10 Revenue Operations Gaps And How to Fix Your Go-To-Market

At Roadmap we work with several hundred clients over the course of a year, and we're putting together go to market systems for them. But we see consistent themes when we work with clients of what they're struggling with. And I thought so to act is perhaps a mirror for our listeners. That can then be turned into a map.

We share these top ten themes that we see our clients and the marketplace struggling with. So the top ten themes that we see folks struggling with. First and foremost is revenue forecasting and pipeline visibility. This is the most common.

No matter the size of the company or the vertical, companies can't predict whether they're going to hit their quarterly targets. Leadership feels like they're flying blind. They don't know what's actually going to occur by the end of the quarter. They're making decisions based off of gut rather than data.

And, you know, we see examples of folks when we first start working with them, they're missing quarterly quarters by ten, 20% or sometimes exceeding. They get what they get, and they don't get upset because they don't know why. So to resolve that, what we also see happening is they start to put in metrics, they start to put in scorecards, and they review leading and lagging indicators. They get a mathematical model, top down models in place.

Here's what our annual goals are. Here's what our actual reoccurring book of businesses. Here's the gap that we have. Here's how many accounts we need to add in.

Here's how many accounts we need to expand. They put all that stuff in there, and they break it down into weekly activities that then get recorded into a scorecard. And then they have a CRM with a pipeline so they can see the visibility of what's occurring. That takes time.

That's a culture change. But that's how they actually get on top of being able to forecast not having a hope cast, having pipeline visibility and understanding where their business is going. The second theme that we see most common that they're struggling with is CRM adaptation and data hygiene. So the struggle is, is that they've got a team, they've put a CRM in place, they've got a platform, the data scattered, you know, they've got it still in multiple places.

It might be, you know, Excel, their financial system, whether it's Business Central or QuickBooks. They have stuff in Outlook or Gmail. They might have stuff in G drive or SharePoint. It's all over the place.

And they're just even though they have a CRM, it's nonfunctional. So how how are we seeing this getting solved for the resolution? Well, you start at the beginning of understanding what the functional requirements are, the basics that you need out of your CRM. You have training and support that gets put in place ongoing.

You'll get a champion that tends to be somebody that's younger and tech savvy to help lead the charge and support all the rest of the revenue team. And you, you marry this to a weekly pipeline inspection. So they have to get results. They have to get paid.

If it's not, if it's not in the CRM. So when you tie compensation to what goes into the CRM, results tend to happen. And also you have to make your CRM such a tool that it makes your reps lives easier. And that's what we see that they're doing to resolve it.

The third most common thing we see is marketing and sales misalignment. In fact, this is this is widespread. It's almost universal. But it's not the pain point that generally brings us, to work with folks.

But marketing sales, they operate in silos, and marketing can't prove ROI. They get treated as a cost center. Sales blames marketing for bad leads. Marketing blame sales for poor follow ups.

And it's rather interesting. They don't tend to know where most of their new revenue opportunities are generated from. And there's not really, pipeline visibility. And so when these are working in isolation, as opposed to as one revenue team, you get this kind of stuff happening.

So the resolution, of course, is to make them one team to create a unified revenue team with a shared scorecard that they're seeing all the stuff together, driving towards the same results, get sales and marketing in joint weekly or bi weekly meetings, whatever the cadence needs to be. So they're actually operating as one team and have full attribution tracking and explain, you know, two sales, what they need to do so that marketing can see if this lead was any good, and then they can feed off that get a virtuous cycle to actually try to get better leads to sales.

Right. And then, of course, you got to hold marketing accountable to pipeline creation. Not just lead volume. And so when everybody's lined up along the same scorecard and you're all part of the same team, that misalignment starts to disappear quite rapidly.

The next thing we see, which is somewhat shocking to me, but we see that people fully don't understand their customers. So they or or even worse, they have unidentified ideal customer profile, which this is a foundational gap. You have to you have to understand who your customer is deeply understand who they are in order to be able to have a viable, scalable go to market. So they can't articulate the struggle because they can't articulate who they should sell to.

Sales reps will chase anybody with a pulse marketing waste budget on broad on targeted campaigns. It's it's just it's you know, it's taking a shotgun approach to sales and marketing. So the resolution is to really, really dial in and understand who your who your actual ideal client profile is. Now here's the thing.

If you've got a pal, you actually have customer data. You can then tier your top customers and see who it is that is your biggest and best and most profitable customers. And that by default will start to become your ideal customer profile unless you're making some strategic shift and change in the business. But start their tier.

Your customers understand who your strategic accounts are, who your growth accounts are, and then who your transactional accounts are. And and don't be focused on the transactional accounts. So you can use this historical data to help you identify who those are. And then go out and have conversations and really deeply understand your customers.

We see that theme over and over again on this podcast about people to understand their customers. All they do is they get boots on the ground, they have conversations, they document, they share it, and they all align around it. The next thing we see is that we've got a system in place. We're getting leads coming in, but it's getting stalled and it's not moving through the pipeline.

And so really what it comes down to is lead management and follow up. The struggle is leads come in, but they're not followed up fast as they should, as fast as they should or consistently. So people, you know, after 1 or 2 touches stop and you know, it, it can take up to 12 touches sometimes to get something to the table. So, you know, you can have we have companies that have generated, like, you know, 20 to 50 qualified leads, per week.

And yet they're not advancing enough in the pipeline that the conversion rate is just terribly low. So what it really comes down to is process. So the the resolution is first and foremost, get your leads into a CRM so that it can have tasks assigned. You can see how fast it is that they're actually contacted.

You can create automation and reminders and nurture sequences. Track the full funnel of leads to contacted the qualified to meetings, to deals, to being signed on. Customers dedicate resources to actually chasing down these leads for consistent outreach and management, and then start to record what's going on, get some team, keep game tape going on and then as a team go through that game tape and get better, learn, listen and get better as a team as to how you actually assess and manage your leads.

We'll get back to show in just a minute. But first, I wanted to share with you an exciting resource that we have available on our site in the resource sections. The 2025 benchmark report. We did research throughout all of 2025 to reveal where B2B companies are strong, where critical gaps exist across their strategy, their metrics, their sales process, technology, customer retention, all the things.

And it also helps leaders decide what they can do next to improve the performance. They can use report to assess where their systems might be falling short, where they're meeting or exceeding benchmarks, and then critically decide where to focus before investing further in their growth. Download the report today. Go to our website roadmap agency.

com/resources. And now let's get back to the show. The sixth one that we have popping up. Because you know what's old is new again is trade shows.

A lot of folks in the manufacturing B2B space, or B2B businesses, they go to trade shows, but they're like, we don't know what really happens at those trade shows. So the struggle is, is you've got companies that are spending six figures annually on trade shows, and they haven't been attributing, any kind of leads or ROI to this. So first and foremost, the resolution is, you know, build a budget and actually really understand what your costs are and then try to figure out the efficiency of that motion of going to trade shows.

You have to track the quotes. You have to track the accounts that have been talked to the customer touches. You have to be able to attribute show, sales to the show, and it could be 3 to 6 months pole show, or it could be even a year. But you have to start to track this kind of stuff so you can understand what's going on.

And most of these companies roll in without even setting goals, for the show. So set explicit goals per show so that you have, you know, something to measure against so you can identify, if this show is worth your while because you have the cost figured out. You know what? You're, you should have a good idea of what your conversion rate is.

You know what? Your average transaction, average account sizes. Well, now you can start to actually mathematically model whether this trade show makes sense or not. And that's the last piece is put it all together mathematically.

Model it out. Figure out which shows are the more efficient shows, which shows that you should just maybe have a presence at like walk the show or just go out and visit with customers. And which ones do you exhibit at? And then you can figure out what that what that is that you need to do effectively and efficiently.

This the seventh trend we see is the lack of management that goes towards your reoccurring book, a business and the expansion opportunities that come with your reoccurring book of business. So the struggle is, is that there isn't plans for this. There is an expansion plans. Folks don't know how to project for it.

They don't know how to document it. And it certainly isn't visible in the CRM and there's no forecasting attached to it. So the resolution for it is to put dedicated account plans in your CRM. So you can see this is what we expect.

Here's what the projections are. To create visibility in your pipeline. You can actually put the seasonal reoccurring deals that happen. So maybe there's an inventory order in the spring and an inventory order in the fall.

So you can put those placeholders in there as part of your planning. You can also put in workflows to make sure you have ongoing account management. So quarterly business reviews depending on the tier that they're on. So you keep those customer touches going and you keep updating the plan and and making sure and dialing it in and then getting things more accurate, for your forecasting.

And so you really want to make sure that this is all resourced appropriately so that reoccurring business is, is managed. And then the expansion opportunity is tracked. Even with folks that have their ideal customer dialed in, they aren't getting consistent feedback loops to help update their understanding of their customer. So the struggle is, is they don't systematically collect customer feedback.

So there's no, process for voice of the customer. There's no voice to the customer program. So the they don't have ongoing clarity on why customers buy, why they are staying with them, why they leave and and where they're at with their buying cycles. So that voice, the customer program just isn't present.

So the resolution is simply to launch a voice, the customer program. Part of that can be, you know, if you're going to set up a dealer council, have customer surveys, you have win loss interviews, that sort of stuff. You really also want to understand who are in your buying committees of your ideal client profile. So really map that out.

You can then do customer journey maps to sort of start to understand some of the friction points that are popping up. So then everybody can get educated on all their accounts. What's occurring. And last and not least, the voice of the customer is there every day.

If you're talking to your customers, record, your customer conversations and then leverage AI to pull insights out that you might not have seen otherwise. And you can build SOPs around the insights that are being learned from everyday conversations you're having with your customers. If you just record the data. The ninth trend we're seeing is folks are putting all this stuff in place, and now they have a resource and capacity constraints.

So growth bottlenecks. The struggle is companies want to grow but they lack the bandwidth or the people to to do what needs to be done. So some key people are doing too much operational work. Sales reps get pulled into tech support admin.

And some people spend time on, you know, the wrong tier three customers when they should be focusing on tier one customers. So there's smoke on small accounts instead of high value accounts. So the resolution is to map out the roles of your sales team and then resource support appropriately. And if you need to hire somebody to take care of technical conversations and scale them up so that your salespeople can be selling, you need to do that.

And, and, you know, mathematically model out if this salesperson could go from selling 40% of the time to 80% of the time, that means they potentially can double their sales. What does that number look like? Does that actually pay for a resource to take some of the other workload off their plate, use automation to help, remove workload? There's, you know, technology, is there AI automation, your CRM that will help and then get really, really clear on roles and who is best at certain things.

What do they love doing? So if you have somebody that's doing outbound and they they're not great at it, they don't love it. Find somebody that does love it. If that's a critical part of your go to market motion, if you if you need somebody that's actually good at a technical support inside sales, again, find somebody that loves it.

So, you know, put put people where they love where their capabilities match. And so, so delegate accordingly based on what the skill sets are of your team. So there's a lot to do there. But the truth of it is, is that you need to understand what the roles are.

So map out all the accountabilities that your team has and then assign resources accordingly. And then use some mathematical modeling to determine if you can actually afford the resourcing to get the results that you need. The 10th big trend that we see is that there is, lack of understanding with paid advertising and the ROI. So marketing optimization.

So companies are spending money on ads, but they can't prove ROI because they haven't tiled in to the whole entire system. They have potentially low conversion rates, because they've got too broad of targeting because they don't know who your ICP is. Or they have weak follow ups, so they're not converting them. There's a, there's a number of issues that could be happening with paid advertising performance.

So the resolution is obviously start with tightening up your audience, getting it dialed into your ICP, you know, AB testing your creative, that sort of stuff. So you have market message fit, making sure that your spend is spent not on broad awareness but on high intent channels. And then also, understand where your customers might be in the funnel and apply different conversion rates and different types of ads to where they are in the funnel and tie it all together. You might be having a as we said already, you might be having low conversion rate or your leads aren't giving you ROI because sales follow up isn't where it needs to be.

So this whole cycle of building a revenue team all comes together. So really, the paid advertising performance is, a symptom of other things that aren't in place, like a customer understanding, you know, marketing, sales, not working as a revenue team, sales follow up, not being where it needs to be. That sort of stuff. So get that other stuff taken care of, and this trend takes care of itself.

So overall, what we see is, you know, to sort of fix the system. We see a lot of us, the entrepreneurial operating system, coming into play, revenue teams deploying and L10 weekly meetings so that they have their scorecards and tied to performance rocks. CRM is being put in place. HubSpot is a leader that gets put in place a lot, revenue operations occurring because of the unified sales and marketing team working together.

And then understanding of the mathematical modeling, understanding your cost of growth so that you can justify resourcing additional sales team members or revenue team members, to bring in and manage what it is that you need to do to grow and then having plans and account based strategies and sales process organization. So these are the common solutions that we see across the board, being deployed that sort of take care of these ten themes. And last but not least, there is ongoing and lots of automation that is happening, supported by AI.

All right. Well, that was a bit of a, behind the scenes sneak peek at how we operationalize the revenue factory. So if you've like what you heard, go to Roadmap agency.com and download our Revenue Factory toolkit.

What you receive the mathematical models and framework for building your go to market system. Also subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes dropping the first and third Wednesday and every month. I'm Steve Whittington.

Thanks for listening. Keep building your own new factory. One look at a time.