Notes from the ops room

When pipeline underperforms, the instinct is to buy something — a better CRM, a routing tool, an attribution platform. It feels like progress. It rarely is, because the leak is almost never in the tool. It’s in the handoff between the people and teams the tool connects. New software just gives you a

Routing that worked at ten reps quietly breaks at thirty. It rarely fails loudly; it just starts sending the wrong leads to the wrong people slightly more often until everyone’s built a workaround. Here are five symptoms that yours has been outgrown.

Here’s a real one, anonymised. A demo request came in from a director at a company that matched the ideal customer profile almost exactly. High intent, right seniority, right size. Nobody called. Nobody emailed. The lead sat, then aged out, then quietly closed. Let’s take it apart, because the failu

A RevOps SLA is a written, two-sided agreement that sets out what marketing owes sales and what sales owes marketing at the handoff — typically the quality and volume of leads marketing delivers, and the speed and depth with which sales works them. It turns “work together” from a hope into a contrac

A lead lifecycle only works if the people at the sharp end trust it. Most don’t fail on the diagram; they fail because sales was never in the room, so reps treat the stages as marketing’s fiction and quietly run their own. Here’s how to design one they’ll actually respect, step by step, with the…