Revenue operations (RevOps) is the team, and the set of software, that turns a sales team's deals into a forecast, a correct quote, an answered proposal and each salesperson's commission. The team usually sits between sales, marketing and finance. Its job is to make sure that everyone reads the same numbers from the CRM.
Five products sit in this zone, roughly in the order of the end of a deal.
First, the forecast. All the deals in progress together are called the pipeline. Every week, the sales leader must say how much of it will close this quarter. Revenue intelligence reads every deal, call and email in the pipeline, and estimates how likely each deal is to close. It then adds these estimates into a forecast. Its part B2B pipeline attribution shows which marketing produced each deal.
Second, the quote. Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software builds a quote with the right options, price, discount and terms. It checks each discount against the company's pricing policy.
Third, the proposal. Large buyers send a request for proposal (RFP), a long questionnaire that every competing seller must answer. RFP software answers it from a library of approved answers.
Fourth, the salesperson's preparation. Sales enablement gives every salesperson the right slides, case studies and training, and coaches them after their calls.
Fifth, the commission. Incentive compensation management works out what each salesperson has earned on the deals that closed, under their plan and their quota. A quota is the amount a salesperson is expected to sell in a period.
Consider the last week of March at a Bhubaneswar company that sells software for maintaining mining equipment. March is the end of the financial year in India, so every open deal matters. Revenue intelligence estimates that ₹3.1 crore of the ₹4 crore target will close. CPQ produces a quote for one mine with a 12% discount, which the head of sales approves. On 31 March, three deals are signed. On 10 April, incentive compensation management calculates the commission of the two salespeople who closed them.
The results then leave this zone. The commission goes to HRIS and payroll software, which pays it with the salary. The forecast goes to the finance team's financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software.