A client surprised me last week.
Over lunch, he told me he's thinking about handing over ownership of the revenue operations system he'd just successfully launched.
I was in Chicago, in person, which almost never happens for us in a remote world. This client is a manufacturing company that wrapped their initial CRM implementation about six months ago. Like many of our projects, IT owned the whole thing, which often makes sense. IT usually drives the software selection, and a CRM rollout is cross-functional by nature.
With the heavy lifting done, he could have shifted into maintenance mode. Instead, he asked a question most people in his seat never think to ask. Now that it's live, should ownership of the revenue operations system move to someone on the revenue side?
I was impressed. Instead of standing back and admiring the finish line, he was staying curious.
That one question told me a lot about why this company is going to get real value from what they built. He understood something plenty of leaders miss. Whoever owns the revenue operations system has to feel it when the system isn't driving outcomes. IT can absolutely keep owning it, and in a lot of companies they do. But if the pipeline stalls or the numbers slip, that pain lands on sales and marketing, not IT. The owner should be someone who's accountable to revenue.
He wasn't protecting his territory. He was asking what would actually serve the business.
I see the other side of this earlier in the process too, when clients are choosing a CRM.
When we tell prospective clients that a system like HubSpot isn't a finite project with a finish line, the natural response is to push back: "Why can't we just implement it and be done?" I get it. Nobody wants to spend more time or money than they think they need to. Resources aren't infinite.
But everything is dynamic. Your company, your customers, your team, your technology, all of it keeps moving. (It's why we're called Denamico, a play on the Spanish word dinámico.) When a system goes live, it needs attention to stay relevant.
We've worked with enough clients now to see the pattern clearly. The ones who grow the most are the ones who keep dedicating resources to improving their revenue operations system. They stop treating it like something they finished and start treating it like the engine of the business. Eventually they can't imagine running the company without it.
On a recent episode of RevOps Champions, Ali McElroy named what separates the brands that scale from the ones that stall. Ali has spent nearly two decades in franchising, including leading international expansion and legal strategy at Lift Brands, and now advises growth-stage brands through her firm, Kaleidoscope Growth Advisors. She's watched a lot of companies try to scale, so when she points to what makes the difference, it's worth listening. It comes down to mindset.
"They have a growth mindset. They're willing to take a step forward and take some of those risks where even if it's not perfect, they have a vision, they have a plan, and they believe in what they're doing and they go forward. A really important part of a growth mindset is just curiosity and learning."
Curiosity and learning. Being iterative. Progress over perfection. That's the whole thing.
A revenue operations system isn't a project you complete. It's a practice you keep. And a practice only works if the people running it stay curious enough to keep asking better questions, the way that IT leader did over lunch.
The best CRM in the world won't grow your business on its own. What grows your business is the discipline of continuously improving it, expecting more of it, and the growth mindset that keeps you invested long after the launch.
That's the work we love at Denamico. We don't hand clients a finished system and walk away. We help them build a Revenue Practice, the ongoing discipline that keeps the system growing with the business. The clients who lean into that, who stay curious the way that IT leader did, are the ones who stop guessing and start seeing their pipeline clearly.
If you've launched a CRM and you're still waiting for the growth to show up, that's usually a sign the practice hasn't started yet. I'd love to talk through where yours stands. There's a link below to grab 30 minutes.
Here's to staying curious, and to continuous improvement of ourselves too.
Kristin
P.S. The client from that lunch isn't worried about whether the system was built right. He's already asking how to get more out of it. That's the whole difference between a project and a practice, and it's exactly the conversation I'd love to have with you.
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Kristin Dennewill
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