The front door problem
Revenue operations without an intake process becomes a queue anyone can jump. Requests arrive as direct messages, hallway asks, and side comments at the end of meetings. They carry no stated purpose and no priority, so the team ends up serving whoever escalated most recently. Intake fixes that. It is one documented path every request travels, with required fields and a review step before work begins.This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. A request that cannot name its downstream use is usually a request that should be declined, and you cannot decline what you never see.
What a request has to carry
Four fields do most of the work. Who is asking and which team the outcome serves. What decision or report the output will drive. When it is needed and what breaks if it slips. What the requester will stop doing once it exists.
That last field kills more weak requests than any review meeting. A new dashboard that nobody agrees to retire a spreadsheet for is a second version of a number, and competing versions of the same number are how a forecast loses credibility inside a company.
Triage categories
Sort incoming work into four buckets. Break-fix jumps the queue, because broken routing or a failed sync corrupts data for as long as it runs. System changes go through a change process, since they alter definitions that every historical comparison depends on. Recurring reporting gets built once and scheduled. Analysis gets scoped before it gets scheduled, because "can you pull the numbers" covers anything from an hour to two weeks of work.
Publish the queue where requesters can see it. When a sales director can see that their field request sits behind a broken lead routing rule, the prioritization argument gets much shorter.
Why intake protects the forecast
Every unreviewed field, report, and automation adds a definition that somebody later has to reconcile. Stage meanings drift, amount fields multiply, and any model reading the CRM inherits the result. ORM's position is that consistency matters more than cleanliness, since a model can learn from imperfect data that is captured the same way every time. Intake is how that consistency gets defended day to day, and it shows up later in forecast accuracy and in whether pipeline coverage means the same thing this quarter that it meant last quarter.
An intake log is also the strongest headcount argument available. Six months of logged requests with hours attached beats any staffing ratio. It shows what the function absorbed, what it declined, and what the company gave up by declining it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does an intake process slow down urgent work?
No, as long as break-fix has its own path. Broken routing, a failed integration, or a permissions error gets worked immediately and logged afterward. Everything else waits for review. The delay people complain about is usually the review that keeps low-value work out of the queue entirely.
Who approves a request?
The RevOps lead approves the work and the requesting executive approves the tradeoff. If a request displaces something already scheduled, the person whose work gets displaced hears about it before the swap, not after they notice their project stopped moving.
What should never go through intake?
Record-level corrections. A rep fixing a close date or an owner merging duplicate accounts is doing the job. Intake governs the system layer, meaning fields, stage definitions, automations, integrations, and recurring reports.
How do you handle an executive who bypasses the queue?
Log the request anyway and show it in the published queue with its displacement cost attached. Bypasses stop being free once the team can point at the two projects that slipped because of them.
Put these metrics to work
ORM builds custom revenue forecast models that turn concepts like revops intake process into prescriptive action for your team.
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