This editorial appeared in the July 24th, 2025, issue of the Topline newsletter.
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RevOps promised to be the brains of go‑to‑market. 73% of companies have already pinned a VP or C‑level badge on someone in the role, yet half of those same executives still describe the team as a reactive help desk. The title is granted but the execution is missing.
Last year I came across T‑shirt advertised by The RevOps Co‑op: “I would agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.” It’s more than just another item in their rather extensive merch store. It’s a confession. If stakeholders disagree with RevOps, RevOps assumes that the stakeholder is stupid.
The reality is that RevOps is not in a good place. There is a growing dissonance between RevOps operators and their counterparts, and signals are mounting that trust in RevOps is eroding. Roles are disappearing, layoffs are hitting hard, and GTM Engineering roles are eating up headcount budget. RevOps leaders need to begin addressing their credibility crisis if they want to have a seat at the table.
I offer this view as founder of a boutique RevOps agency for high‑growth startups, former VP RevOps at a tech unicorn, and retired seller with seven years carrying my own quota.
The Trust Factor
The criticism is strikingly consistent from growth‑stage founders to Fortune‑500 chiefs against RevOps teams:
- They over‑engineer GTM processes
- They produce guardrails that slow deals
- They don’t understand their stakeholders because they’ve never done the job
Most RevOps operators have never carried a bag, so their “insights” can feel academic when deals are on the line. SaaS leaders swap stories about paying for six different point solutions because RevOps kept adding tools “the CRM already does,” creating what one startup CRO calls “tool‑fatigue tax.”
RevOps is supposed to be the truth engine of the revenue org, yet the numbers say we’re in a credibility crisis.
Two versions of reality are running in parallel
50% of CROs say their CRM data is “high confidence,” but 80% of RevOps leads rate the same data as “poor.”
In one Slack channel, RevOps is flagging duplicate accounts and sand‑castle pipeline stages; in another, Sales is celebrating a “lock” quarter on data RevOps swears is broken. When half the leadership team believes the map is accurate and the other half insists it’s upside‑down, the only thing everyone can agree on is to ignore the map.
Every miss compounds the distrust loop
Less than 20% of sales orgs hit 75%+ forecast accuracy.
Finance already hair‑cuts the forecast because last quarter came in light. Reps already second-guess the comp calculator because last year their accelerators misfired. Each error teaches people to add their own margin of error, so even when RevOps is right, nobody bets the quarter on it.
Just can’t get comp right
90% of sales leaders don’t trust their comp plans. Meanwhile, 75% of reps think they’re paid wrong.
If sellers and leaders are unhappy with their pay, motivation wanes. Whether or not a company can capture this on a dashboard, the reality is that poor compensation practices drive poor performance.
Perception beats architecture
89% of executives say RevOps lacks clear strategic goals.
You can deploy the cleanest Salesforce schema on the planet, but if the CRO thinks it’s a black box, it is a black box. Trust is the gating factor for every RevOps initiative, and if you lose it, even the best process redesign won’t land.
These aren’t isolated grumbles. They’re the perception backdrop against which budget decisions are made. When the function charged with efficiency is viewed as bureaucratic overhead, head‑count lines are the first to go, no matter how clean the data model looks on a slide.
The RevOps Recession
We’ve sobered up from ZIRP and companies are now focused on profitable efficient growth. This should be great news for RevOps: efficiency is fundamental to the mandate. So RevOps jobs are safe…right?
No! The lack of trust is playing out in the numbers.
Hiring Freezes:
Recruiters are pulling back, and RevOps roles are no longer automatic requisitions.
- LinkedIn shows job ads dropped from 26k to 21k from May 2024 to May 2025, a 19 % decline over the same period, confirming that the talent market has flipped from “can’t hire fast enough” to “surplus on the bench.”
- Open RevOps roles on Indeed fell from ~25,000 to 19,000 in the past twelve months: a 22 % year‑over‑year plunge.
- LinkedIn analysts tallied roughly 1,000 fewer RevOps titles in North America last year, the first net decline since the discipline had a name. Sixty‑four percent of CROs say their Ops budget will stay flat or shrink again in 2025.
Pink Slips:
It’s not just hiring; companies are reducing headcount here, too. Over the last twelve months, major tech companies have either downsized or eliminated their RevOps functions.
Several layoffs that included RevOps:
- ZoomInfo (Jun 2025)
- WEKA (Feb 2025)
- Outreach (Nov 2024)
- Dell Technologies (Aug 2024)
- Microsoft (announced for early Jul 2025)
If both Fortune-500 vendors and venture-backed startups are trimming RevOps, the contraction isn’t an enterprise quirk: it’s industry-wide.
Sure, Sales teams are getting hit harder in the market, but nuance here matters. Sellers are aimed at growth, RevOps is aimed at efficiency. Companies are being careful about growth, but they are aggressively pursuing efficiency. Hiring managers are no longer betting on RevOps to drive that efficiency. In fact, they’re pulling back.
Sales Engineers: The Budget Rebrand
Hiring dollars that used to go to RevOps are now being re-routed to Go-to-Market Engineers. Essentially the same mandate, just packaged with deeper coding skills. The very need for a new label is the signal: if boards were satisfied with classic RevOps, they wouldn’t be funding a rebrand.
- Indeed listed roughly 822 GTM‑Engineer openings in July (roughly 4x last year)
- Clay’s Slack instance rocketed over 260% to 8,000 members, while the RevOps Co‑op community sat flat at roughly 18,000.
- About 1,400 LinkedIn job ads for “GTM Engineer” were live in the U.S. as of May 2025 (up from effectively zero a year earlier) while “Revenue Operations” ads dropped 19% year over year.
Companies still want the work RevOps promised, they’re just funding a more modern approach and skill set.
A Reckoning, Not a Rough Patch
45% of leaders from a recent Salesloft survey view RevOps as a reactive support function rather than a strategic one, and 79% still categorize it as merely “sales-adjacent.”
In practice, this means that companies where RevOps is formally in place, many CROs, CMOs, and CEOs have never fully embraced RevOps as a peer strategic advisor. RevOps teams might be invited to the meeting, and “present in strategic conversations but rarely leading them.” They often have the data and insights but lack the mandate or trust to drive strategic initiatives autonomously.
More concerning, AI is making access to data and generating insights easier (along with CRM, tooling, and basically everything else within RevOps’ mandate). If RevOps’ value is restricted to these areas and is not seen as a major strategic driver, then AI is going to provide increasing pressure to RevOps roles.
Whether RevOps rewrites itself or gets written out is now a quarterly metric, not a philosophical debate.
The trust deficit, the hiring pull‑back, the layoffs, and the flight of budget toward code‑first GTM engineers paint a single picture: RevOps is at risk. The mandate hasn’t vanished. Boards still crave predictable revenue and tighter funnels. They’re just no longer convinced the traditional revOps playbook, and the people holding it, can deliver.
