Revenue Leak
Revenue Leak is Lost revenue from process gaps: missed renewals, pricing errors, manual handoff failures, broken workflows, and untracked discounts. RevOps exists to find and plug these leaks.
Revenue leak is the revenue you earned on paper but never collected — or the revenue you should have generated but didn't because a process broke somewhere. It's not a single problem. It's death by a thousand cuts: a renewal that slipped because nobody owned the reminder, a discount that got applied twice because the approval workflow had a gap, a deal that stalled because the handoff from SDR to AE dropped context.
Every revenue team has leaks. The question is whether you're measuring them. Most aren't. RevOps exists, in large part, to find these leaks, quantify the damage, and build systems that prevent them from recurring.
Common Sources of Revenue Leak
- CRM data gaps: Missing or inaccurate fields that cause leads to route incorrectly, deals to fall through stage cracks, or renewals to go untracked. If your opportunity close date field is "TBD" on 40% of deals, your forecast is fiction and your follow-up cadence is broken.
- Inconsistent pricing: Reps applying discounts outside policy, legacy pricing lingering on renewal contracts, or CPQ rules that don't match current rate cards. One company found $2M in annual leak just from reps rounding down to "nice" numbers.
- Failed handoffs: The SDR-to-AE handoff where context gets lost. The sales-to-CS handoff where implementation requirements get dropped. The CS-to-renewal handoff where expansion signals go unnoticed. Every handoff is a leak opportunity.
- Untracked churn signals: Usage drops, support ticket spikes, champion departures — signals that predict churn but aren't wired into any workflow. By the time someone notices, the customer is already evaluating competitors.
- Broken workflows: Automation that stopped firing after a CRM update. Approval chains that bottleneck deals for days. Quote-to-cash processes with manual steps that introduce errors and delays.
How RevOps Identifies and Fixes Leaks
Start with the data. Audit your pipeline stage conversion rates — where are deals dying? Audit your renewal rates by segment — where are customers churning? Audit your discount distribution — are reps giving away margin unnecessarily? Then build systems: automated renewal workflows, pricing guardrails in CPQ, handoff checklists that require field completion before stage progression, churn risk scoring models that trigger CS intervention.
The RevOps tool stack is your leak detection infrastructure. CRM validation rules prevent bad data. CPQ enforces pricing. Workflow automation eliminates manual handoff failures. And the right KPIs make leaks visible before they compound.
Frequently Asked Questions
What causes revenue leak?
Revenue leak stems from process gaps across the revenue cycle: missed renewals due to lack of automated reminders, pricing errors from inconsistent discount policies, failed handoffs between SDR/AE/CS where deal context gets lost, broken CRM workflows that let deals fall through stages, and untracked churn signals like usage drops or champion departures. The root cause is almost always a lack of operational infrastructure — no one owns the process, so no one notices when it breaks.
How does RevOps reduce revenue leak?
RevOps reduces leak by building systems that enforce process consistency: CRM validation rules that require fields before stage progression, CPQ pricing guardrails that prevent unauthorized discounts, automated renewal workflows that trigger 90-120 days before expiration, handoff protocols with required context transfer, and churn risk scoring that triggers CS intervention on at-risk accounts. The first step is always measurement — you can't fix leaks you can't see. Audit stage conversion rates, discount distributions, and renewal rates by segment to quantify the damage.
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