Optimising RevOps to boost sales growth 

Inflexion’s latest Commercial Exchange brought together portfolio leaders to explore how revenue operations (RevOps) is helping businesses break down silos and scale more effectively. 

“We’re seeing more businesses move away from traditional commercial silos to embrace end-to-end operational excellence,” says Ada Pham, Assistant Director at Inflexion. “Revenue Operations is emerging as the key approach to aligning teams, improving visibility, and accelerating performance,” she explains, highlighting the increasing strategic importance of these in today’s more complex multi-channel environments.

Marcus Bening, Founder at Bening Consulting, frames RevOps as a driver of go-to-market excellence. “The challenge is balancing strategic objectives with tactical imperatives,” he argues. 

Marcus walked attendees through a comprehensive RevOps model encompassing marketing, sales and customer success functions, supported by enablers like repeatable processes, data, systems, and structured planning. “The goal is predictability, productivity and performance. And to get there, you need to understand the customer journey across every touchpoint.”

Marcus described the ‘bow-tie model’, a modern framework for understanding and managing recurring revenues businesses (particularly SaaS and subscription models). While traditional sales functions focus on acquiring new customers, the bow-tie model emphasises the entire customer lifecycle, before and after the initial sale. It highlights the fact that real value in recurring revenues businesses comes after the initial sale through customer success, retention and expansion.

He also explained the revenue factory model, which is about designing and running GTM operations like a well-run factory: systematic, measurable, and continuously improving. It emphasises the importance of clear workflows, automation, data-driven decision-making and ongoing process optimisation. Progress is measured regularly with a view to refining operations for efficiency and scalability.

Inflexion supports its portfolio to optimise commercial functions, with a dedicated team in-house to provide hands-on support. The Exchange heard about the experiences of a couple.

Nomentia: Building RevOps from the ground up

In late 2024, European treasury and cash management software provider Nomentia formally established its RevOps team to unify its commercial operations. Huub Wevers, Chief Revenue Officer, and Jeffrey Wold, Head of Revenue Operations & Business Development, shared their experience of building the function from scratch in order to support the company’s ambitious growth plans, which were boosted with funding from Inflexion in 2023.

The primary goals were clear: enhance pipeline visibility, improve outbound opportunity generation, and equip the sales team with scalable systems. “We knew we needed clarity and more leads,” says Huub. “One centralised sales playbook, consistent training, and clean data. Without that foundation, scaling would have been chaos.”

The team began by mapping and documenting every core sales workflow. They adjusted their Salesforce CRM, introduced Salesloft for outbound campaigns, and launched a new commission structure to incentivise business development. External agencies helped build momentum, and tools like Lusha and Clay improved data sourcing.

“We started by showing results with a dedicated business development representative (BDR) team,” recalls Jeffrey. “That created proof behind best practice and gave our sales execs the confidence to follow. Guardrails in the CRM were essential too – without them, data quality would always suffer.”

The results are impressive: in under a year, sales capacity has risen by 40%, sales qualified leads (SQLs) jumped by over 50%, and the BDR pipeline contribution exceeded €1 million. Nomentia also launched new dashboards to track pipeline velocity and data hygiene and is now experimenting with AI tools to further automate outreach and improve funnel insight.

Ocorian: Scalable growth through a unified data model

Ocorian is shifting from its European fiduciary roots to become a global asset servicing leader. The provider of corporate, fund and fiduciary administration services was carved out of its former parent in 2016 by Inflexion and has undergone tremendous growth since then.

“We’re moving from a diversified business to one that serves the diverse needs of specific client segments,” Frank Hattann, Ocorian Chief Revenue Officer, explains. “To do that well, we need the data infrastructure and systems to support personalisation at scale.”

RevOps has proven to be an enabler of a broader commercial transformation, with Ocorian having faced a complex starting point of over 25 global offices and 28 different ERP systems or local variations. Fragmented data and inconsistent reporting made commercial decision-making slow and reactive. The team responded by building a centralised data lake with a unified client hierarchy and unique identifiers, enabling consistent measurement across business lines and geographies.

“We built a model that doesn’t manipulate data at source,” Frank explains. “Instead, we structure it centrally, so every system can feed in. Dashboards then allow people to cut and filter the data they need, but all from a single source of truth.”

With cleaner data, Ocorian unlocked new RevOps use cases: smarter lead prioritisation, targeted outbound campaigns, and automated marketing sequences. This not only improved campaign engagement but also helped optimise resource allocation by focusing efforts on high-conversion segments. And these vary by geography: In the US, Ocorian has found that conversion improved if reps call before emailing – the opposite approach for the UK. Additionally, it found that optimal conversion requires 6-7 touch points on average in the US, whereas in India it is 1-2 touchpoints.

In parallel, the business restructured its commercial teams, appointing specialists by region and service line while keeping subject matter experts embedded within delivery teams. This model allows marketing, RevOps and junior sales to focus on opportunity generation, while experienced sellers engage deeper in client conversion.

“We know that in our world, people still buy from people,” says Frank. “But RevOps is what gives our people the tools, structure and insight to have better conversations and confidence.”

It’s clear that looking at the whole customer journey and ensuring teams are working together to build long-term value is key. “That’s how to drive recurring and growing revenue,” Ada stresses.