Despite roadblocks, 74% of revenue leaders report outperforming company goals this year.

92% of survey respondents expect their RevOps tech budget to grow next year, and a majority (80%) say they are very or extremely likely to evaluate a new integrated revenue solution in the next twelve months as growth puts pressure on their current tech stack.

Revenue leaders have diagnosed their own roadblocks: disconnected systems and data. Thankfully, they intend to do something about it, and they have the budget to help do so.

The top areas they plan to invest in, CPQ and automation, are also key areas we found that could be holding teams back from optimizing their numbers, as you’ll read about in the findings below.

CRM and CPQ are table stakes, but most teams have bolted on a half-dozen more tools just to fill the gaps left by those core systems.

Most revenue teams manage their end-to-end process across two to three separate tools, and 46% rely on spreadsheets for between 25% and 50% of their revenue workflows, with reporting as the single most common use case. The prevalence of spreadsheets is likely a sign that the integrated tooling required to replace them has not yet earned their trust.

A third of teams take a full business day to deliver a finalized quote after a verbal agreement, and it can take up to two more days to get it signed, leaving the window when deals can go cold often wide open at every stage of the process.

Adding more time to the process is the fact that a third of teams still build quotes by hand. 32% are sending quotes they’ve built manually in Word, Excel, or Google Docs, and less than a quarter use a CPQ tool.

54% of respondents say that, 25-50% of the time, they send quotes to customers and leads as static documents (Word, Excel, Google Docs), rather than automated or interactive quotes that let them review, sign, and pay from one place.

While leaders say their buyers have a clear, simple experience, 71% say the quoting process creates friction and actively slows deal velocity and impacts overall close rates, and 70% say buyers complained about quoting complexity, which isn’t good because a frustrated customer before a quote has even been signed is more likely to be lost.

All of this means that the quoting process has not meaningfully evolved in years, and for most teams it remains slow, manual, and inconsistent. In fact, three in four teams say deals stall or go cold sometimes or very often because the process simply cannot keep up.

The disconnect between “our buyers have a simple experience,” “quoting friction costs us deals,” and “buyers complain about complexity” is the revenue context gap we mentioned before.

The cost of assembling a revenue stack is paid in implementation time, with nearly a third of teams spending three to four weeks just to get their tools fully operational. 28% say it takes significant effort (1-3 months) to fully operationalize the tools.

Most implementations aren’t painless, with 53% calling the experience “Somewhat easy - some challenges.” Only a third of respondents called the process truly painless.

While most teams describe their revenue tools as integrated, 65% of respondents say their teams spend between two and ten hours every month simply keeping those integrations from breaking, and that “manual steps remain.” Only 7% say their integrations are stable (needing little to no maintenance).

Despite these pain points, satisfaction with CRM and billing vendors is solid. Revenue intelligence tools show the widest confidence gap, with more than half of users only somewhat satisfied. This is significant because revenue data is the basis of what revenue teams need to do their jobs effectively.

Collections and marketing attribution are the weakest links in the vendor landscape, with fewer than four in ten leaders saying they are very satisfied with what they have today.

Confidence is clearly highest in the systems of record, but lowest exactly where revenue context has to travel between systems.

Even with all the technology at their fingertips, a majority of revenue leaders we surveyed say they are only somewhat satisfied with their current revenue process, which makes sense. Every post-sale motion still depends on someone manually moving the context between systems.

While product purchases are certainly critical to their bottom line, one underestimated barrier to truly optimizing revenue growth shows up after a deal is made. Even in the AI era, processes like contracting, billing, and mid-term changes remain heavily manual.

When a customer upgrades or downgrades mid-term, someone still manually walks that change through the system, and collections follow-up is fully automated for only one in three teams.

AI can be a help throughout this process, with nearly half of revenue teams moving beyond using AI as a personal assistant to deploying agents that handle entire workflows autonomously, from quoting to invoice follow-up.

AI agents are deployed within the same revenue context gap that everyone else works around, which limits the value AI can actually deliver: 72% of revenue leaders say AI tools lack access to integrated, accurate revenue data.

The cumulative cost of reconciliation work is substantial, even with tools meant to lighten reps' load and maximize efficiency. It represents a category of lost productivity that a unified data layer will largely eliminate.

Revenue leaders are ready for a change

The same key themes among B2B revenue teams keep surfacing across our data: important revenue context is separated from customer context. It shows up as:

• Quotes that take a full day to deliver because reps are pulling from two or three systems
• Missed renewal opportunities because target dates live somewhere teams can’t see
• Months end closes where teams are using different numbers
• AI agents that can’t optimize and streamline processes because tools are missing the necessary data

This is where Revenue Hub comes in, as your team's command center for quotes, billing, and payments. Revenue context lives where your customer data lives, and your HubSpot AI can work from the first prompt to the final payment.