RevOps team: roles, structure and when to hire

A RevOps team covers four jobs that a revenue operation needs to have owned: designing the process across marketing, sales and customer success, administering the CRM and the systems connected to it, analyzing the data that turns into reports and decisions, and preparing the people who run all of this day to day. A small company gathers these fronts in one person, a mid-sized company in three, and a company with several sales teams builds a full team, with a leader who reports to the executive team. The mistake I see most often is hiring a CRM analyst and expecting that person to handle all four fronts with no authority over the teams, no prioritization rule and no clear reporting line. Six months later, the executive team replaces the person and repeats the same role design with the next hire.

In the typical scene, the new analyst gets requests from three directors over WhatsApp and spends the month creating fields, fixing imports and building the report for Friday’s meeting. The SLA between teams stalls, because the analyst reports to a marketing manager and has no way to get three directors to sign an agreement. What I argue in Revenue Operations in practice applies here: RevOps is a management capability, and the team sustains that discipline while leadership remains the owner of the decisions.

Why can’t a CRM analyst alone fix the revenue operation?

The CRM analyst role was created to look after the tool, and the revenue operation asks for skills that seldom fit in one person. Whoever administers the CRM knows how to create properties, routing rules and reports. Whoever designs process has to lead a conversation between directors about lead criteria and handoffs, and whoever analyzes data has to explain to the board why the forecast missed. When the company puts all of this into one job, the urgent tool work swallows the process work, because the report request comes with a deadline and the SLA review comes with no one asking for it.

The scope of the function has also grown in recent years. In a survey of 318 sales leaders conducted in August and September 2022, sales operations professionals, the function that handles territory, quota, compensation and reporting for the sales team, said they spent 73% of their time supporting non-sales functions, up from 39% in 2019 (Gartner, 2023). The firm linked part of that shift to companies moving to a RevOps model. For the executive team, the practical reading is that the operations person hired today will get requests from marketing, CS, finance and IT, and someone has to decide before the hire who sets the order of the queue.

Which signs show that a company needs a RevOps team?

The first signs show up in the leaders’ routine. Each director asks for fields, automations and reports directly from whoever knows the tool, and no one checks whether the marketing request breaks the sales report. In the committee, marketing, sales and CS bring different versions of the same metric, a problem I cover in RevOps metrics, and the meeting spends half an hour reconciling spreadsheets before discussing the funnel.

Other signs are harder to see. The integration between the CRM, the ERP and the e-signature tool works because a veteran salesperson built the automations and is the only one who can fix them. Commissions come out of a spreadsheet the manager reviews over the weekend, and the SLA exists on paper with no one measuring compliance. One calculation helps the decision: add up the hours managers and salespeople spend each week building spreadsheets, fixing records and reconciling numbers between systems. When the total goes past the weekly hours of one full-time person, the company already pays for an operations role, spread across expensive people who should be selling or leading.

What are the roles in a RevOps team?

I split the work into four roles. They describe functions, and in a small company one person holds two or three of them. Each function needs an owner, and the executive team needs to know which one is uncovered. Enablement, a term in the table, is the front that prepares the team to run the process and use the tools; BI, short for business intelligence, is the layer of analysis and dashboards on top of the operation’s data.

Role	Responsibilities	Deliverables	Profile
RevOps leader (revenue operations manager)	Prioritizes the teams’ request queue, leads the review of the process and the SLA and answers for the numbers that reach the revenue committee	Updated journey map and SLA, quarterly operations plan, agenda and numbers for the monthly committee	Experience in sales or marketing operations, financial literacy and negotiation with directors
Data and BI analyst	Models revenue data, maintains dashboards and explains variations to leaders	Applied metrics glossary, dashboards by team, forecast, loss and churn analyses	SQL or a BI tool, basic statistics and the clarity to explain numbers to non-technical people
CRM and systems administrator	Configures the CRM, permissions, automations and integrations with ERP, marketing automation and service tools	Documented environment, routing rules, monitored integrations, change log	Command of the platform, data logic, a grasp of API integration and documentation discipline
Process and enablement analyst	Turns the process into routine, prepares materials and trains users and new hires	Usage guides by role, CRM onboarding path, adoption indicators	Teaching skills, sales or service experience, process design and closeness to the field team

Many companies already have someone in sales ops and ask whether renaming the role is enough. The difference lies in scope: sales ops serves the sales team, and RevOps covers marketing, sales and CS with the same data and the same process. If the person keeps reporting to the sales director and handling only that director’s requests, the new title leaves marketing and CS with no owner in the operation.

The administrator works on top of a tool design whose logic I explain in RevOps stack, and the data analyst depends on rules for CRM data quality, or spends the week cleaning the database.

How does a Revenue Operations structure evolve with company size?

I do not tie the structure to headcount in sales or to revenue: a company of one hundred people with three products, two channels and an integrated ERP has more operations work than one of three hundred with a single product. The table shows the three stages I find most often and the sign for moving to the next one.

Stage	Composition	Focus of the work	What usually goes to a partner	Sign for the next stage
One person	Operations generalist with process experience	Organize the CRM, write the first SLA, build the committee dashboard	Complex integrations, migrations and BI projects	Request queue with weeks of waiting and the executive team asking for analyses that never arrive
Three people	RevOps leader, CRM and systems administrator, data analyst	CRM governance, integrations, revenue metrics, quarterly SLA review	Rollout of new modules and custom development	Several teams, products or countries running different processes in the same CRM
Full team	Leader, administrators by system, BI and enablement analysts, someone for compensation and territory	Sales planning, team capacity, compensation and ongoing training	Projects with a start and an end, such as migration or audit	Design review at each annual planning cycle

For the first hire, choose someone with more process experience than tool experience, because CRM configuration can go to a partner and the weekly conversation with directors needs someone in-house. The second hire is usually the administrator, when the technical queue starts eating the generalist’s time, and the third is the data analyst, when the executive team starts asking for trend and segment analysis. At the full-team stage, RevOps takes on part of sales planning, with capacity, quota and territory calculations.

Who should the RevOps team report to?

The reporting line defines who arbitrates the queue, and the executive team decides this line of the org chart before opening the position. The table sums up the three options I discuss with the CEO. CRO stands for chief revenue officer, the executive who answers for revenue across marketing, sales and CS; COO is the chief operating officer.

Reports to	Pros	Cons	When it makes sense
CEO	Authority over all three teams and priorities set by whoever owns the shared target	Crowded agenda and risk of becoming the president’s project, with no routine	Smaller companies or companies in restructuring, with the CEO leading the revenue committee
CRO	Same owner for the target and the operation, with fast decisions about the funnel	Tendency to prioritize sales demands and leave marketing and CS waiting	Companies that have already put marketing, sales and CS under one executive
COO	Balance between teams and closeness to finance, IT and delivery	Distance from the sales routine and risk of becoming technical support	Operations with complex delivery, logistics or heavy post-sale service

The option I advise against is placing RevOps under one of the three teams it needs to align. Under marketing, the sales request queue waits; under sales, the handoff to CS becomes the last item on the agenda. If the company has no CRO yet and the CEO cannot give it agenda time, a middle path is to keep the formal reporting line with the COO and give the revenue committee the final word on quarterly prioritization.

What should you outsource and what should stay inside the RevOps team?

I separate project work from routine work. Rollout, migration between CRMs, ERP integrations, the BI foundation and audits have a start, an end and a scope, and a specialized partner delivers in weeks what the internal team would take months to learn. Process definition, the metrics glossary, queue prioritization and the relationship with leaders require business knowledge and presence in the routine, and they stay with in-house people.

Outsourcing goes wrong when the knowledge leaves along with the partner. The partner configures fifty automations, closes the project, and three months later the internal administrator does not know why a rule sends leads from the South to the São Paulo team. The internal team needs to take part in the decisions, approve each delivery and receive documentation that allows it to change the configuration without calling the vendor.

What does each leader need to guarantee for the team to work?

The RevOps team designs, configures and measures, and the behavior of the people who sell, generate demand and serve customers remains the responsibility of each leader. I have seen a well-built operations team deliver the SLA, the dashboard and the required fields while salespeople kept logging only the close and marketing kept celebrating volume.

Sales leadership

The sales director makes sure the team logs activity in the CRM and that change requests go through the RevOps queue, with no personal favors from the administrator. The director brings to the pipeline meeting the numbers RevOps prepares and holds salespeople to them, as I describe in sales dashboard.

Marketing leadership

Marketing leadership accepts that lead criteria and opportunity source will be measured by a team that does not report to it. It takes part in the quarterly SLA review and uses the rejection reasons RevOps consolidates to adjust channels and messages.

Customer success leadership

CS leadership makes sure the team records renewal, expansion and churn reason in the same CRM, with the same definitions, and brings to the RevOps team the fields missing from the handoff. It also holds its own team to using the expansion pipeline, so the committee sees revenue from the installed base in the same detail as new revenue.

A roadmap for leadership to build the RevOps team

I follow this roadmap with the executive team before any hire.

1. Take inventory of the demand. List the requests for fields, automations, reports and integrations from the last three months, with who asked and how many hours each one took. The inventory shows the most uncovered role.
2. Write the team’s mandate on one page. Define what RevOps does, what stays out, who prioritizes the queue and how the team will be evaluated.
3. Decide the reporting line before the job opening. Choose between CEO, CRO and COO and agree with the three leaders on how quarterly prioritization will be decided.
4. Hire for the bottleneck. The first person covers the most uncovered role in the inventory, with a preference for process experience.
5. Agree on what goes to a partner. Separate the projects with a start and an end and put documentation and handoff in the contract.
6. Prepare the leaders before the person arrives. Marketing, sales and CS need to know what to ask the team for, how to ask and what they will hold their own teams to.

The first 90 days of a new RevOps hire

The 90-day plan guides the new hire and gives the executive team the deliverables by which it evaluates the hire. The leader the person reports to approves the plan in the first week.

Days 1 to 30: listen and measure

The person talks with the leaders and with the people who operate, from the SDR (the sales development rep who qualifies leads) to the CS analyst, and watches each one’s work on screen. In parallel, the person takes inventory of the CRM, with the fields, automations, integrations and reports in use. The deliverable for the month is a one-page diagnosis with the baseline for the handoff metrics and the five largest sources of rework.

Days 31 to 60: fix the foundation

In the second month, the person organizes the request queue with a priority rule approved by the leader, publishes the metrics glossary and fixes the fields the SLA uses. The first committee dashboard comes out in this period, with few metrics and a declared source for each.

Days 61 to 90: the first management cycle

In the third month, the person presents the numbers at the committee, records decisions with an owner and a date and proposes the plan for the next quarter. The executive team assesses whether the leaders started using the queue and the dashboard and whether the committee discussed the funnel instead of reconciling spreadsheets.

RevOps team and HR: job description, assessment, training and measurement

How to recognize the need

HR usually notices the problem through turnover in the CRM analyst role or through the new hire’s complaint about working for three bosses. The sales manager who builds reports over the weekend is another sign. Before opening a new position, ask the executive team whether the function has a written mandate and who it reports to.

How to write the job description

A useful description starts with the mandate and the reporting line, then lists the responsibilities of the main role and closes with the deliverables expected in the first 90 days. A posting that asks for command of four tools, SQL, automation, dashboard design and user training drives away good candidates and attracts people who promise everything. State which of the four roles is the main one and which are secondary, and use the title the market searches for: RevOps analyst, revenue operations analyst or revenue operations manager.

Skills and candidate assessment

In the Gartner survey cited above, leaders named data visualization, analytic problem solving, project management, effective oral communication and sales compensation administration as the five most important sales operations skills for 2023. Since no technical test measures negotiation with directors, I propose a case study: the candidate receives an anonymized CRM export and a real conflict between marketing and sales, prepares an analysis and presents it in twenty minutes to a panel with one leader from each team. The panel watches whether the candidate starts from the data, asks about the process before proposing a tool and how they react when two leaders disagree.

Training path

The new hire needs training in business, with a grasp of margin, sales cycle and revenue metrics, and in facilitation, because they will lead meetings with directors; the tool they learn through the vendor’s certification and the environment’s documentation. The individual path does not cover the behavior change in the teams, because the RevOps team alone cannot convince salespeople to log activity or marketing to accept a quality target. That change calls for joint training of the marketing, sales and CS leaders, with the RevOps person in the same room, the format I use in my in-company programs on the topic.

How to measure

Average turnaround time for the queue, completeness of the SLA fields, leader attendance at the committee and the number of decisions recorded per month show whether the structure works. For the new hire, use the 90-day deliverables as the first assessment, and after two quarters compare forecast accuracy and time to first contact with the diagnosis baseline.

If your company is about to hire someone for RevOps, or has already hired and the teams keep asking the CRM administrator for favors, that is the work of the in-company Revenue Operations training. I run the program with the marketing, sales and CS leaders and with whoever will operate the function, on the company’s real funnel. The group leaves with the SLA between marketing, sales and CS and the RevOps metrics matrix in writing, and the operations team uses both documents as the basis for its first mandate.

Frequently asked questions

What does a RevOps team do?

The RevOps team sustains the revenue process across marketing, sales and CS. It administers the CRM and integrations, maintains metrics and dashboards, prepares the team to run the process and brings the numbers to the revenue committee, while the leaders remain the owners of the decisions.

What is the difference between sales ops and RevOps?

Sales ops serves the sales team, with territory, quota, compensation and sales reporting. RevOps covers marketing, sales and CS with the same data and the same process, which is why it usually reports to an executive above all three teams.

When should you hire the first RevOps analyst?

When managers and salespeople together spend, every week, more hours than one full-time person works on spreadsheets, records and number reconciliation, or when the teams bring different versions of the same metric to the committee. The first hire should have more process experience than tool experience, with an external partner for the technical projects.

Who should the RevOps team report to?

To the CEO, the CRO or the COO, depending on the company’s size and structure. I advise against reporting to marketing or to sales, because the hiring team gets priority in the queue and the others stop trusting the numbers.

Can you outsource RevOps?

You can outsource projects with a start and an end, such as rollout, migration, integrations and the BI foundation. Process definition, the metrics glossary and queue prioritization need someone in-house, and the partner contract should include documentation and a handoff to that team.

How do you train the teams to work with the RevOps team?

Train the marketing, sales and CS leaders in the same group, with the RevOps person present, on the company’s funnel and data. The program should end with the SLA, the metrics glossary and the queue rule approved, and you measure the result by committee use and field completeness in the following months.