Why simplifying your revenue stack comes before everything else

Editor's note: This article was based on a talk given by Fabrice Buron, VP, Revenue Operations at Outreach, at our Revenue Operations Summit, London, 2025.

When I ask a room full of RevOps professionals to raise their hands if their tech stack has gotten simpler in the last two years, maybe five hands go up. Five. Out of a room that size.

That tells you everything you need to know about where we are as an industry right now.

We've been stacking, not simplifying. Every new tool, every new technology layer, every new data source gets added to the pile. And all of that complexity? It lands squarely on RevOps. We used to be the team keeping the engine running. Now we're being asked to make it smarter, faster, and more predictable, all at the same time, with a stack that's grown into something that would make a systems architect nervous.

I shared a real picture of Outreach's ecosystem during my keynote. It's a lot. And I'd guess it looks familiar to most of you.

So the question I want to dig into here is the one we explored on stage: how do you create clarity and simplicity when you're managing complex systems, fragmented workflows, and teams that have been doing things a certain way for years? And what does it actually look like when a company at genuine global scale takes that challenge seriously?

To explore that, I was joined by Torsten Rieschenberger, who leads revenue operations at Siemens Digital Industries. If you want a real-world test case for complexity, this is it. Four thousand sellers. One hundred and ninety countries. Multiple business units and product lines. Fifteen CRM systems. Twenty-five ERP systems. A company that's been operating for roughly 180 years.

Here's what we learned from that conversation, and why it matters for RevOps teams at every size.

Start with process, not platforms

One of the most consistent mistakes we see in RevOps is reaching for a new tool before the underlying process is sorted. You can implement the most sophisticated platform on the market, but if the workflow it's built on is broken, you've just got a broken workflow with a more expensive interface.

Torsten's team started their consolidation journey with an audit. Not of their tech stack, but of their processes. How were opportunities being handled? How did reps actually perceive the CRM? What guidelines existed, and were they being followed? Only after working through those questions did they start looking at how to bring systems into alignment.

And what surfaced when they did that work was genuinely surprising. Opportunities being handled inconsistently. Data sources influencing other elements in ways nobody had noticed. Whole areas of the process that Torsten's team didn't even control, meaning they depended on other teams to fix things before they could move forward.

That's the reality of RevOps at scale. You're not just managing your own backlog. You're navigating dependencies across the entire organization, often without direct authority over the things that need to change.

The honest assessment from Torsten:

"We are crawling. We are definitely not running."

And that's a company with serious resources and executive attention behind this initiative. So if your own consolidation journey feels slow, that's probably normal. The timeline that a board wants (done tomorrow, ideally) rarely matches the timeline that sustainable change actually requires.

The forecasting piece is where it gets real

One of the areas where Siemens Digital Industries has focused most intentionally is forecasting. And this makes sense. For a publicly listed company, the pressure to forecast accurately is enormous. Shareholders want to see that whatever you've committed to, you can deliver. But even for private companies, forecast accuracy is a signal of organizational health. If you're trying to raise investment or demonstrate consistency to a leadership team, the quality of your forecast tells a story.

What Torsten's team set out to change wasn't just the tooling around forecasting. It was the culture of it. Historically, forecasting happened above the rep level. The data flowed up, got aggregated, and the numbers were produced. Reps were largely disconnected from that process.

The shift they've been making is bringing account managers into the loop. Giving them accountability. Making their voice part of the forecast, rather than just treating them as a data source. And the early results are meaningful: better predictability, better accuracy, and something that's harder to measure but just as important: reps saying they feel heard.