In New Orleans, Dana Breakstone, Director of RevOps at Pax8, Erick Mahle, VP of Operations and Digital Transformation at Lendz Financial, and Tana Jackson, VP of Operations at Upright Labs, debated whether or not business systems should be owned by revenue operations.
As expected, people had strong FEELINGS. But in true RevOpsAF fashion, no matter where they landed in the debate, they all had fantastic advice for operators who have zero or next to zero administrative access to core business systems.
In plenty of companies, RevOps doesn’t actually own the tech stack. Instead, you’re at the mercy of an IT or business systems team that’s juggling five competing priorities—and probably thinks the “MQL” is a marketing buzzword or actually dead.
Speaking from experience, that’s really difficult to accept when the first ten years of your career were centered around CRM implementation and administration.
So what do you do when you’re accountable for results but not in control of the systems?
You build influence. You build trust. And you put yourself back in your shoes when you first started in revenue operations – before you earned all that business context.
No one likes a fire drill—especially the team that gets roped in late. RevOps often knows about go-to-market changes before anyone else. Use that to your advantage.
Hear about a new product offering? Is your new SVP of sales already talking about instituting a different qualification methodology? Is your VP of customer success obsessed with a ABX? Bring your IT or business systems partner in the loop as soon as you hear about any major headwinds that are bound to change things down the road.
Sure, you may give them a heads up about something that may not materialize in major configuration changes, but they’ll feel better knowing change may happen than getting a last minute directive.
There’s no excuse for last-minute tickets related to major go-to-market changes revenue operations knows about. The more you make go-to-market needs part of their planning cycles, the better the collaboration gets.
Try This:
We’ll let you in on a secret:
Your systems team doesn’t wake up excited to build another territory routing rule.
But if they understand why that routing rule helps decrease time to first contact and drive $300K in pipeline?
Totally different story.
IT leaders have been striving for decades to master the art of communicating the return on investment. They don’t want to be seen as a cost center any more than we do.
Help them by calculating time savings, conversion rate impact, or reduction in churn. These co-owned projects will go from nice-to-have to must-have in the eyes of your C-Suite and a great addition to everyone’s resume.
And remember, they can’t read minds either. If you’ve ever received an urgent request from sales leadership for “a dashboard,” you understand why context is everything.
Make it easy:
The “throw it over the fence and hope for the best” method gets you exactly what you asked for, not what you needed. Bad tickets cost more than time—they erode trust.
Whether you're requesting a change, outlining a process, or handing off an implementation, clear documentation makes you the kind of RevOps pro systems teams want to work with.
What to include:
This is also a great opportunity to create a communication plan and enablement documentation for your end users.
Custom fields. Custom objects. Custom everything. Sound familiar?
RevOps leaders are often caught in the middle between business stakeholders asking for Frankenstein solutions and systems teams that love a challenge.
The best way to protect everyone’s sanity is to push back early—with data and a point of view.
You are allowed to say: “That’s not scalable. Here’s what we recommend instead.”
If you need backup:
No one wins when you spend $50K customizing a system to match a spreadsheet that shouldn’t exist in the first place. I know a highly technical person may see a custom coded solution as job security, but companies rarely look at the authors of Franken-solutions as a hero.
Yes, documentation matters. Yes, planning ahead is critical. But if your systems partner sees you as a black hole of Jira tickets, you’ve already lost.
The RevOps pros who get things done aren’t just technically savvy—they’re politically savvy. They build trust. They know birthdays. They ask about each other’s kids.
The more you bring your business partner into the loop and find ways to collaborate, the more likely you are to have an ally who can defend your decisions when you aren’t in the room.
Relationship-building tips:
When priorities inevitably clash, a strong relationship turns negotiation into collaboration.
Business systems teams don’t have to be roadblocks. They can create a sustainable, scalable infrastructure—if you treat them like partners, not order-takers.
So if you don’t own the tech, own the relationship. Own the planning. Own the clarity. Own the why.
Because when systems work well, nobody notices. When they don’t? Everyone blames RevOps.
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