The situation
A roughly 400-person firm, operating globally, selling tailored engineering solutions and placing technical staff with clients - mostly in consumer goods. On paper, a serious tech stack: two CRMs, tools for enrichment, tools for data mining, automations, AI agents, all of it costing real money every month.
In practice, nobody senior would touch any of it, and it wasn’t reluctance, it was refusal. The main stakeholders did not open the CRMs at all, because no two of them could agree on what a “deal” or a “contact” actually represented. When the objects mean nothing, the system is just expensive furniture.
The instinct in the room was to buy something that would finally tie it all together. We told them to use less, and to start from what people actually did.
What RevOps XL did
1. Populate the CRM from where the work already happened
People weren’t in the CRM. They were in their inbox, on WhatsApp, on SMS. So we stopped asking them to be somewhere else and brought the data to the system instead.
We pulled from the communication channels the team actually used - email, WhatsApp, SMS - and automatically populated the mother CRM from them. A portion of that activity was synced back out to the modules that needed it: marketing, customer satisfaction, customer success. The record filled itself as a by-product of people doing their jobs, with no data-entry tax added on top.
This is the unglamorous foundation. You cannot align a team around data nobody enters, so we made the entering disappear.
2. Find the few KPIs everyone would actually agree on
Training was never the issue; people use a system when it measures something they care about. So before touching a workflow, we isolated a small number of KPIs that carried shared importance across every major stakeholder - the CEO, pre-sales, customer success - and got a definition each of them would sign.
That last part is the whole battle. A KPI everyone interprets differently is worse than no KPI. Once the definitions were agreed and adopted, those few numbers became the numbers the team steered by. Teams started opening the system on purpose, because it was now how you moved the number you were judged on.
The tools stayed the same. What changed was that people now had a reason to open them.
3. Let the forecast lie, then make it impossible
The first thing that happened when sales had a KPI was that sales gamed it. Deals that were going nowhere stayed marked “in progress” because a fuller pipeline looked like better forecasting. That was predictable, and entirely human.
So we tightened the definitions until the gaming had nowhere to go: what counts as a commit, what a genuinely live deal looks like versus one that is just being kept warm on a slide, and a written definition of what “stalled” and “lost” actually mean, with the workflow and rules to enforce it.
The result looked, for a moment, like a catastrophe: a massive drop from “opportunities in progress” to “closed lost.” The pipeline looked like it was collapsing, but it had just stopped lying. For the first time, the number on the board was one the CEO could actually plan against.
4. Read the losses, then fix what caused them
A pile of honestly-labelled lost opportunities is the best dataset a go-to-market team will ever get. So we analysed it: where, and why, deals were actually being lost.
That surfaced three problems. Communication practices were costing deals, so we addressed them directly with internal workshops in a cross-functional room. Admin work was pulling sales away from clients, so we handed it to automation. And the main-CRM view was so cluttered that reps avoided it, so we simplified it down to the few objects they actually needed to touch, clean enough to use in seconds on the go.
Adoption stopped being something you had to mandate, because the system was now faster than the workaround.
5. The parallel NPS project - and the 34%
Alongside the sales work, we ran an NPS programme with the customer success teams and their account managers, and used it to reactivate customers rather than to collect scores nobody would read.
It reactivated a meaningful set of dormant customers, and that single campaign opened 34% new pipeline. It also surfaced exactly where the delivery teams had failed to produce the results that had been promised, and opened honest conversations about optimising and updating their workflows and project-management programmes, problems that had been invisible while everyone avoided the system that would have shown them.
