Why Revenue Operations Is Broken in Most Scaleups: 20 Questions Answered

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is one of the most critical — and most misunderstood — functions inside modern scaleups.
When it works, RevOps fuels aligned growth.
When it’s broken, your CRM becomes a black hole and your forecast becomes a guess.

This post walks through 20 of the most important questions we hear from scaling companies, and what we’ve learned from rebuilding RevOps infrastructure across dozens of HubSpot environments.

1. What is Revenue Operations (RevOps), really?

A) RevOps is the strategic alignment of people, processes, and platforms across marketing, sales, and customer success. It’s not just about reporting or admin — it’s about building a repeatable, scalable system for generating and retaining revenue.

2. Why do scaleups wait too long to invest in RevOps?

A) Because early wins come from hustle — not structure. Founders focus on deals and demos, not data and handoffs. But once growth outpaces coordination, everything breaks. That’s when RevOps becomes essential.

3. What does a broken RevOps system look like?

A) Messy handoffs. Stalled leads. Inaccurate dashboards. Pipeline fiction. Reps updating fields manually (or not at all). No one trusts the CRM, and everyone blames the other team.

4. Why is HubSpot so powerful — and so dangerous — for fast-growing teams?

A) HubSpot is brilliantly flexible, which means you can build fast. But without governance, you create workflow sprawl, inconsistent data, and systems no one understands — or wants to own.

5. What’s the difference between a HubSpot Admin and a RevOps Partner?

A) A HubSpot Admin builds what you ask for. A RevOps Partner builds what the business needs — strategically, across teams, with a focus on adoption, outcomes, and scale.
→ Read more

6. Why are lifecycle stages so misunderstood and misused?

A) Most companies leave lifecycle automation half-built. Leads get stuck in “Lead” forever. MQL definitions are unclear. Sales skips SQL entirely. No one can report with confidence.

7. What role should lead scoring actually play in qualification?

A) Scoring should reflect both fit (ICP profile) and intent (behavioural signals). It should guide — not automate — qualification, and be reviewed monthly with GTM input.

8. How do bad handoffs kill pipeline and customer experience?

A) When leads aren’t routed correctly, or CS doesn’t know deal context, handoffs create friction. It leads to delays, frustration, and churn risk — all preventable with RevOps alignment.

9. Why are your dashboards lying to you?

A) Dashboards are only as good as the data beneath them. If lifecycle stages, deal stages, and lead sources are misused or incomplete, your dashboards tell a pretty story — not the real one.

10. What’s the real cost of pipeline fiction?

A) You over-forecast. You under-coach. You chase dead deals. Pipeline fiction wastes time and damages credibility. RevOps solves this by enforcing exit criteria, stage discipline, and accountability.

11. How can you enforce SOPs inside HubSpot?

A) Use Sidekick — our in-CRM assistant that prompts reps with required fields, confirms exit criteria, and flags skipped steps. It ensures adoption of the processes you worked so hard to design.

12. Why do workflows break more than they help?

A) Because they’re built ad hoc, named poorly, and left to rot. RevOps teams implement naming conventions, workflow audits, and dependency mapping to create systems that scale.

13. How do you stop leads from sitting in ‘Lead’ forever?

A) Define what turns a Lead into an MQL — then automate it. Trigger transitions based on score, form activity, and page engagement.
→ Lifecycle playbook here

14. What’s the right way to use HubSpot properties?

A) Use property groups, naming conventions, and required fields by stage. Archive what’s unused. Standardise definitions so every team knows what data matters — and why.

15. How do you fix a CRM without rebuilding it from scratch?

A) Run a 90-day clean-up. Audit, prioritise, rebuild foundations, retrain teams. You don’t need a total relaunch — just structure, sequencing, and support.
→ Our 90-day RevOps playbook

16. Why doesn’t your sales team trust the CRM?

A) Because it doesn’t help them sell. Reps see it as admin, not value. RevOps fixes this by embedding useful logic, automation, and enablement into their daily workflows — not on top of them.

17. What does ‘clean data’ actually mean?

A) It means data that’s structured, consistent, updated, and reportable. Clean data supports decisions. Dirty data destroys them.

18. How do you make forecasting predictable instead of painful?

A) Define deal stage criteria. Build forecast views by confidence and risk. Create weekly cadence for review. Enforce CRM hygiene with tools like Sidekick.
→ Forecasting blog here

19. How do you align sales, marketing, and CS around revenue?

A) Shared definitions. Unified dashboards. Integrated handoffs. Joint KPIs. RevOps ensures everyone runs the same playbook, on the same field, toward the same goal.

20. What does good RevOps actually look like in a scaleup?

A) Clean CRM. Accurate dashboards. Trusted forecast. Clear roles. Cross-team sync. Measurable pipeline health. And above all — a revenue engine that scales without breaking.

Final Thoughts

RevOps isn’t a nice-to-have.
It’s the operating system that powers aligned, accountable, scalable growth.

At Project36, we rebuild broken RevOps systems for scaleups using WaypointOS — our proven framework for revenue clarity, and Sidekick — our in-CRM enforcement layer.

If these 20 questions hit close to home, we should talk.