Signal › Contributors
Ben Crawford
I got into RevOps before it was called RevOps. In 2016, I was a sales operations analyst at a mid-size SaaS company in Austin, and my job was to keep the CRM clean, build reports for the VP of Sales, and figure out why our pipeline numbers never matched reality. The answer was always the same: data hygiene. Reps weren't logging activities. Stages weren't standardized. The "close date" field was aspirational fiction. I spent 80% of my time cleaning data and 20% analyzing it.
I joined Outreach in 2018 as their second RevOps hire. Outreach was growing fast, really fast, and the operational infrastructure was held together with duct tape and Zapier. My job was to build systems that could scale. Over three years, I built the lead routing engine, the territory model, the commission calculator, the pipeline inspection framework, and about 200 Salesforce automations that I still see referenced in LinkedIn posts by people who don't know I built them.
The most important thing I built at Outreach was the revenue model, a bottoms-up forecasting system that predicted quarterly revenue within 3% accuracy by analyzing pipeline velocity, stage conversion rates, and rep-level patterns. Before that model, forecasting was essentially the VP of Sales asking each director, "How do you feel about the quarter?" and averaging the results. The model replaced vibes with math, and it was the single most impactful operational improvement in my career.
In 2021, I moved to Gong as Head of Revenue Operations. Gong was the perfect environment for a data-obsessed RevOps person because the product literally records and analyzes every sales conversation. I had access to data that most RevOps teams dream about. We built an operational framework that connected marketing attribution to sales conversations to customer success outcomes, a full-lifecycle view that most companies claim to have but almost none actually do.
I left Gong in 2024 because I'd become increasingly frustrated by the gap between RevOps discourse and RevOps reality. On LinkedIn, RevOps is all about "aligning revenue teams" and "driving predictable growth." In practice, it's about fixing a broken Salesforce workflow at 11 PM on a Friday because the quarter closes Monday and the CEO just realized the dashboard is wrong.
I write about the unglamorous operational work that actually drives revenue. Not the strategy decks. The Salesforce formulas.
I live in Austin with my wife and our golden retriever, Quota. (He always overachieves.)
Experience
- Head of Revenue Operations, Gong
- RevOps Lead, Outreach