The Growth-Stage SaaS Revenue Operations Challenge
Scaling B2B SaaS companies often find that more technology doesn’t automatically mean more closed deals. RevOps and sales leaders at growth-stage companies grapple with:
- Siloed systems and data overload: Customer info is scattered across CRM, emails, and spreadsheets, making it hard to get a clear view of opportunities. Here’s how to bring it all together for a 360° view: Breaking Down Data Silos for a 360° Customer View
- Manual processes slowing deals: Reps spend hours on data entry, logging activities, and pulling reports, time that could be spent engaging prospects.
- Misaligned incentives and confusion: Complicated or opaque commission plans leave reps unsure where to focus, so they chase easy wins instead of strategic deals.
- Pressure to “do more with less”: With lean teams and ambitious targets, everyone is searching for efficiency gains, often turning to automation and AI as a silver bullet.
The result? Despite investing in CRM workflows and plug-ins, many teams still see high-potential deals stall out or slip through the cracks. There’s a nagging sense that traditional automation is only moving data around, not actually moving the needle on revenue.
When Automation Only Moves Data
Today’s sales stack is full of automation. CRMs update fields, scheduling tools book meetings, and integration platforms sync data across systems. These tools save time and reduce error, but too often they operate only at the data level.
They move information, not deals.
Workflows can log next steps, but they don’t help reps prioritize. Automated emails go out, but they don’t adapt to stuck deals. Scheduling links get meetings booked, but don’t prepare reps for conversations that move things forward.
In short: automation is keeping the trains running, but it’s not laying new tracks. If your system feels busy but not productive, you’re likely facing the same gap many teams are – activity without real deal momentum.
Competitors Address Efficiency, But Miss Alignment
Many popular tools tackle sales efficiency well, schedulers accelerate booking, CRM workflows automate tasks, and integrations sync data across platforms. AI platforms surface risk signals and coaching insights. These systems do reduce manual effort, but most of them stop short once the activity is logged or the task is triggered.
The missing link? Forward motion. These tools rarely help reps prioritize strategic deals or course-correct when momentum stalls. They boost activity, not outcomes. And without tying that activity to real deal progression or aligning incentives across the team, automation alone can’t close revenue gaps. It just makes the process look cleaner.
Focus on Deal Progression, Not Just Process
To truly impact revenue, automation must pivot from a process-centric approach to a deal-centric approach. Rather than asking, “What data can we sync or which task can we automate next?”, RevOps leaders should ask, “What’s stopping this deal from moving forward, and how can automation help fix that?”
This shift in mindset leads to a few guiding principles:
Automate the low-value work, elevate the high-value work
Use AI and automation to take care of things like data entry, meeting scheduling, and CRM updates, areas where humans aren’t uniquely talented. This frees your sales team to spend more time on the creative, strategic work that does move deals (like crafting a tailored ROI proposal or building a relationship with the champion). In other words, let machines handle the busywork so your people can double down on the human touch.
At the Hyperengage Podcast, Ryan Milligan, VP of Sales, Marketing & RevOps at the incentive management platform QuotaPath, emphasized that AI should be used to augment humans, not replace them.
“I think the mistake a lot of people are making with AI is using it as a human replacement. I think about AI much more as a human augmentation than a replacement.” – Ryan Milligan
Trigger actions based on buyer signals
Build automations that react to meaningful events. For example, alert a rep when a prospect repeatedly views the pricing page or when usage in a trial spikes. These are moments when a well-timed human outreach can propel the deal forward. The key is using your data not just to inform you, but to prompt action for your reps at just the right time.
Prioritize quality over quantity
It’s better to intelligently nurture 5 promising deals forward than to blindly push 50 prospects through a generic cadence. Configure your automation to surface which deals are most worth your team’s attention. For instance, implement lead/deal scoring so that the hottest opportunities get immediate white-glove treatment (assisted by automation, of course).
By focusing automation on advancing deals, you build a sales process where nothing falls through the cracks and every step adds value. Automation transforms from being a mere data admin to acting like a virtual deal coordinator, always monitoring, nudging, and enabling the next best action to keep deals moving.
Compensation Transparency as a Catalyst
Even the smartest workflow breaks down if people aren’t motivated to act. That’s where compensation transparency becomes essential; it turns automation into actual revenue impact.
Too often, comp plans live in outdated spreadsheets, revealed after the quarter ends. But with real-time visibility, reps can see the value of each deal before it closes, and leaders can align incentives with strategic goals. This clarity drives focus: when reps understand how their actions affect their earnings, they naturally prioritize the deals that matter most.
Take a rep weighing one large deal against a few smaller ones. If they can see that the big deal pays out more, thanks to a kicker or bonus, it quickly becomes their top priority. Transparency like this ensures your team’s energy aligns with where automation points them: toward high-value, high-impact opportunities.
Building Revenue Confidence Through Alignment
When deal-centric automation (the process) meets compensation transparency (the people), something powerful happens: revenue confidence soars. This concept of revenue confidence means:
- Predictable, quality pipeline: Forecasts stop feeling like guesses and start feeling reliable. Why? Because your automation ensures every critical opportunity is addressed promptly, and your incentive structure ensures reps are motivated to follow up with vigor. The pipeline isn’t just full, it’s full of deals that are likely to close.
- Empowered, proactive teams: Reps aren’t just going through the motions; they’re thinking like owners of their pipeline. They trust the numbers they see daily, and they understand exactly what moving each deal means for their paycheck and their team’s success.
“If a rep sells more two-year deals, they make more money. And they make more money because they’re selling deals that are better for the business. That’s one of the rare moments where the rep wins, the sales leader wins, the finance leader wins.” – Ryan Milligan
How can RevOps leaders create this kind of alignment? A few actionable steps:
- Audit your sales process for bottlenecks: Identify where deals most often stall out. At those choke points, introduce an automation – maybe a trigger that alerts leadership about stalled proposals, or an AI-based suggestion to the rep (“This deal’s gone quiet; here’s a revive playbook.”).
- Align your comp plan with strategic goals: Pinpoint the behaviors or outcomes you want to see more of (e.g. higher average deal size, upsells, better retention) and ensure your commission plan rewards those accordingly. Then, communicate those changes clearly and often.
- Connect the dots with technology: Ideally, your deal automation platform and your comp tracking tool should integrate. For example, when a deal’s stage changes, the rep’s projected commission updates instantly. This “pipeline-to-payroll” linkage means reps always know the real-time stakes, and finance never has to scramble to calculate payouts.
- Reinforce alignment in coaching: Use pipeline review meetings and one-on-ones to highlight not just what is in the pipeline, but why certain deals matter. Discuss potential commission outcomes alongside deal status (“Closing this upsell would not only hit our expansion goal, it also gets you to accelerators”). This keeps both the company’s and the rep’s priorities front and center.
With each step, you’re fostering a culture of accountability and enthusiasm. The team isn’t merely hitting numbers; they understand the story behind those numbers and have the tools to repeat that success quarter after quarter. That is true revenue confidence.
QuotaPath: Aligning Incentives with Revenue Outcomes
Closing the gap between activity and outcomes requires more than just the right philosophy.
It needs a system built to make that alignment tangible every day. That’s where QuotaPath comes in. By combining deal-centric automation with real-time commission visibility, QuotaPath turns the theory of revenue confidence into an operational reality.
QuotaPath helps sales teams connect the dots between pipeline activity and compensation outcomes. Instead of treating commission as an afterthought, it brings clarity and visibility into how reps earn, right from the moment a deal enters the pipeline.
By integrating with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, QuotaPath calculates commissions in real time as deals move through the funnel. Reps can see how much they stand to earn on each opportunity, helping them prioritize higher-impact deals. For example, if multi-year contracts pay out more, QuotaPath makes that obvious, so reps are more likely to pursue them.
This transparency keeps reps motivated, eliminates end-of-quarter confusion, and aligns everyone (from finance to frontline sellers) around the same goals.
When automation shows what to do and compensation visibility shows why it matters, teams move with purpose.
Embracing a Unified Workflow
Ultimately, the goal for any growing B2B SaaS organization is sustainable, predictable revenue. Achieving that means aligning your people, process, and technology around what matters most: moving deals forward.
If your current automation stack has you questioning its impact, it may be time to rethink the approach. Platforms like Hyperengage bring deal-cycle visibility and next-step automation to the forefront. They help keep momentum alive across the funnel by surfacing at-risk opportunities, triggering timely follow-ups, and aligning GTM teams around real signals.
This kind of alignment between automation, behavior, and outcomes is how you move from scattered activity to consistent growth. Combine it with transparent incentives, and you build a system that not only runs efficiently but drives the kind of deals that grow the business.
