Clean Data, Correct Routing, and Numbers You Can Defend

A RevOps agency owns the systems revenue runs on: the CRM data model, data hygiene, lead routing, automation between tools, and the reporting that ties activity to pipeline. In practice most engagements start with cleanup, because routing rules and attribution models both read from fields nobody has governed. Good ones work inside your accounts and write down what they build. Bad ones build in their own environment, keep the documentation, and quietly become the only people who understand how your pipeline number is calculated.

Match the model to the work. A build with a clear end state (cleanup, migration, routing rebuild, attribution) suits an agency or project engagement, because it needs several skills at once for a fixed stretch and then stops. Ongoing judgment calls, forecast hygiene, and territory politics need someone inside the company, fractional or full time. The failure case is hiring an agency on an open-ended retainer for work that was really a project, then paying monthly for a system that stopped changing two quarters ago.

In order: audit, reversible merge, then prevention. Before anything merges we snapshot the records, map which fields feed which reports, and agree survivorship rules (which record wins, which values carry over, what happens to associated deals and activity). Merges run in batches, so a bad rule affects a hundred records, not the whole database. Prevention matters more than the cleanup itself: normalized domain matching on create, required fields enforced in the form rather than in a reminder, and validation on every integration that writes in.

Attribution is a data-entry problem before it is a modeling problem. No model recovers a source that was never captured, so we start at the write path: enforced UTM conventions on every campaign link, original and last touch stamped on the contact at creation and locked from overwrite, offline touches logged as activity records rather than notes, and one definition of opportunity source that sales, marketing, and finance agree to before any dashboard gets built. After that the model is straightforward, because the inputs are consistent.

Everything. The work happens in your accounts under your admin credentials, so the CRM configuration, the automations, the dashboards, and the integration keys are yours from day one rather than transferred at the end. Handover means a written runbook per workflow (what it does, what triggers it, what breaks it, how to fix it), recorded walkthroughs, and a working session with whoever will own each system. The test we hold ourselves to: your ops team can change a routing rule or add a field next quarter without calling us.