A step-by-step guide to auditing and optimising the hand-offs that power your marketing, sales and customer-success flywheel
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is fast becoming the operating system for ambitious UK scale-ups and larger SMEs. When you align marketing, sales and customer-success around common processes and data, the commercial gains are striking: businesses with tight sales–marketing alignment grow 19 % faster and are 15 % more profitable than their peers (zywave.com); fully integrated revenue teams can unlock up to 36 % extra revenue growth (zywave.com).
Below is a practical, UK-centric checklist you can apply this quarter. It will help you surface friction, break down silos, and build a smoother revenue engine—without ripping out your existing tech stack.
1. Map the end-to-end journey (from the buyer’s eye-line)
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List every customer touch-point—from first ad click to renewal call.
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Overlay internal actors: marketing ops, SDRs, AEs, account managers, service agents.
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Highlight “moments that matter”—lead qualification, opportunity creation, onboarding, QBRs.
Quick win: Print the map and let each team annotate where they lose visibility or duplicate effort. The gaps you reveal usually become your first process-improvement sprints.
2. Audit data quality & ownership
| Checkpoint |
Typical red flag |
RevOps fix |
| Lead source & campaign fields |
“(Not set)” or conflicting values |
Standardise pick-lists; lock fields from ad-hoc edits |
| Lifecycle stage dates |
Missing or overwritten |
Automate stamps via workflows |
| Account hierarchy & contacts |
Duplicates across sales & service hubs |
Deploy a single ‘golden’ account object and merge duplicates |
Clean, inspectable data is the bedrock of any RevOps strategy—otherwise your dashboards lie and your hand-offs suffer.
3. Define crystal-clear exit criteria for every hand-off
| Stage |
Exit criteria example (buyer-centric) |
Responsible team |
| Marketing → Sales |
Lead meets ICP score and has requested sales conversation |
Marketing Ops |
| Sales → Implementation |
Signed order form plus completed discovery checklist |
Account Executive |
| Implementation → CSM |
Platform live, adoption ≥ 80 %, first success plan agreed |
Implementation Lead |
Using factual, inspectable criteria prevents “throwing over the wall” behaviours and keeps funnel velocity high.
4. Instrument the feedback loops
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Onboarding NPS (week 4) → feeds enablement materials for AEs.
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Closed-lost reasons → pipes into content‐gap analysis for marketing.
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CSM churn notes → surfaces product-fit signals for product managers.
Automate these loops in your CRM or BI layer so insights are visible inside the same dashboards your teams live in.
5. Introduce weekly RevOps “stand-up”
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15 minutes, cross-functional: marketing, SDR, sales, CS.
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Agenda: metric pulse (conversion & ageing), obstacles, next sprint.
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Outcome: rapid iteration of playbooks and faster decision-making.
High-growth firms that embed a shared RevOps cadence report 10-15 % higher win rates and 10-20 % lower go-to-market costs (zywave.com).
6. Measure what matters
| KPI |
Why it matters |
Target pointer |
| Lead-to-SQL conversion |
Gauges hand-off quality & ICP focus |
≥ 25 % (varies by channel) |
| Opportunity ageing (days) |
Exposes process drag |
Benchmark current, cut 20 % |
| Onboarding time-to-value |
Early predictor of retention |
Aim for < 30 days |
| Net Revenue Retention |
Ultimate proof of alignment |
110 %+ for SaaS scale-ups |
Take-away checklist
☑ Map buyer journey end-to-end
☑ Clean & standardise revenue data
☑ Set exit criteria for every stage
☑ Automate cross-team feedback loops
☑ Run a weekly RevOps stand-up
☑ Track a unified KPI set
By following this Process Improvement 101 guide you’ll not only align sales and marketing, but create a revenue flywheel that compounds: cleaner data, tighter hand-offs, happier customers—and a commercial engine that scales predictably.
Need a hand putting this into practice? As a RevOps firm focused exclusively on HubSpot, Inbound Orbit specialises in helping UK businesses improve sales-funnel efficiency, break down silos and embed a future-proof RevOps strategy. Let’s turn your operational chaos into sustainable growth.
