When is the perfect time for a RevOps hire?

First things first, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when we banter around the term “RevOps.” I’m referring to Revenue Operations, a holistic framework that aligns an organization’s internal processes around revenue growth along the entire customer journey. RevOps transforms a siloed organizational structure and mindset into one where all customer-touching departments from Demand Gen to Sales, from Customer Success to  Finance interactions are laser focused on following, feeding, nurturing, and growing the revenue engine.

In my mind, there’s really no “perfect” time for a RevOps hire. That being said, there are two typical scenarios where it makes perfect sense to embark on this revenue-rewarding adventure.

Brand-Spanking New Organizations

Whether you’re emerging from stealth mode or just secured Series A funding, now is the time to think about your team’s structure and incorporate RevOps into it. You’ve got the luxury of strategizing and taking advantage of this holistic framework as you initially build out your team. By implementing RevOps early on, all team members can frame what they do in terms of revenue. That means as they create net-new processes or evaluate system tools, they are hyper aware of the hand-offs between team members and how those hand-offs impact revenue success. When you build RevOps from the get-go, you can avoid many of the missteps more mature organizations have to fix (e.g., siloed processes without integrations across teams).

Now, At Any Size, or Maturity Level 

If you’re like many of my clients, the organization has built up around a start-up culture. Early days are marked by seeing what sticks to the walls and fixing problems in the moment. Now is the time to migrate systems and mindsets in order to poise your organization for growth.  

What a RevOps Hire Solves

As you put together a job description and start recruiting, let’s touch on what problems a RevOps hire solves.

• Siloed Information - key information about the customer that’s needed from lead generation to qualification to getting a signed deal. When information is siloed in different software systems and not shared across all teams that touch the customer, it causes bottlenecks, unnecessary workarounds, and a less-than-stellar customer experience.

• Poor Communication - echoing what I said earlier about hand-offs, when individual departments don’t get what they need in a timely fashion, stuff falls through the cracks. The organization suffers in a multitude of ways -- misunderstandings, time inefficiencies, lost revenue, poor brand reputation.

• Team Misalignment - the RevOps framework shows the entire team how information travels through the company and proactively address hiccups before they become serious issues

• Miss-Matched Metrics - I’m a fan of a single-point-of-truth: a dashboard that includes all OKRs that are tied to activities that make you money 

• Wasted Resources - before your organization can scale for growth, you need to weed out time sinks, overlapping technology, and general inefficiencies caused by bloated, inconsistent, or missing processes. Without this step, you’re compounding problems that will be more painful and expensive to fix later.

• Lost Opportunities - when the path of information isn’t mapped toward revenue, you’re inevitably working on things that are not tied directly to making the organization money (like workarounds, managing by exception).

What To Look For When Hiring RevOps 

If you’re ready to hire a full-time RevOps person, you’ll first need to consider where this role fits in the organizational hierarchy. I’ve seen successful RevOps roles at all levels, from entry-level administrators, managers, directors, VPs, to Chief Revenue Officers. RevOps functions across your organizational structure. Their role is to align processes throughout the entire revenue engine. So what’s included in the Revenue Engine, you ask… 

• Marketing - managing lead generation from ops to creative

• Sales - qualifying and nurturing leads through close 

• Success - facilitating renewals and support

• Finance - crunching the numbers from invoices to A/R and revenue reconciliation, forecasting and calculating margins to accountability reporting to investors

So now you know what a RevOps hire does, let’s talk about the characteristics and skills needed for success. I recommend that you not look for a subject matter expert (SME). A RevOps hire must visualize the entire process. They are experts at generalizing, where they are “good enough” - Jack/Jill of All Trades and all that. They work well with specialists, discerning between what’s relevant and what’s getting in the way. Lastly, they have an educator mindset; they’ll be teaching teams and individual experts on the entire process to gain buy-in and change processes.

Conversely, what should you avoid in a RevOps hire? In some ways, this list is a bit easier to describe. My advice is to avoid candidates who have:

• An individual contributor mindset. Those who prefer focusing on their stand-alone work deliverables often have difficulty seeing across organizational functions.

• Big egos. Shy away from anyone who wants their name on the solution. RevOps is all about collaboration, making necessary concessions for the greater good.

• Siloed thinking. They assume their “way” is the best place to start or from their perspective. For example, if they are hardcore sales person, they may have a sales-centric bias towards the RevOps framework. 

• Low EQ. When retooling an organization with revenue in mind, feathers will be ruffled. The game is that everyone is inconvenienced a little so the entire organization wins as a whole. Also, you need someone who excels at interpersonal communication, skills that span across functions and levels (above and below).

• Lots of projects with little to show for it. A RevOps hire should not have a skeleton closet full of half-finished projects. The point here is that they get projects over the finish line. They thrive on measuring stuff to show progress (time and money saved). They are the ones with the stopwatch, shaving off seconds to improve efficiencies.

• Can’t explain what, why, and how they did things. While the results of successfully implementing a RevOps framework are magical, the process isn't magic. If they can’t explain past successes in a way that’s understandable and replicable, move on to your next candidate. 

Not ready to hire an employee to fill your RevOps needs? Alternative Partners can help you fill the gap and plan for growth. You can also read RevOps success stories.