Sales ops teams spend 73% of their time on non-sales work

Operators and investors,

Sales operations spends most of its week on work that is not selling. Gartner's 2022 survey of sales leaders put the share of sales-ops time going to non-sales functions at 73%, up from 39% in 2019, as the role absorbed analytics, finance, supply chain, HR, and IT support. That figure is a few years old, and nothing since has reversed it.

If anything, the load has compounded. Gartner's May 2026 research found that AI now saves sellers close to 5 hours a week, and that 72% of sales organizations fail to turn that time into higher-value work, because the operating model around the seller was built to scale by adding people and tools rather than removing friction (Gartner, May 2026). The capacity is there. The system absorbs it.

Putting sales to work in 2026 is better than 2023, but the math is still constrained

What I see in portfolio companies is that this has stopped being a sales problem and become an operating-cost problem the COO and CFO now own. When a small sales-ops team spends most of its week reconciling data across 10 or more overlapping platforms, the conversation at the leadership table turns to cutting tools, naming a stack owner, and capturing what the consolidation frees up.

We’ve been tackling this from different angles for different DevriX clients over the years:

• WhatsApp integration for a logistics company to serve as a newsletter-and-CX instrument to facilitate better deals

• Three different integrations within HubSpot and Salesforce for better call tracking, site integration (lead enrichment), and improved sales workflows (fewer manual clicks and better context as cycling through the pipeline)

• Better call logging and context switching across the site (individual numbers tied to site context and search intent)

• RevOps dashboards and clear KPIs to prioritize on a weekly basis

The core premise of RevOps retainers builds on initially audited organizational capacity and the funnel leaks we identify in the process: missing data points, performance gaps in marketing, sales, CX/account, and decision-making priorities for executive teams (getting budget approvals for operators and leadership teams).

This issue covers 4 topics:

• How sales ops drifted into a back-office function

• What the tool stack was actually costing

• The consolidation we ran and how finance got involved

• What changed in the numbers

This issue is written for operators and sponsors whose portfolio companies are adding RevTech faster than they can absorb, with specific examples from our portfolio and how we solved this challenge across 7 PE-owned firms.

1. How sales ops drifted into a back-office function

The expansion of sales operations was mostly deliberate. As companies moved toward a revenue-operations model, sales ops took on cross-functional work that used to sit in separate silos, and that is often the right structure. The cost shows up when the remit grows without the headcount or the tooling discipline to match it, and the team ends up administering systems instead of improving how revenue is run.

This is aligned with the AI adoption and T-shaped expertise required at the workplace now.

• Engineers are involved with product and design work thanks to tools

• Designers now execute working prototypes and interactive UX demos

• Product managers build MVPs and internal tools without waiting for engineering

Organizations like Anthropic and OpenAI have a broader title “Member of Technical Staff” - uniquely tied to the broad number of hats modern experts have to wear at work. When great prompting and data-fed tools can produce anything from content to video to plans to dashboards to animations to sites, agency plays a key role in executing at scale individually - and multiplying that effort and skillset instead.

The pattern is consistent across mid-market portcos: the team responsible for giving the CRO a clean read on pipeline has the least time left to produce one.

2. What the tool stack was actually costing

The tooling layer is where costs compound. Most mid-market revenue teams now run more platforms than they can use well; a large share of the paid stack sits idle at near-half utilization; and the integrations between tools generate their own maintenance burden.

When finance sees how little of the stack is actually used, consolidation moves from a vendor preference to a mandate, with RevOps owning the governance and finance owning the budget pressure behind it (2026 stack analysis). The unused half is not free. It is licenses, admin hours, and vendor management with no return.

This financial cleanup started in early 2023, after the interest rate spikes and the first waves of layoffs. Assessing efficiency across thousands of companies, CFOs installed blanket cuts of 20% of more across entire teams, and each unit stumbled upon dozens (or in some cases, over 100) different SaaS subscriptions and licenses with disjointed data and limited use.

For a PE-backed company, that spend and that lost capacity are not only a productivity issue. They sit in the cost base a buyer examines, and they cap how much commercial output the current headcount can produce.

3. The consolidation we ran and how finance got involved

Having been involved in a handful of these processes over the past years, we have identified clear trends at play in PE portfolio companies.

The initial audit maps every tool against the workflow it actually serves, finds the overlap, decides what the core platforms are, and sequences the cutover so the revenue team is never blind during the switch.

This process needs an owner with the authority to retire tools people are attached to, which is why it lands at the COO and CFO level rather than with the sales leader who signed the original contracts.

When we execute that through DevriX or Growth Shuttle, we take one of the following approaches:

• DevriX is hired as an embedded unit/fractional operating partner in charge of RevOps or a specific discipline with sufficient access and control

• One of our members is granted special permissions as a semi-formal company hire to receive the right clearance

• Growth Shuttle is hired as an audit authority independently of 3rd party agencies and interviews key stakeholders, assessing the P&L and licenses

• I act as a fractional CXO or an advisor to the operating partner or the private equity firm, working alongside internal teams, third-party teams, or executing through DevriX on a retainer

In all cases, the current stack was audited, certain tools were dropped or consolidated or replaced, and new KPIs were established to better serve the unit - with ongoing development of assets, SOPs, tools, dashboards, and integrations to better serve the core business objectives.

4. What changed in the numbers

The goal of the consolidation was to give the sales-ops team its week back and hand the leadership team a cleaner, cheaper revenue engine. The results are what make the case.

Unlike typical growth projects or cost-reduction exercises, these actions were uniquely valuable since they served several purposes at the same time:

1. Cutting costs for unused seats, expensive licenses, or multiple tools serving the same purpose

2. Reducing data noise and disjointed source of truth metrics across a dozen different dashboards

3. Connecting the pieces together into consolidated Big Data warehouses for better guidance and unified system of record labels and metrics everyone agreed with

4. Freeing up hundreds of hours monthly in jumping around or taking wrong decisions by relying on disconnected or incomplete data

5. Increasing operational efficiency

6. Increasing brand value and valuation through GP growth

7. Opening up opportunities for career growth internally (due to better utilization and higher individual performance)

Those are the numbers that change how a board reads the commercial function, and they are the ones a buyer rewards at exit.

If your portfolio companies have added more than 2 or 3 RevTech tools in the past year without retiring any, the consolidation case is already there, the cost is just not on anyone's desk yet.

The trigger to act is the renewal calendar.

Before the next batch of RevTech contracts renews, have the COO commission a one-page stack map: every tool, its annual cost, its weekly active usage, and the single workflow it owns. Any tool that is duplicated, under-used, or unowned is a candidate to cut, and the time the sales-ops team gets back is worth more than the license you save.

Mario

🧩 Third add-on in 18 months, and finance is reconciling three chart-of-accounts structures while sales can't produce a unified pipeline. 70% of serial acquirers underperform on integration - not because they picked wrong, but because they never built a repeatable operating system. Pick the integration archetype before close: full absorption, federated, capability bolt-on, or holding structure.

🎉 16 years of DevriX today, and the pivots explain the RevOps playbook we run now. Software factory to WordPress retainers to B2B SaaS and 976M monthly views in digital publishing to PE-backed RevOps partner. Consultancies stay fluid or they die - the last 24 months of PMI and value creation work grew from that same rhythm.

📋 The wire cleared, and now the real work begins - fewer than 30% of acquirers hit their synergy targets. Day 1 controls, CRM unification, martech consolidation, and SEO-safe web migration are where valuation gets protected or destroyed. Execution lives in checklists, decision rights, and daily accountability - not in the deal memo that justified the price.

🎯 Most sponsors still treat recruiting as an HR cost, not a value creation lever. The operating partner or RevOps lead hired in the first 90 days sets the ceiling for the entire hold period. Talent and revenue operations aren't two separate problems - the person you hire to own GTM is the decision that determines whether your RevOps thesis lands or stalls.

Every major AI vendor is now building embedded consulting arms to close the deployment gap. AWS committed $1B to its own Forward Deployed Engineer org, following OpenAI and Anthropic's $4B and $1.5B FDE joint ventures already backed by PE firms for capital and portfolio access.

Agentic AI pricing is compressing fast, moving the ROI math for mid-market deployments. Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 at $2/$10 per million tokens with performance near Opus 4.8, signaling that autonomous agent workloads can now be run at materially lower cost across RevOps and back-office use cases.

Sovereign-backed private credit is now the dominant capital pool for high-growth companies in the Gulf. GCC private debt reached $4.1bn in 2025, up 8.2x year-over-year, with Saudi Arabia capturing 95% as PIF, Sanabil, and Mubadala pull structured credit ahead of venture capital as the primary funding source.

SaaS supply chain risk is now the dominant enterprise cyber vector, driven by stale third-party credentials. A 2022 pilot credential at Klue that was never revoked let attackers pivot through OAuth tokens into 195+ customer environments, including LastPass, Snyk, Tanium, and Huntress, exposing how portfolio-wide credential hygiene has become an operational discipline.

Creative Lighting Amazon FBA: 10-year-old Amazon FBA specializing in moon lamps, galaxy projectors, and specialty lighting products. Operations are highly automated, with Amazon handling logistics and primary customer service. $133,000

Skincare Shopify Brand: 32-year-old Shopify brand best known for pioneering the use of copper peptides in skincare and for its proprietary Blue Copper® formulations. Operated by an outsourced team with streamlined SOPs and fulfillment. $900,000

Manufacturing YouTube Channel: 3-year-old YouTube channel in the manufacturing and industrial technology niche. Monetized primarily through Adsense. $2,000,000

IT Consulting Firm: 30-year-old IT consulting firm specializing in cutting-edge areas like cybersecurity, data center management, and telecom solutions. Generates revenue via project-based, licensing, and maintenance programs. $18,500,000

For PE partners and operators seeking alpha

🌐 Scaling $50M - $500M+ mid-market companies with value creation through RevOps, data engineering, and WordPress. DevriX provides full RevOps consulting + delivery with GTM enablement for PE-backed portfolio companies, traditional tech, healthcare, finance, and professional service businesses pacing toward revenue growth initiatives. Our standard retainers between $10K and $60K include revenue lifecycle services for marketing and sales leaders, FP&A for financial teams, pipeline enrichment through websites and dozens of lead sources, automations and delivery integrations, CRO and ongoing testing, product delivery and platform integration solutions, and more through our consulting solutions.

🚀 1:1 Advisory retainers. Supporting operating partners, private equity funds, family offices, and mid-market executives in different capacities, from value creation through due diligence to portfolio digital GTM management in my async advisory programs via Growth Shuttle.

📈 GTM while scaling. European and international businesses can opt in for doola LLC and their “Business in a Box” model. Scaling founders can find smaller digital opportunities on Flippa. And additional opportunities across my investments can be found here.