A promise to a customer belongs to the whole company. Sales agrees the scope, delivery does the work and finance sends the invoice. If those people understand the agreement differently, the founder may struggle to establish whether the work was profitable.
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, provides a way to manage that shared work. This article focuses on a founder’s responsibility for information: who makes sure the commercial agreement survives the journey from sales to delivery and invoicing? That question connects with Olli Junes’s account of why Resappi is being built.
Revory founder Kati Huusko-Viikilä has also written about this field in her Finnish book Monikanavaisen myynnin johtaminen. Revory’s podcast collection includes her Resapodi conversation with Olli Junes. The episode description lists targets, compensation models, CRM and data transparency among its topics.
Who decides what the customer was promised?
Consider a fictional service business. Its proposal includes a monthly fee and a separate setup charge. The salesperson agrees a discount on the phone. Delivery sees the original proposal and finance invoices against it. The customer is the first person to spot the mistake.
The company needs a rule for recording that change, approving it and showing the valid price to the person issuing the invoice. That rule also has to work when the account owner is away. A customer should not have to prove what the supplier promised.
The founder must resolve conflicting targets
Sales may be measured on signed contracts. Delivery may be measured on utilisation and finance on invoicing speed. Everyone could meet their own target while the customer waits for work to start. It is worth examining what falls between those measures.
Leadership must decide the conditions under which work can be sold and started. If a start date is promised before capacity is confirmed, delivery cannot be expected to resolve the conflict afterwards. Someone also needs authority to approve exceptions. Access to a shared screen does not give a person permission to change a price or delivery date.
Follow one account all the way through
Start with one completed engagement. Open the proposal, agreement, delivery task list and invoice. Check whether the services and prices agree. Then establish where changes were approved and whether the next person received the information in time.
Follow the account beyond delivery, too. Was customer feedback recorded? Did a recurring problem reach the person preparing the next proposal? If the lesson stays in one employee’s memory, the same mistake can recur with the next customer.
Record where someone had to ask for information again. These moments suggest a manageable change, such as defining approval to invoice or notifying delivery about contract changes. The earlier article on starting work after signature examines one such handover in Resappi’s internal use.
Measure clarification work before automating it
Count how many reviewed accounts required information to be corrected before invoicing. Record the reason as well. A missing purchase order number needs a different response from an unclear scope of work. A small sample describes those cases; it does not establish an annual loss for the entire business.
Once a rule is agreed, check whether it holds in subsequent accounts. That gives you evidence for deciding what to automate. The business still owns the rule after software takes over the transfer of information.
The Resappi RevOps guide covers the broader operating model. In your own business, begin with one question: can the person issuing the invoice show exactly which customer agreement supports it?
