RevOps Leadership Competencies
Key Responsiblities:
- Strategy & Planning
- Includes: org structure; sales productivity & process optimization; cross-functional collaboration, capacity, budgeting, policies/rules of engagement
- Analytics & Forecasting
- Also includes: Revenue intelligence, reporting, dashboards; KPIs/metrics
- Systems & Data
- Comp & Quota
- Also includes: rewards & recognition
- Territory
- Deal Desk (may report directly to Finance or Legal)
Additional Responsibilities:
- Sales Enablement (may report directly to CRO)
- Includes: onboarding; ongoing training; SKO; sales communications
- Sales Development (may report directly to CRO or CMO)
- Sales Engineering (may report directly to CRO)
- Customer Success Operations (may report directly to CCO)
- Marketing Ops (may report directly to CMO)
- Channel Ops (may report directly to CRO or CMO)
Characteristics:
- Talent leadership – hiring, coaching, & performance management
- Strategic thinking/problem solving
- Communications & interpersonal skills; cross-functional collaboration; change management
- Strong analytical skills (Excel required; SQL & Python highly desired; financial acumen desired)
- Attention to detail
- Project management
- Process design & optimization
- Entrepreneurial, proactive, self-starter, self-directed
- Data-driven decision making
- Deep understanding of KPIs
- Systems
- CRM (SFDC; Hubspot)
- Marketing Automation (Marketo; SFDC Pardot)
- BI (Looker; Tableau; etc.)
- Automation (Zapier; Workato)
- Functional Expertise:
- Sales: forecasting; pipeline analysis; sales process; sales methodologies; territory design; capacity planning; incentive compensation; etc.
- Marketing: lead scoring; lead routing; attribution; campaign management
- Customer Success & Support: onboarding; QBRs; renewal processses
Also see my highly detailed list of RevOps responsibilities here.
RevOps Scaling
- Hire #1: Systems admin (esp. CRM focused)
- Hire #2: Director who is a Swiss army knife but esp. focused on strategy, process, analytics
- Hire #3: Analyst esp focused on regular and ad-hoc reporting
- Hires #4-#7 (sequence depends on need)
- Deal desk
- Comp, quota, and territory admin
- Marketing Ops
- CS Ops
- Hires 8+: More capacity in areas above. For analysts, incremental hires tend to operate as partners to sales leaders. For example. if CRO has a head of commercial and a head of ENT under them, then you might have a dedicated RevOps person assigned to each of them.
RevOps Staffing Ratios
The following is the ratio of revenue professionals (AE/AM, CSM, & SDR) to revenue operations professionals based on the Insight Partners portfolio as of May 15, 2023.
| By ASP | Median Ratio | % with RevOps |
|---|---|---|
| Transactional (<$25k) | 15.4 | 76% |
| Solution ($25K to $75K) | 13.1 | 77% |
| Consultative (>$75K) | 16.0 | 84% |
| By ARR | Median Ratio | % with RevOps |
|---|---|---|
| $0 to $10M | 11.0 | 49% |
| $10M to $20M | 12.9 | 89% |
| $20M to $50M | 15.7 | 81% |
| $50M to $100M | 15.0 | 98% |
| Over $100M | 15.4 | 93% |
The following is the ratio of revenue professionals (AE/AM, CSM, SDR, & Sales Eng.) to revenue operations professionals based on the Cloud 100 as of Jan 16, 2023.
| # Total Employees | Median Ratio | Average Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| 286 to 600 | 14:1 | 16:1 |
| 601 to 900 | 27:1 | 27:1 |
| 901 to 1,150 | 21:1 | 21:1 |
| 1,151 plus | 20:1 | 24:1 |
| Overall | 20:1 | 23:1 |
The following queries were used to determine counts using LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
- AE/AM: (“account executive” OR “account manager” OR “account representative” OR “sales executive” OR “sales manager” OR “sales representative” OR “sales associate” OR “territory manager” OR “strategic account” OR “strategic accounts” OR “partner sales” OR “channel sales” OR “major account” OR “major accounts” OR “account director” OR “sales director” OR “business development” OR “enterprise AE” OR “mid market AE” OR “strategic AE” OR “SMB AE” OR “senior AE” OR “senior AE” OR “AE Team Lead”) AND (NOT(“business development representative” OR enablement OR operations OR technical OR “sales development”))
- SDR: SDR OR “sales development” OR BDR OR “business development representative” OR “inbound sales” OR “lead development” OR ldr OR “lead response” OR “market response” OR “account development” OR adr
- CSM: (“customer success” OR csm OR “client partner” OR “client engagement” OR “customer engagement” OR “client strategy” OR “technical account manager”) AND (NOT(operations OR enablement))
- Revenue Operations: (“sales operations” OR “revenue operations” OR “commercial operations” OR “field operations” OR “sales strategy” OR “revenue strategy” OR “deal desk” OR “salesforce admin” OR “salesforce administrator” OR “salesforce developer” OR “sales analytics” OR “sales compensation”)
- Sales Eng.: “sales engineer” OR “sales engineering” OR “solution engineer” OR “solution engineering” OR “solutions engineer” OR “solutions engineering” OR “sales consultant” OR “presales” OR “solutions consultant”
Revenue Operations Compensation
- Keep the variable compensation plan for RevOps people simple by fulling aligning the metrics to those of the CRO. Most often, this means just one metric = net ARR increase = new logos – expansion – downgrades – churn
- Per Glassdoor in Information Technology as of August 8, 2023: (base/variable split)
- RevOps people typically have linear comp plans – i.e. no thresholds on the low end or accelerators on the high end of attainment
- Equity:
- Analyst: 0.0025% to 0.005%
- Manager: 0.01% to 0.02%
- Director: 0.025% to 0.05%
- Vice President (Head of): 0.1% to 0.2%
| Role | New York | Austin | San Francisco |
| Analyst | $77K (93/7) | $71K (93/7) | $87K (93/7) |
| Manager | $150K (65/35) | $132K (65/35) | $187K (65/35) |
| Director | $215K (60/40) | $210K (60/40) | $235K (60/40) |
| Vice President | $380K (50/50) | $355K (50/50) | $400K (50/50) |
Historical as of June 4th, 2022
- Analyst: $72K (93/7)
- Manager: $131 (65/35)
- Director: $233 (60/40)
- Vice President: $344 (50/50)
Revenue Operations as a Service
(*) = Recommended
- Go Nimbly
- (*) LeanLayer (fractional GTM, RevOps, and BI)
- LeanScale (CRM design; GTM analytics; operational advisory)
- Operatus (fka Admin Within)
- Revcarto (more Marketing Ops – MOps – focused)
- (*) RevenuePulse (mainly marketingops; AI capabilities)
- (*) RevPartners (possibly Hubspot only)
- (*) SalesOps.io
- Think RevOps (Catherine Mandungu)
- TPG (Josh Winnegrad)
- (*) Unicorn Revenue Operations (Austin Bankhead)
- (*) Union Square Consulting (Eddie Reynolds)
Revenue Operations Recruiters
(*) = Recommended
- (*) Captivate Talent (Bri Doyle)
- (*) Chasm Partners (Matt Dumas)
- (*) Russel Reynolds (Taylor Somerville)
- (*) Sales Talent Agency (Asad Zaman)
- (*) True Search (Steph Paris)
- (*) TwentyPine (Lee Masucci)