We wrote about sales operations best practices back in 2024. Since then, the function itself has changed more than the practices have. A 2025 Salesloft-commissioned Wakefield Research survey of 400 U.S. RevOps and executive decision-makers across manufacturing, telecom, financial services, and technology found that 73% of companies now have a C-suite role dedicated to RevOps, and 98% say the function's scope has grown over the past year. That's the elevation nobody's 2024 playbook predicted. What it didn't fix is the harder part: the same survey found 89% still lack clearly defined strategic goals for the function, and respondents were split almost evenly on whether RevOps is a strategic driver or still reactive support. Getting a seat at the table and knowing what to do with it are two different problems, and most teams have only solved the first one.
The Forecast Is Still the Tell
If you want a single number that captures how sales operations is actually performing, skip the org chart and look at forecast accuracy. Gartner puts the median at 70% to 79%, with only 7% of sales organizations reaching 90% or better. Xactly's 2024 Sales Forecasting Benchmark Report, a survey of 405 sales and finance leaders, found four in five had missed a quarterly forecast in the past year, and more than half had missed it twice or more. Those aren't small variances. A finance leader planning headcount or spend off a forecast that's off by 20% to 30% is planning off noise, and no amount of RevOps prestige in the C-suite changes that until the underlying number gets fixed.
The Root Cause Isn't the Model
The instinct when a forecast is wrong is to blame the forecasting method, and vendors are happy to sell a fix for that. But the pattern we see inside client CRM instances, and what the broader research backs up, is that forecast accuracy under roughly 75% almost always traces back to data hygiene, not the model: stale contacts, missing decision-makers, and close dates reps have quietly pushed to make the pipeline look healthier than it is. A cleaner model applied to dirty inputs still produces a wrong number, just with more confidence attached to it. This is the part of the 2024 list we'd underline harder today. Centralized CRM data isn't a nice-to-have alongside forecasting, it's the prerequisite for forecasting to mean anything.
Tool Sprawl Is Back on the Agenda
The other shift since 2024 is around the tech stack itself. Gartner has started describing the sales tech market as moving through what it calls sales tech mayhem, consolidating from a wide set of point categories into a narrower list of vendors with broader capability. Forrester's Peter Ostrow has made a similar point from the buyer side: too many revenue enablement strategies measure success by tool adoption rather than revenue outcomes, which is exactly backward. If your sales operations team is maintaining a dozen overlapping platforms, that sprawl is itself a data hygiene problem. Every additional system is another place records can drift out of sync with the source of truth, and every integration between them is another place a forecast-killing data error can get introduced.
What We'd Add to the 2024 List
The core practices from our first pass at this topic, centralizing CRM data, standardizing the sales process, and building a real cadence between sales and marketing, still hold. What we'd add now, given what the last two years have shown:
- Treat data hygiene as its own workstream, not a side effect of using the CRM. Someone should own deduplication, enrichment, and validation the way someone owns pipeline coverage.
- Set the RevOps mandate in writing before adding more headcount or tooling to the function. A C-suite seat without defined goals just moves the ambiguity up a level.
- Audit the stack before adding to it. Consolidation, not expansion, is where most teams have room to improve their data hygiene and their budget at the same time.
- Report forecast accuracy alongside pipeline metrics, not as a quarterly surprise. If the number isn't tracked and shown to leadership regularly, it doesn't improve.
Our Take
Sales operations has more organizational weight behind it now than it did in 2024, and that's a real gain. But weight without a clear mandate just means more people watching the same broken forecast. The teams actually improving productivity right now aren't the ones with the newest AI layer or the biggest headcount, they're the ones that fixed data hygiene before they scaled anything on top of it. That's still the unglamorous work, and it's still where the return is.
If your RevOps function has grown but your forecast still misses by double digits, that gap between organizational status and data reality is exactly what we help clients close.