RevOps Engagement Models: What You're Actually Buying
Companies waste millions on the wrong type of RevOps support. Traditional consultancies sell theoretical slide decks. Managed agencies sell cheap administrative labour. Here is the reality of the RevOps market and why operator-led guidance is different.
The question isn't whether you need RevOps help. It's whether the model you're buying will actually change your outcomes, or just change your invoices.
Four Models, Very Different Outcomes
The RevOps market offers four distinct engagement models. Each has a different cost structure, a different bias, and a fundamentally different failure mode.
Most companies choose based on price or availability. The ones that get results choose based on what kind of judgment they're actually buying.
The matrix below strips away the marketing language and compares what each model actually delivers, where it breaks, and what you should expect.
The Engagement Model Comparison
Why Traditional RevOps Consulting Fails
The partner who sold you the engagement is not the person doing the work. That person is three levels removed, reviewing a deck built by someone who has never owned a forecast.
Traditional consulting firms optimise for billable hours. Their incentive is to extend the engagement, not to resolve the problem. Discovery phases stretch. Recommendations multiply. Implementation is always someone else's problem.
The output is a slide deck. It looks thorough. It benchmarks well. But it was built by people who have never been accountable for the outcomes they're recommending. They've observed many revenue functions. They haven't built one.
If your consultant has never carried a forecast, owned a tech stack migration, or been in the room when a deal structure fell apart, they're advising from theory, not experience.
Why Managed RevOps Doesn't Solve the Problem
Managed RevOps agencies treat your revenue function like an IT help desk. They assign a pooled team of junior administrators who close tickets in a queue. Fields get updated. Reports get built. Workflows get created.
None of that fixes the root cause. If your forecasting is broken because pipeline stage definitions are wrong, a managed agency will build you a beautiful dashboard on top of bad data. They'll do it fast. And they'll invoice you monthly for maintaining it.
The structural problems remain untouched. The architecture stays broken. The junior team doesn't have the experience or authority to challenge the decisions that created the mess in the first place.
Automating a broken process doesn't fix it. It scales the dysfunction faster and makes it harder to diagnose later.
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