The friction between sales and revenue operations is one of business’s costliest challenges. This quiet conflict drains revenue, wastes time, and erodes morale. For companies to thrive, this operational divide must be bridged. But how?
Jim Sbarra, Vice President of sales productivity at Freshworks, understands both sides of this conflict better than almost anyone. His unique 38-year career gives him a rare 360-degree view of the problem. He has held senior sales leadership roles at Salesforce and Oracle and led global RevOps at Domo. In a recent conversation on The Go-to-Market Podcastย with Amy Osmond Cook, co-founder and CMO at Fullcast, Jim shared his actionable blueprint for transforming this adversarial relationship into a powerful alliance.
This alignment is critical as teams face mounting pressure on efficiency and quota attainment. The need for collaboration has never been greater.
Nearly 77% of sellers are missing their targets despite lowered quotas, according to theย 2025 Benchmarks Report.
Here’s how to build the collaboration needed to reverse that trend.
Why Sales And Revops Speak Different Languages
To solve the friction between sales and RevOps, you first have to understand its source. After spending over three decades as a “customer” of RevOps services and then five years as the “supplier,” Jim Sbarra gained a unique understanding of the fundamental disconnect.
The conflict stems not from personalities, but from conflicting motivations baked into the structure of the roles.
The Commission Mindset Vs. The Process Imperative
The core difference lies in how each team is incentivized. Sales professionals are laser-focused on one thing: closing deals. Their income, success, and professional validation are tied directly to their quota. As Jim explains, “If someone who is working on commissionโฆ anything that doesn’t involve closing a deal seems like noise.”
Revenue operations, on the other hand, is driven by the process imperative. Their goal is to build scalable, repeatable, and compliant systems that ensure the business can grow predictably and legally. This requires data integrity, standardized workflows, and adherence to rules.
The challenge is that these two worldviews inevitably clash, making trueย aligning sales strategyย a constant battle.
How “Helping” Operations Can Feel Like Hurting Sales
From the RevOps perspective, asking a seller to fill out three extra CRM fields is a small step to ensure accurate forecasting and smooth handoffs. But to the seller, it can feel like a productivity-killing distraction.
This empathy gap can become a significant disconnect. Amy Osmond Cook shared an anecdote about an operations leader who, when told that a new system didn’t capture the sales pipeline correctly, responded with, “I don’t know how much we care.” This attitude, Jim notes, is precisely why RevOps must constantly evaluate their requests.
He made it a priority to “eliminate a lot of unnecessary process that was more helping operations” and replace it with systems that benefited both sides.
The Failure Of “Because I Said So” Mandates
When empathy fails, leaders often resort to top-down mandates. This “because I said so” approach is almost always doomed to fail. “No one wants to be told you’re doing this because this is our process,” Jim warns.
People want to feel like they are part of the process, not victims of it.
You only get to play the non-negotiable card a few times before you lose all credibility and goodwill. To build a lasting alliance, organizations must move beyond siloed thinking and build aย collaborative customer-centric modelย where every function understands its role in the larger revenue engine.
The Revops Playbook For Building An Alliance With Sales
RevOps leaders cannot wait for sales to come to them. They must proactively bridge the gap by shifting their function from a process enforcer to a strategic partner.ย This requires a deliberate playbook built on demonstrating empathy and creating tangible value for sellers.
1. Start With Empathy: Understand The Seller’s World
Jim’s single most important piece of advice is for RevOps to truly understand the sales perspective. Before asking for anything, RevOps leaders must deeply understand the pressures, motivations, and daily realities of a commission-based sales role.
This empathy is the bedrock of credibility. Jim’s 32 years in sales gave him an immediate advantage because the sales team knew he understood their world. For RevOps leaders without that background, earning trust starts with demonstrating a genuine interest in helping sellers succeed.
When RevOps leads with empathy, it canย become more strategicย and unlock a new level of influence.
2. Frame Every Request With “What’s In It For Them?”
The key to getting buy-in is to translate every operational request into a direct sales benefit. Instead of saying, “You need to do this for our process,” shift the conversation to, “Doing this now will help you close deals faster later.”
Jim provides a perfect example: “If you answer these three [questions] now, we can eliminate [the 20 questions] after things are closed.” This simple reframing changes the request from a burden into a time-saving trade-off.
By consistently demonstrating how process helps sellers, RevOps proves it is aย secret weapon for growth, not a roadblock.
3. Extend Your Alliance-Building Beyond Sales
This empathetic, benefit-focused approach isn’t just for the sales team. Jim advises his RevOps teams to apply the same principles when working with Finance, Legal, and Marketing. “If they see you as an ally and at least that they know you understand, or you’re trying to care about what they do, then you’re gonna get way farther,” he says. By building bridges across departments, RevOps solidifies its role as the connective tissue for the entireย end-to-end go-to-marketย motion.
A Seller’s Guide To Revops As A Force Multiplier
This alignment requires effort from both sides.ย Sales professionals who learn to see RevOps as a strategic partner rather than an obstacle can unlock a powerful force multiplier for their own success.
Revops Succeeds When You Succeed
Jim often challenges sales teams with a simple, powerful question: “Do you honestly believe that this group is in place to stop you from selling?” The answer, of course, is no. RevOps professionals only keep their jobs if the company grows, and the company only grows if sales is successful.
They are not there to prevent deals. They are there to ensure sales happen in a “reputable, legal way that also allows for tracking, accountability, and accurate reporting.” Recognizing this shared dependency is the first step toward collaboration. A strongย Wartime RevOps leaderย is an invaluable asset, especially when market conditions are tough.
Protect Your Commission Check With Process
For sellers, the most compelling reason to embrace process is that it protects their income. Accurate contracts, correct entitlements, and clean data are what ensure the company pays commissions correctly and on time. RevOps is the function that protects both the seller and the company by ensuring deals are solid from start to finish. Viewing process through this lens transforms it from a chore into a form of self-preservation, guided by clearย RevOps execution policies.
Trade 80% Of Fighting For 10% Of Doing
Jim offers a final piece of pragmatic advice for sellers who resist process: do the math. “Rather than spending 80% of your time fighting it, spend 10% just doing it,” he recommends. The time and energy spent pushing back, escalating issues, and dealing with the fallout of non-compliance is almost always greater than the time it would take to simply follow the process in the first place. That recovered time can be spent on what matters most: selling.
The Pillars Of Sustainable Alignment: Technology And Mindset
While interpersonal strategies are crucial, long-term sales-RevOps alignment must be embedded in the company’s systems and culture.
Technology and mindset are the final pillars that make this partnership sustainable.
Pillar 1: Use Your Gtm Platform To Mandate Collaboration
Modern Go-to-Market platforms can serve as a single source of truth that forces collaboration. Jim highlights his experience with Fullcast, where scenario planning for territories allows sales leaders to be part of the design process.
This prevents the “mind blown” moment where RevOps hands over a flawed plan, an approach that has helped customers likeย Qualtricsย avoid weeks of rework and build trust between teams. By bringing sales, finance, and operations into a shared system,ย Fullcast’s RevOps platformย makes collaboration a natural part of the workflow.
Pillar 2: Embrace Continuous Change With Agile Operations
Re-orgs, re-plans, and territory shifts often induce what Jim calls “PTSD for people in my role.” It’s historically been a painful, reactive, and manual process. However, the right technology transforms this dread into a strategic advantage.
Modern platforms allow RevOps to model changes proactively, get ahead of business needs, and present data-backed solutions to leadership. This shift allows teams toย Automate GTM operationsย and turn change into an opportunity.
Pillar 3: Adopt A Mindset Of Perpetual Curiosity
Jim’s final piece of advice transcends any single role. The ultimate key to navigating the evolving landscape of sales and operations is to never believe you are at the top of your game.
“The minute you believe that, then you stop learning,” he says. True experts stay ahead by remaining curious, reading broadly, and learning from the challenges and solutions in other industries. This mindset, whereย RevOps as a philosophyย of continuous improvement is embraced, is what will ensure both individuals and organizations thrive.
The Future Of Sales And Revops
The chronic friction between sales and revenue operations is not an unsolvable problem of personalities, but one of perspective. As Jim Sbarra’s experience reveals, the solution lies in transforming the relationship from an operational tug of war into a strategic alliance. His blueprint for lastingย sales RevOps alignmentย is built on a simple, powerful foundation: empathy.
Achieving this alignment requires RevOps to walk in a seller’s shoes and sales to recognize ops as a partner protecting their commission check. When this human-centric approach is supported by collaborative technology, the entire go-to-market motion becomes more resilient and effective. The ultimate goal isn’t just a truce between departments, but a fully integrated revenue engine where every part works in concert to drive predictable, sustainable growth.
