’s how RevOps platforms complement and enhance CRMs:
Organizations don’t have to choose between a CRM and a RevOps platform because the two complement each other. Here’s how to decide:
Selecting the best revenue operations platform is not a one-size-fits-all decision—it hinges entirely on your organization’s unique needs and goals. Begin by evaluating your current challenges and pinpointing the features that will effectively address them. Take full advantage of free trials, demos, and customer reviews to gain firsthand insights into each platform’s capabilities.
The ideal platform shouldn’t feel like just another tool. It should seamlessly integrate into your workflows as the missing puzzle piece that brings clarity and cohesion to your revenue strategy. You’ll empower your teams, streamline operations, and unlock your business’s full growth potential with the right choice.
Remember the chaos of managing spreadsheets for sales forecasts, keeping marketing leads in separate databases, and tracking customer renewals elsewhere? It felt like piecing together a puzzle without a single source of truth. For many organizations, this disjointed approach is still the reality.
Revenue operations platforms are here to change that. They bridge the gaps between sales, marketing, and customer success, enabling revenue teams to work cohesively. No more toggling between tools to validate pipelines, update forecasts, or track deals. These platforms empower teams to spend less time on admin tasks and more time driving revenue.
This article will explore how revenue operations platforms streamline processes, improve collaboration, and drive growth. Whether you're a sales rep looking to exceed quota, a manager aiming for accurate forecasts, or a revenue leader planning for scale, these platforms have something for everyone.
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is a business function that aligns the sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth and efficiency. It focuses on streamlining processes, improving collaboration, and leveraging data to deliver consistent, predictable revenue outcomes.
Revenue operations planning breaks down silos between departments, enabling a unified strategy to improve customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and drive sustainable growth. It drives full-funnel accountability where revenue-generating teams sync with shared objectives, tools, and metrics. It accelerates the sales cycle to foster a customer-centric culture that improves retention and upsell opportunities.
RevOps is being adopted for the following reasons:
The classic workplace drama involves sales operations blaming marketing operations for poor lead quality. Marketing operations defend their MQL criteria like it's the holy grail, and customer success wonders why they're always the last to know about... well, everything. It's like a corporate reality show minus the entertainment value.
Revenue operations step in, eliminate the chaos, and get everyone to work towards a common goal: drive revenue growth. While all these teams aim toward the same goal, they differ in scope, focus, and execution.
The sales operations focus on optimizing the sales process. It involves managing tools, training sales teams, and improving workflows for closing deals. Traditionally, they focus on:
The marketing operations ensure marketing campaigns focus on lead generation, campaign management, and marketing analytics. They are responsible for:
Revenue operations take a holistic approach while bridging the gap between sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. It takes a broader, more integrated approach by:
A revenue operations platform is designed to centralize, automate, and optimize revenue-related processes across all revenue-impacting teams. These platforms integrate with CRMs, marketing automation software, and analytics tools to provide a holistic view of the revenue lifecycle.
The most critical features of a Revenue Operations Platform include:
A B2B software company had a running joke about their Monday forecast meetings – they called it "Story Time" because every department came with a different narrative about the quarter's outlook. After implementing RevOps, they renamed it "Revenue Reality Check" because, finally, everyone was working from the same plot line.
Adopting RevOps isn't just a trend but a competitive necessity. Organizations that resist this change are at a significant disadvantage, like companies that initially resisted adopting CRM systems. The question is no longer whether to adopt revenue operations platforms but how quickly you can optimize your revenue process to stay competitive in the data-driven marketplace.
Here’s a list of the top revenue operations platforms that can help you drive growth faster:
Clari has established itself as the revenue operations platform for enterprise organizations. It helps eliminate guesswork from forecasting, analyzing, and executing revenue strategies. With AI-driven insights, Clari offers unparalleled visibility into your pipeline, allowing sales reps to focus on the deals that matter most.
Suitable for: Enterprise-level companies with complex sales cycles
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom pricing
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
What Reddit Says: Reddit users appreciate Clari’s ability to provide clear, actionable insights. One user shared, "The platform is great in that you can get a holistic view of your business."
Gong is a revolutionary revenue intelligence platform for sales, customer success, and marketing teams that analyze customer interactions. It empowers sales teams to replicate success by improving talk-to-listen ratios and identifying winning phrases.
Suitable for: Revenue teams that want to clone their top performers
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom pricing
G2 Rating: 4.8/5
What Reddit Says: Gong is praised for its conversation analytics. “I love Gong. I’m a terrible note-taker during calls, and Gong does it for me." one Redditor remarked.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is perfect for organizations with intricate sales processes. Its CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) capabilities save time and reduce errors in deal structuring. With powerful analytics, Salesforce ensures your revenue processes are efficient and adaptable to market changes.
Suitable for: Salesforce-native organizations looking for deep integration
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: 3-tier pricing
G2 Rating: 4.2/5
What Reddit Says: "The CPQ feature saves us hours every week," noted a Reddit user.
Revenue.io stands out for its ability to provide in-the-moment guidance to revenue teams, making it particularly valuable for organizations with remote or distributed teams. Its smart suggestions ensure sales teams are one step ahead, making it a preferred option for organizations with heavy phone-based sales operations.
Suitable for: Teams looking to scale revenue operations with AI-powered insights
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
What Reddit Says: "Their AI suggestions are spot-on," noted a user.
Productive distinguishes itself in RevOps by focusing on revenue team productivity and performance optimization. It automates traditional manual processes like territory planning and compensation management, turning them into strategic advantages.
Suitable for: Optimizing revenue team performance and productivity
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: 3-tier pricing
G2 Rating: NA
What Reddit Says: “We have been using Productive for a long time in the company, and it is a great tool, although it has a slightly higher learning curve.” says a Reddit user.
SalesLoft has created a complete revenue operations solution to build consistency with productive workflows. It balances automation with a human touch to drive engaging interactions and conversions.
Suitable for: Revenue teams looking to standardize their sales processes
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.5/5
What Reddit Says: “Overall, the feedback from the team members is that it's a lot more user-friendly, and I have found it to be just as functional.” a user claimed.
6sense revenue AI offers unique revenue operations capabilities for both sales and marketing teams. For marketing, it provides capabilities such as data enrichment and audience building, while the sales solution offers account intelligence and workflow prospecting.
Feature Highlights:
Pricing: Custom Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.3/5
What Reddit Says: “6sense data is usually more accurate in the sense that they tell you exactly which page someone at your target account is visiting and which keywords they are searching for,” reported one user.
Using only a CRM to manage revenue is like trying to drive a car by just looking in the rearview mirror. You can see where you've been, but you'll crash if you don't know what's ahead. It perfectly captures the relationship between CRM and Revenue Operations platforms in modern business.
Think of CRM as your customer database and RevOps as the intelligence layer that makes sense of it all. The CRM will tell you how many deals were closed last quarter. Revenue operations platforms tell you how many will likely close next quarter and what you can do differently to improve that number.
Picture this: You’re part of a sales team at a fast-growing tech company. The marketing team is running a brilliant campaign and generating leads. Meanwhile, customer success is handling critical renewals with strategic upsell opportunities. But when it's time to develop a full-funnel report, chaos ensues. When individual teams scramble to piece the puzzle together, the moment to make informed decisions has passed.
Despite its importance, a CRM system is not without its flaws. Here are some of the key limitations that often hinder businesses:
Data silos in many organizations result in CRMs only storing a portion of customer journeys, leaving teams disconnected. The sales team stores data while the marketing team may update a separate tool, and the customer success team would have a different system. The lack of integrations leads to silos where teams don’t have a complete picture of the customer journey.
For example, a sales rep might not know that a prospect recently downloaded an eBook or attended a webinar because that information is in a separate marketing tool.
CRMs are great for capturing historical data but usually cannot forecast future outcomes. For instance, a CRM can show you how many deals were closed last quarter, but it doesn’t predict which deals in the pipeline are most likely to close next quarter. This reactive approach limits strategic decision-making.
A CRM’s sales-centric design isn't just an inconvenience – it's leaving money on the table. When marketing can't see how their campaigns influence deal progression, when customer success lacks visibility into sales commitments, and when sales remain unaware of customer health signals, you're not just dealing with a communication gap. You're looking at a revenue leak.
Many CRMs depend heavily on manual data entry and processes, making them time-intensive and prone to human error. Routine tasks such as updating deal stages, generating forecasts, and routing leads often demand considerable effort, slowing operations and hindering scalability.
While CRMs are essential for managing customer relationships and tracking sales activities, they often operate in isolation, focusing primarily on historical data and sales-specific tasks. On the other hand, revenue operations platforms bridge the gaps and elevate CRM functionality by providing a comprehensive, forward-looking approach to revenue management.
Here’s how RevOps platforms complement and enhance CRMs:
Organizations don’t have to choose between a CRM and a RevOps platform because the two complement each other. Here’s how to decide:
Selecting the best revenue operations platform is not a one-size-fits-all decision—it hinges entirely on your organization’s unique needs and goals. Begin by evaluating your current challenges and pinpointing the features that will effectively address them. Take full advantage of free trials, demos, and customer reviews to gain firsthand insights into each platform’s capabilities.
The ideal platform shouldn’t feel like just another tool. It should seamlessly integrate into your workflows as the missing puzzle piece that brings clarity and cohesion to your revenue strategy. You’ll empower your teams, streamline operations, and unlock your business’s full growth potential with the right choice.
