Companies could see a 76% increase in webinar registrations and attendance if they integrate a new approach to aligning their marketing and sales teams, according to Julia Payne.
As a fractional CMO and specialist in Revenue Operations (RevOps), she says RevOps could transform how businesses manage growth by breaking down silos, streamlining processes and creating a single, unified approach across the entire revenue journey.
RevOps exists to close the gaps where growth so often stalls. At its core, it is a strategic business function and operating model that aligns marketing, sales and customer service by unifying each function’s people, processes, data and tech across the entire revenue life cycle.
“I’ve got a phrase that growth dies in the gaps between functions and that’s what RevOps seeks to overcome,” Payne says.
By bringing these teams together, RevOps is designed to dismantle departmental silos and replace fragmented working with a single, shared source of truth.
This is a contrast to traditional structures because often each function operates in isolation, producing its own version of performance, she notes.
“Marketing will produce a dashboard, then sales will and customer success will. Then the board or the founder will look at all this information and think ‘how does it fit together?’,” she explains.
RevOps addresses this disconnect by harmonising every revenue-facing function, ensuring they are all pulling in the same direction. Rather than individual teams optimising for their own outcomes, the entire organisation is aligned around predictable, scalable revenue growth across the full customer journey.
“In short, RevOps brings all those revenue related activities together, so the team are working across consistent platforms and tools towards shared growth objectives,” she says.
That alignment, Payne argues, delivers tangible results across the business. In practice, RevOps doesn’t just tidy up reporting; it fundamentally changes how quickly and effectively organisations can move.
She cites that one client cut new product launch times from three months to just one. Another achieved a 76% increase in webinar registrations and attendance after sales and marketing were fully aligned.
She also points to the impact of tailoring marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot or SalesForce to work exactly as the business needs. In one Fintech firm, automating the KYC process reduced onboarding times by 57%.
The gains continue further down the funnel. One client saw its deal pipeline grow by more than 200%, while another increased pipeline velocity – the speed at which deals move from start to close – by 45%.
In each case, the common factor was the same: closing the gaps between functions to keep growth moving.
The hurdles to effective RevOps
Despite its clear value, RevOps is not without its challenges, most of which come down to people and habits. Payne acknowledges that one of the biggest obstacles is resistance to change. Teams are often comfortable doing things the way they always have, but RevOps disrupts that by introducing standardised systems and processes, replacing individual approaches with a shared way of working.
“Sometimes they can feel threatened that if everybody is one team, then people feel like they’re losing control of their function and sometimes their decision-making ability,” she notes.
That tension is often reinforced by how organisations traditionally measure and reward performance. When marketing is incentivised on marketing qualified leads, sales on closed revenue and customer success on retention, each function is pushed to optimise for its own metrics rather than the collective outcome. The result is misalignment built into the system itself.
Instead, Payne argues, businesses need to rethink performance through a revenue lens, viewing it as a connected chain, a customer journey and a lifecycle, with incentives aligned across the entire system rather than fragmented by function.
There is also a persistent misconception that RevOps is only relevant for large, complex organisations. Payne pushes back against this assumption, pointing out that she primarily works with businesses generating between £1 million and £10 million in turnover or ARR. In fact, she argues that implementing RevOps earlier can be significantly easier.
“When you’re building up a company, obviously that’s true, because there might be one person, if anyone in marketing and similarly, in sales, but actually, as with most things, the best time to put RevOps in is as early as possible,” she says.
“If you put it in from the beginning, as soon as you can, as soon as you’ve got those functions developing, then it’s the best time.”
Done early, RevOps doesn’t have to undo entrenched habits or realign competing incentives. It becomes less of a transformation project and more of a foundation for sustainable growth.
Turning challenges into results
Given the challenges that come with adopting RevOps, Payne is clear that success depends as much on how it is introduced as on the model itself.
For companies looking to introduce RevOps and unlock its benefits, Payne is clear that success starts at the top. She says the first step is securing a senior sponsor.
While RevOps is designed to solve real business pain points, it also challenges established ways of working and not everyone will immediately be on board. Therefore, strong sponsorship is essential to push it through the organisation and maintain momentum when resistance appears.
Equally important is involving frontline teams early. Payne advises bringing marketing, sales and customer-facing teams into both the decision to adopt RevOps and the design of the processes and service level agreements that support it.
“They’re the closest to the customers, they’re obviously closest to their roles and they’re also the closest to the friction. Because it’s a move from departments to a revenue system, there will be resistance, but it’s a chain so by involving the people and showing how it’s going to improve their world is always beneficial,” she explains.
When it comes to implementation, Payne stresses that organisations should resist the temptation to retrofit RevOps into existing structures. Instead, the focus should be on designing and mapping the revenue journey first.
“You’ve got to understand your entire revenue cycle, how it moves from A to B to C to D and understand where those gaps are at present, and how you can fill those through RevOps,” she says.
“Once you’ve done that and you’ve mapped out your revenue system, then it’s to align the organisation with that revenue system.”
Underpinning all of this is data. Modern marketing and sales are already heavily data-driven, but RevOps raises the stakes by making data the backbone of the entire revenue model. Payne emphasises the need to get data foundations in place early, with clear strategies for capturing, managing and using new data effectively.
By taking control of the data narrative, organisations create a shared view of performance that underpins the entire revenue journey
Combined with strong sponsorship to champion the change, early involvement from frontline teams to address friction, and a clear mapping of how revenue flows across the business, this approach turns potential resistance into collaboration.
When all these elements come together, RevOps transforms fragmented processes into a unified system, aligning marketing, sales and customer success and setting the organisation up for predictable, scalable growth.
Discover more insights from Julia Payne at FP Live! 2026 on the ‘Boardroom ready: Aligning marketing with strategic mandates’ panel.