Most companies still talk about revenue as if it behaves like a funnel.
Top of funnel. Mid funnel. Bottom of funnel.
The mental model suggests linear movement. Add more at the top and more will come out at the bottom. Improve one stage and overall performance improves.
In practice, revenue behaves nothing like that.
It behaves like an operating system.
Every change introduced into the system affects something else. Tighten qualification and pipeline volume falls. Add pricing controls and sales cycles extend. Increase pressure on new business and renewals begin to suffer. Adjust compensation and deal structure changes almost immediately.
None of these shifts are random.
They are responses.
When revenue performance changes, it is rarely because one stage stopped working. It is usually because the system adjusted to pressure elsewhere.
This is where the funnel metaphor becomes misleading.
Funnels isolate stages. Operating systems connect them.
An operating system is shaped by decisions about incentives, ownership, authority and trade-offs. Those decisions determine how people behave long before metrics move.
Consider forecasting volatility. Many organisations treat it as a pipeline hygiene problem. In reality, volatility is often the output of incentive design, target realism and how leadership reacts to bad news. The system teaches people what is safe to report.
Or consider margin erosion. It is easy to attribute it to discount discipline. More often, it reflects competitive positioning, quota pressure and approval dynamics that reward short-term closure over long-term structure.
Revenue outcomes are behavioural outputs of structural choices.
When leaders optimise locally — conversion rate, average deal size, pipeline coverage — the system compensates globally. Gains in one area frequently introduce pressure somewhere else.
That does not mean performance cannot improve.
It means improvement requires understanding second-order effects before they appear.
Strategic revenue leadership involves asking different questions.
What behaviour is this incentive encouraging? Where will pressure accumulate if we push here? What trade-off are we implicitly accepting? Who owns enforcement when tension appears?
These are operating system questions.
RevOps, when positioned correctly, acts as the architect of that system. Not by adding dashboards, but by modelling consequences before they compound.
Treat revenue like a funnel and you will manage symptoms.
Treat it like an operating system and you can design outcomes intentionally.
The difference becomes visible over time.