Don’t Hire for RevOps! Until…

You’ve likely been seeing more and more people with the title of RevOps (short for Revenue Operations) at tech companies.

As can be seen below, this is a new term that didn't exist ten years ago and is rapidly growing:

What is now called RevOps is an amalgamation of several roles, including marketing operations, sales operations, CS operations, and CRM administration more broadly.

Over time, GTM teams have increasingly realized how tied together these functions actually are. With that, they’ve found that having a single team managing the whole funnel is much more efficient.

Naturally, you’re probably wondering if making a RevOps hire is right for your company.

The answer: It’s not! Until you do these three things…

1. Assess your current process

Before hiring a RevOps professional, it's important to assess your current revenue generation processes and identify areas of inefficiency or misalignment.

Here are some examples of problems that might indicate a need for a RevOps professional:

• Misaligned teams: Are your marketing, sales, and customer success teams operating in silos, with no clear communication or alignment? This can result in wasted resources, missed opportunities, and a poor customer experience.

• Inefficient processes: Are your revenue generation processes slow, manual, or prone to errors? This can result in lost sales, frustrated customers, and missed opportunities for growth.

• Lack of visibility: Do you have a clear understanding of your revenue generation processes, including the key metrics and data points that drive success? Without this visibility, it can be difficult to identify areas of improvement or make data-driven decisions.

• Limited scalability: Are your revenue generation processes able to scale as your business grows? Without a scalable process, it can be difficult to keep up with demand and maintain a consistent revenue stream.

• Ineffective technology: Are you using outdated or inefficient technology to support your revenue generation processes? This can result in missed opportunities for automation, data analysis, and process optimization.

If you’re experiencing any of these problems, don’t jump the gun and hire a RevOps professional yet!

You also need to ask yourself how pressing these problems really are in relation to other business priorities. If the problems aren’t very painful or urgent, an outsourced CRM administrator or maybe a leader in marketing, sales, or CS could take care of the bulk of it for the time being.

If, however, these problems are already painful or growing, it might be time to bring in a RevOps professional before things get worse.

By bringing in someone with a deep understanding of revenue generation processes and the tools and technology to support them, you'll be able to identify and address these issues, optimize your revenue generation processes, and drive sustainable growth for your business.

But before you go make the hire, there are a couple more things you need to do…

2. Define the function and skillset

Depending on the resources you already have in place and the exact problems you’re experiencing, the RevOps role can look very different compared to other companies.

This is why it is important to define what the function will look like and what skill sets are needed.

In most cases, the function entails the following:

• Key objectives: The RevOps function should have a clear set of objectives that align with the overall revenue generation strategy of the organization. These objectives should be specific, measurable, and time-bound, and should reflect the goals of the organization.

• Scope of responsibility: The RevOps function should have a defined scope of responsibility that covers the entire customer lifecycle, from lead generation to retention. This includes overseeing all revenue-generating teams, processes, and technology. If you’re looking for someone with a narrower scope, a different type of role/title is more appropriate.

• Cross-functional collaboration: The RevOps function should facilitate cross-functional collaboration between marketing, sales, customer success, and finance teams, ensuring that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals.

• Data analysis and reporting: The RevOps function should be responsible for analyzing data and generating reports that provide insights into the performance of revenue-generating teams and processes. This includes identifying areas of inefficiency or misalignment, as well as opportunities for optimization and growth.

• Technology management: The RevOps function should be responsible for managing the technology and tools that support revenue generation processes, including the CRM, marketing automation and support tools, and data analytics platforms.

If some of these responsibilities are already being taken care of by others in your organization, you will need to consider 1) relieving them of those responsibilities, or 2) choosing a RevOps professional who is skilled in only the areas you are lacking.

If (2) seems like a better fit, you might want to target people with marketing ops, sales ops, or CS ops as their current title and then upskill them into new areas.

This brings us to the next point which is to define the skills the potential RevOps hire needs.

You should look for people with these 5 skills:

• “Data-native”: Data is the blood of RevOps and they need to speak it as if it was their native language. This doesn’t mean that they need to be an engineer or data scientist (though this might be a good fit); rather, it means they’re able to extract and analyze data with an eye toward business objectives.

• Collaboration: Due to the cross-functional nature of the role, RevOps professionals need to be amazing collaborators and communicators. They must be able and willing to get along with a wide range of people and personalities and communicate with them in a way they can understand. This is the only way you can get your revenue engine moving in the same, coordinated direction.

• Strategic thinking: RevOps is a very strategic function as it takes disjointed parts of the business and tries to unify them towards business objectives. They must be creative and weigh options that align with the long-term vision of the company.

• Ready to solve problems: Much of the RevOps role is about solving problems, mostly for other department heads. They must have an eagerness to be able to solve these problems and think outside the box as the answers might not be available by a simple Google search.

• Continuous learning: Change is the only certainty in RevOps, especially when it comes to the technology and tools being used. Staying ahead of the curve and always willing to learn more is critical.

We recommend that you take these five points as a scoring card when comparing RevOps candidates. (Take a look at this blog post for more detail about what these skills entail.)

However, there is one more thing you need before you even start interviewing candidates…

3. Able and willing to invest

RevOps is not a little island within your company. Due to its cross-functional nature and its heavy reliance on technology/data, you will need to be able and willing to invest time and money into this role for your RevOps hire to be successful.

On the aspect of time, department heads from all GTM functions will need to invest significant time up-front to get the RevOps professional familiar with all the systems, workflows, and current challenges.

This will likely entail daily meetings at first, as well as ongoing meetings once or twice a week with each department head to coordinate and keep projects moving forward.

On the aspect of money, modern RevOps teams could not function - or exist in the first place - without software tools to assist.

Though you might already have several of these, here are some software tools that will likely be involved in making the RevOps function (and all GTM) work:

• Marketing data (ZoomInfo, RocketReach, etc.)
• Marketing automation tools (Marketo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc.)
• A quality sales CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.)
• Tools for outbounding (Outreach, Apollo, Amplemarket, etc.)
• Deal desk management (RevOps.io, DealHub, etc.)
• Customer support and help desk tools (Zendesk, Intercom, etc.)
• Data syncing (Polytomic was built for this! Check us out 😁)

Unless you’re prepared to invest this type of time and money, your RevOps hire is likely to fail.

Conclusion

There is a lot that goes into making sure you’re ready to make your first RevOps hire.

If you don’t go through these steps, you run a serious risk of setting up the RevOps hire for failure. They’ll be stepping on toes, having little work to do, or not enough resources to be impactful.

But by going through these steps, you’ll be clear on their role, their purpose, where they fit in the company, and the investment needed. Thus, setting them and your whole revenue engine up for success!

Once you make the hire, send them our way so we can discuss data syncing.