The Illusion of Alignment: Why RevOps Won’t Fix Your Revenue Problem
Every company today claims to be “aligning sales, marketing, and customer success.”
There’s a new job title, a new dashboard, a new acronym - RevOps.
Revenue Operations promises harmony: shared data, shared goals, shared success.
But if we’re honest, most “alignment” projects deliver more dashboards than direction. More meetings than meaning. More collaboration… on paper.
Because alignment is not agreement. And RevOps, despite its good intentions, often aligns systems, not people.
The new corporate panacea
RevOps is the latest attempt to industrialize revenue. It connects CRM, automation, and analytics into one integrated flow - so every team operates from a single source of truth.
In theory, that’s progress.
In practice, it’s choreography: everyone moves in sync, but few move with intent.
The problem isn’t in the logic of RevOps. It’s in what we expect it to solve. We treat misalignment as a data problem, when it’s often a behavioral one. You can’t automate trust, ownership, or judgment - yet that’s exactly what many companies try to do through RevOps.
Alignment vs. agreement
Alignment is mechanical. Agreement is human.
RevOps can align your systems - shared dashboards, uniform stages, consistent hand-offs.
But it can’t make your teams agree on what success means.
Marketing can still celebrate MQLs - “Marketing Qualified Leads” that look good in the dashboard but no one in Sales actually wants.
Sales can still question the leads it receives.
Customer Success can still chase renewals that make no sense.
You can align every process in your CRM and still have three departments pulling in opposite directions.
That’s the hidden cost of “alignment.” It hides the absence of real agreement.
The cost of fake alignment
Fake alignment feels good - because it’s measurable. Everyone gets a dashboard, a KPI, and a recurring meeting. On the surface, the business looks more organized than ever.
But underneath, ownership disappears. Shared metrics blur accountability. Collaboration becomes consensus - and consensus, in turn, becomes paralysis.
I’ve seen organizations where RevOps produced so many shared goals that no one could tell who actually owned revenue anymore. When everything is “a team effort,” individuals stop acting like it’s their responsibility.
It’s what I call the comfort of collective ambiguity: we’re all responsible, so no one really is.
Incentives still drive behavior
In my article “The Power of Sales Compensation,” I quoted Charlie Munger: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” And it does not have to be monetary.
That truth applies to RevOps too.
If you want people to take ownership of revenue collection, CRM hygiene, or renewal accuracy - incentivize it.
In one of my past roles, the finance team responsible for collections asked Sales to “help recover” unpaid invoices. Felt like their KPI was to send reminder emails. Ours was to close new deals. Guess who ended up making the calls?
The logic was simple: “revenue is everyone’s job.”
But that’s the problem. When revenue is everyone’s job, it becomes no one’s.
Alignment without incentives creates nice-looking workflows and zero ownership. You can connect every system in the stack, but you can’t connect motivation unless you design for it.
What real alignment looks like
True alignment isn’t about systems - it’s about intent clarity.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Shared narrative, not just shared metrics.
Everyone knows why we’re doing this, not just how we’ll measure it.Context before coordination.
Marketing understands how Sales closes; Sales understands why customers renew.
Each team knows how its success feeds the others.Human check-ins, not just workflow automation.
Systems keep you efficient; conversations keep you effective.Aligned incentives.
If your Customer Success team is rewarded for satisfaction, but your Sales team is rewarded for volume, don’t expect RevOps to reconcile that gap.
True alignment happens when incentives, intent, and execution move in the same direction.
The mirror test
Ask yourself this:
Did your RevOps project make your team feel better, or perform better?
If it improved visibility but not accountability - it’s not alignment, it’s anesthesia.
Technology can align systems.
Only leadership aligns people.
Most guides (and I’ve read a few) will tell you how to build RevOps - which tools to buy, which KPIs to track, which processes to standardize.
Few will tell you why it fails.Because revenue isn’t a process problem.
It’s a people problem disguised as one.
And until we learn to align intentions as carefully as we align data, no framework will truly fix it.
The B2B Specialist