I've been in B2B tech long enough to notice something interesting: the companies running the fastest are the ones that handed their Go-to-market keys to their Revenue Operations. Yep, RevOps. The team that used to just clean up Salesforce data and build dashboards.
As co-founder of Lusha, I get to peek behind the curtain at hundreds of sales organizations. The pattern is unmistakable. Companies that put RevOps at the center of their GTM strategy are running circles around the ones still treating it like back-office support. I'm talking about real transformation here. Boston Consulting Group reports a 100-200% increase in marketing ROI and a 30% drop in GTM expenses.
Sales teams in RevOp-optimized companies are reporting a 59% boost in win rates and 53% net-dollar retention. Put another way, the same teams that used to lose leads between marketing and sales handoffs are now operating like a well-rehearsed rock band. Every player knows exactly when to come in, how loud to play, and most importantly, the secret to going platinum.
The death of department silos
Traditional GTM structures are breaking down because buyers have changed how they purchase. Today's B2B buyer is bombarded by all kinds of different digital channels and engages with mountains of content when seeking solutions (LinkedIn, anyone?). And according to Forrester, about 92% already have at least one vendor in mind when they start searching. 41% have narrowed it down to their number one preference before formal evaluation kicks off.
Millennials and Gen Z also tend to include up to 10 decision-makers in the process (including those outside of their company). That's way too many people to bank on dazzling prospects with your org chart. They don't have time for that. They're not interested. They expect consistent experiences whether they're reading your blog, talking to sales, or working with a customer success rep.
So RevOps stepped up to fix this mess. When one team owns everything from that first website visit through to renewal, you stop losing deals in the cracks between departments. Now, sales actually knows what content that prospect downloaded, which demos they watched, and what problems they're trying to solve.
And modern RevOps is making handoffs unnecessary. Because why should marketing and sales maintain separate versions of reality about the same customer? With a single customer profile fed by all data streams, marketing finally finds out which of their campaigns actually make money. Sales can see that a prospect just spent 20 minutes on the pricing page and hovered over a certain option longer than others.
No more CSV exports and manual imports. No more "can you check if this lead is in your system?" Slack messages. Now, hot prospects find their way to the right rep without anyone having to manually route them.
We used to push leads through funnels. Now the good ones surface on their own.
Automation and intelligence at scale
Only 5.1% of prospects even bother replying to cold outreach, and most need more than 50 touchpoints before they'll talk to you. That's basically just "bothering people until they give up" as a sales strategy. That's why modern RevOps teams are building something completely different.
You have to pay attention, but prospects actually clearly signal when they're ready to buy. Someone gets promoted to VP of Sales? They might need new tools. A company raises Series B? Safe to say they're about to go on a hiring spree. Your competitor's customer starts googling alternatives? That's an opportunity. The problem is, these signals are scattered everywhere: LinkedIn, review sites, their website behavior, press releases, job postings. No human can track all of that.
That's where sales streaming comes in, and it's a big improvement on sales seeking. Sales streaming is faster and more accurate, too. This is a very welcome change in an industry where 37% of sales professionals say being slow to recognize changing buying behaviors is one of their top problems and 64% of marketing leaders don't trust their current marketing measurement tools for decision-making.
Sales streaming AI watches for key moments and signals, spots the patterns that actually matter - like if downloading a white paper in a certain industry means nothing compared to checking a pricing page 3x in a week - and serves up the hottest prospects to reps every morning. It's similar to Spotify's Discover Weekly, but instead of songs you might like, it's prospects who are ready to buy.
And just like Spotify's algorithm, sales streaming AIs are just as hungry for info and fine tuning for success. Every "not interested" teaches the system what doesn't work. Every closed deal reinforces what does. Six months in, you basically have a tireless, always on sales assistant who knows your market better than you do.
The new metrics that matter
Modern RevOps is also eliminating the Monday morning activity report. Remember those meetings where everyone bragged about making 100 calls? Well, nobody cares if those calls went to voicemail. You don't want your GTM process to be anything like an old gym membership you keep paying for but rarely get anything out of.
How good are the prospects you're calling? How fast do they move from "hello" to "let's talk pricing"? How much revenue did you generate per dollar spent getting it?
Those are the metrics that matter.
The good news? Modern RevOps understand the difference between someone killing time on your blog and someone actually shopping for a solution. It can tell you which prospect will close before your rep even picks up the phone. In this economy, when every dollar counts and boards are asking hard questions about efficiency, this precision is gold. And the RevOps leaders who can walk into a board meeting and say, "Here's exactly what every marketing dollar returned," are the ones getting promoted to CRO.
The RevOps point of no return
This revenue playlist keeps producing bangers. Cutting-edge RevOps teams already have the tech. Now, they're tracking how much better their systems get each quarter. Is the AI getting better at predicting which leads will close? Are the email sequences teaching themselves which subject lines work? Is pipeline quality improving without anyone lifting a finger?
Modern revenue generation requires systems thinking, not siloes. It requires intelligence that learns and adapts instead of static playbooks and manual processes.
This is compound interest for revenue teams. Your competitors are still sales seeking, working in spreadsheets counting how many times their reps picked up the phone. They're still playing the same song (it's called "The Numbers Game"), stuck on repeat - more calls, more emails, more everything.
While they're doing that, others are tuning in to sales streaming. Sales streaming can tell you which prospects actually want to talk to you.
If you take away nothing else, know this: The gap between these two approaches isn't about one side being 10, 20, or even 50% better.
It's about one side not even realizing the genre has changed.
