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.
List every customer touch-point—from first ad click to renewal call.
Overlay internal actors: marketing ops, SDRs, AEs, account managers, service agents.
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.
| 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.
| 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.
Onboarding NPS (week 4) → feeds enablement materials for AEs.
Closed-lost reasons → pipes into content‐gap analysis for marketing.
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.
15 minutes, cross-functional: marketing, SDR, sales, CS.
Agenda: metric pulse (conversion & ageing), obstacles, next sprint.
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).
| 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 |
☑ 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.