The Quantity Delusion: Why RevOps Scaled Math While Sellers (and Buyers) Collapsed

over engineered & misunderstood

RevOps is another idea that has acquired almost religious status – everyone violently agrees with it, not withstanding that very few can give you a coherent definition (accepting that RevOps means different things to different people and different companies!)

RevOps even works. But here’s the catch - only for companies with thousands of reps and millions of clean data points. The rest of the market tried to copy them and ended up with pretty dashboards built on unreliable CRM fields, flawed attribution, and false forecasting. It wasn’t RevOps that failed, it’s the fantasy that RevOps scales downward. It doesn’t. We’re mistaking enterprise infrastructure for universal truth, and if you step back from the dashboards long enough to breathe, one thing becomes painfully obvious:

Modern B2B didn’t get better — it just got louder.

The great RevOps promise was elegant on paper: unified revenue motion, data-driven clarity, predictable pipeline, scalability. But like most management fashions exported from MBA’s and Management Guru thinking it accidentally evolved into a different religion:

Quantity = Safety. Instrumentation = Intelligence. Dashboards = Truth.

Most companies just don’t have the data volume, CRM hygiene, or behavioral consistency to make RevOps math mean anything beyond “look, colored bars going up.”

The Myth of Predictable Revenue (for 99% of companies)

Here’s the quiet thing no one wants to say too loud:

The reason RevOps works (sort of) at Salesforce or AWS is because they have millions of interactions, thousands of reps, structured quoting, and a decade of historical patterns. Big companies like this can influence (nee dictate) how prospects and customers communicate and interact with them. For example it’s why a sales method like MEDDICC works for them - but very few others!

The rest of the market has:

• less sellers, but with more diverse personalities

• spotty CRM notes entered at 4:53 p.m. on a Friday

• one messy ICP

• three broken lead scoring rules

• and a pipeline full of optimism masquerading as truth

  
  

You can’t turn that into a predictive model no matter how many dashboards you stack. Predictive models that support solid conclusions need statistical validity and discipline. RevOps multiplied the wrong variable: inputs without comprehension.

We scaled activity, not relevance; automation, not preparation. The spreadsheets improved. The outcomes haven’t, in fact in many cases they’ve worsened.

The Collapse of the Numbers-First Mindset

We reduced sales and marketing (GTM) to an engineering problem, dismissing the fact that we’re dealing with human beings here. You know those things that are predictably unpredictable! We asked sellers to behave like algorithmic throughput instead of humans who influence humans.

The results are everywhere:

• response rates at 1% and falling

• conversion rates eroding quarter over quarter

• CAC rising faster than revenue growth

• inflated pipelines no one believes

• forecasts rewritten three times before the board meeting

• SDR burnout at crisis levels

• buyers increasingly allergic to outreach

The irony is tragic: We engineered precision around the one thing we never fixed: capability.

Dashboards measured. Cadences fired. Sequences sequenced – and a Partridge in a Pear Tree And meanwhile? Actual buying conversations got worse, not better.

When Math Becomes a Crutch

RevOps was meant to help leadership see the truth. It accidentally gave them a shield to avoid it.

• “The dashboard says it’s fine”

• “The funnel says marketing is performing”

• “The attribution model says the spend is justified”

But numbers describe conditions — not meaning. Pipeline volume is not pipeline intent. Stage progression is not understanding. Forecast confidence is not buyer confidence.

The machine became the focus, not the mission. Which is why effectiveness tools — the ones centered on:

• practice

• readiness

• qualification

• message clarity

• behavioral context

• strategic relevance

…are no longer “nice to have.”

They are the counterculture movement. Not against tech — but against empty math.

Quality vs Quantity: The Budget Reckoning

We have reached a moment where companies can’t have both:

• the giant RevOps tech spine, and

• the investment in actual seller capability

Budgets are finite. Leadership has to pick a philosophy, not just a platform.

Do you optimize volume, or do you improve the people doing the selling?

One says: “If we just send more, dial more, log more — growth will follow.”

The other says: “If we teach people to be relevant, credible, and prepared — we’ll convert more and growth will follow.”

They sound related. They are not.

One is diagnostic. The other is intervention.

RevOps describes the storm. Readiness builds the roof.

“But RevOps is working — look how many companies use it!”

Everyone says this. Sure — and almost all of them are missing targets, burning out teams, drowning in automation residue, and waiting until they can’t maintain the lie and they lose their job. It’s not “if” it’s “when” and that’s no way to live!

Mass adoption ≠ mass effectiveness. Six Sigma was everywhere too — until it wasn’t. Lean, TQM, Agile… all had a moment of ubiquity before quietly evolving into something no one would admit was different.

No movement with enterprise adoption ever dies. It just rebrands.

Ideas That Didn’t Die, They Just Mutated

Original Hype	What It Quietly Became
Six Sigma (manufacturing-precision religion)	Continuous Improvement (minus the militant belts & jargon)
TQM (Total Quality Management)	ISO / QA frameworks (same soul, fewer posters)
Agile (post-Waterfall revolution)	Scaled Agile / Product Ops (i.e. Agile, but corporately house-trained)

RevOps will follow the same arc. There will be no mass apology, no LinkedIn confessional.

It will just morph into:

• “Revenue Effectiveness”

• “Go-to-Market Intelligence”

• “Unified Buyer Operations”

• or whatever consultancies decide sounds plausible next.

The math will stay. The slogan will change. The human element will (finally) have to return.

Where We Go from Here

The coming era is simple:

Better sellers, not bigger pipelines.

Sales that sounds like humans, not automation residue. Marketing that communicates meaning, not mail merges.AI that augments capability, not just generates dashboards. Technology that improves the act of selling, not just the act of logging. Quantity will always be easier to measure. Quality will always be harder to deliver. But when the noise reaches saturation —when conversion rates hit statistical irrelevance, when RevOps can no longer inflate reality, the market will remember what actually moves deals:

Humans who know how to sell. To think. To prepare. To matter.

The future isn’t anti-tech. It’s anti-thoughtless tech.

• Not less AI. Smarter AI.

• Not less data. More meaningful (and well considered) data.

• Not fewer dashboards. Fewer illusions.

  
  

The correction is underway. Quietly. Inevitably. And when it lands, effectiveness won’t be the counterculture anymore —it will be the center.