A RevOps maturity model you can test in an afternoon

Ask three vendors how many stages a RevOps maturity model has and you will get three answers. Six & Flow’s has four, running from Poor to Excellent, Outreach’s has five, from Ad hoc to Optimized, and some stop at three.

We use four, because those are the four answers people choose from when our RevOps maturity assessment asks them to describe their revenue operations. We have added a test to each one, since how a team describes itself and what sits in its CRM can be two separate things.

What a RevOps maturity model is

A RevOps maturity model describes how far a company’s revenue operations have developed, from nobody owning them to a documented system that survives staff changes. Its use is deciding what to fix next and what to leave alone for now.

Many published versions score people, process, technology and data. We find self-scoring hard to use on its own: a team with a lifecycle document somewhere in a shared drive gives itself credit for process, whether or not anyone has opened that document since the person who wrote it left. So we ask the system a question and see how long the answer takes.

Stage 1: no RevOps yet

Ask for last quarter’s closed revenue by lead source. At this stage it takes a spreadsheet and most of a day, and whoever builds it makes judgement calls along the way that nobody reviews. A founder or sales lead runs the pipeline largely from memory, the CRM is somewhere to keep names, and marketing keeps its own numbers. Before there is a sales motion that repeats, we would not change much here, because bringing in RevOps too early costs more than the mess does.

Stage 2: one person wearing many hats

Someone in marketing or sales took on the CRM because they could, and they do it alongside the job they were hired for. This is where we meet a lot of companies, and the work is often good.

The risk shows up when that person is away, so plan for it on paper: two weeks off, no phone. Which reports stop? Which integrations can nobody else repair? Who answers when sales asks why a number moved? We worked with a European B2B organisation whose portal had been designed by one consultant, and by the time we arrived even he could not remember what half of it meant or which parts were still in use.

Stage 3: a dedicated person or team

RevOps is now somebody’s job, with time set aside for it. Marketing and sales still argue about numbers, though by now the argument is over what a number means, and there is someone to settle it.

Getting here takes longer than people expect. At one company we interviewed ten people and came away with ten views of how the business worked, none of them false, and it took roughly three months to reconcile them into one customer journey. The test follows from that: ask five people what a given stage or lifecycle status means, then compare the answers.

Stage 4: mature and documented

Someone who was not there when the system was built can read it. A new vendor connects without calling the original builder, a new hire trusts a report within their first few weeks, and the forecast matches finance’s number or differs by an amount somebody can explain.

For the test, pick twenty open deals and compare each record with what happened, including whether the meeting was held or only booked. When we reconciled every open deal at an EMEA agricultural-machinery maker against its call records, the pipeline turned out to be full of meetings that never happened.

Which stage you should aim for

The top stage is not the goal for everyone. A twelve-person company with one pipeline and one sales lead can stay at stage 2 with decent notes for a long time, and change control there would mostly slow down the people selling. A regulated group in eleven countries is different. I ran operations for one, and a wrong number there could reach an auditor as well as a board.

Two things usually push a company up: more teams, products or countries writing to the same CRM, and someone outside the team relying on the figures, such as a board, a lender or a regulator. You often hear about it first as reports people have stopped opening.

How to move up a stage, and what it costs

Go one stage at a time, since each depends on the one below. Moving from 1 to 2 can be as small as naming an owner and writing down what each pipeline stage and lifecycle status means. The step from 2 to 3 is bigger: what is in that person’s head has to go on paper and whatever nobody uses has to come out, which in one portal we audited meant going through 722 custom properties, 203 of them empty. Stage 4 mostly adds habits, like reviewing changes before they go in and reconciling the forecast against finance every month.

Internal time is the largest cost at every step. If you bring someone in, our published prices are a 40-hour audit at €3,000, which places you and writes the plan, and fractional work from €75 an hour after that. A small HubSpot portal can be re-mapped and rebuilt in a few weeks, and a complex multi-team one takes about a quarter, most of it discovery.

How to assess your RevOps maturity

Run the four tests in order. The first one you cannot pass is your next piece of work.

Our free RevOps maturity assessment is a rougher version online, with ten questions, about five minutes, a score across seven dimensions and a 90-day roadmap. It records what you believe about your system and cannot see inside your CRM, so use it to decide where to look.