A sales methodology is not a revenue process.

Technology without process is faster chaos. Data without process is a prettier argument. Process without a referee is a document nobody obeys. That is why process comes after people, and before data and tools.

When the company is small, heroics feel like a process. They are not. If your best rep is on leave and a competent stranger cannot run the path, you do not have a process. You have a memory.

MEDDIC, Challenger, inbound theory — those can live inside a stage. RevOps does not pick a religion for how a conversation is run. It designs the path those methods travel on.

The path is unglamorous on purpose: who counts as ICP, when a lead becomes an MQL and an SQL, what must be true to open an opportunity, how routing and speed-to-lead work, how quotes get approved, how Closed-won becomes onboarding, how renewal and expansion are run, who may touch whose account.

Companies that try to redraw the whole lifecycle on a single afternoon produce a mural. A mural is not an operating system.

Executives do not need a process lecture. They need two stories from their own company: one deal that closed, and one customer or lead that died at a handoff. Walk both from first meaningful touch to renewal, expansion, or the moment it stopped. At each handoff ask who owned it, what had to be true to pass it, who knew it had passed, and how long it sat.

Mark the fields that vanished and the questions the customer had to answer twice. That is the customer-visible cost. This is not a prosecution of a named rep.

Good process is written, versioned, and owned. Entry and exit criteria can be audited by a stranger. There is a clock and an escalation. Exceptions are written — including enterprise deals — with a name who may grant them. Process changes go through one gate, not a message that became policy at 6pm. An unwritten exception is the whole process.

Pick the leakiest seam. The usual candidates are MQL to SQL, or Closed-won to Customer Success. If you cannot choose, pick the place the customer repeats themselves.

Write, on one page: the seam, one owner, observable entry criteria, the five fields that may not be blank, an SLA with a clock and an escalation, one success metric, and a pilot smaller than the company. The two sides of the seam and the referee sign it.

Run that pilot for thirty days. Do not add a second seam until this one holds. Do not buy a workflow product to enforce a handoff you have not written.