RevOps Staffing: A Guide to Optimal Team Structures and Responsibilities

RevOps is a complex field, and Revenue Operations staffing can be even more difficult to get right. From head officers and executives to sales and marketing professionals, modern companies have various intricate RevOps roles to fill. Finding the right team member to fit each position takes significant time, effort, and planning.

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Additionally, industry professionals suggest building a RevOps team from the early stages of your business to prevent confusing mistakes in your systems, tracking, and reporting. Luckily, RevOps staffing doesn't have to be as complicated as tracking and attributing latent revenue streams or optimizing functional tech stacks. 

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This guide will cover the ins and outs of effective RevOps teams, including RevOps job descriptions for popular roles, different organizational models you can leverage, and measuring employee performance to improve collaboration and profitability. With this information, you can optimize your RevOps team structure and assist your staff in better fulfilling their roles. 

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Understanding RevOps Staffing

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What is revenue operations, exactly?

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Modern B2B RevOps aims to align different teams within an organization to work toward a singular goal: Maximizing revenue. Most modern businesses have split their operations across a variety of departments, including:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Customer service

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Unfortunately, information, strategies, and collaboration can often become siloed within these different teams. A robust RevOps strategy, however, can break down the barriers between different departments and help them work together more effectively. 

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Specific RevOps team structures and configurations vary from organization to organization. They may be centralized, with a singular team member in charge of directing operations leading the rest. Alternatively, they may be decentralized and have no leading figure to steer RevOps tasks. 

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Your care in selecting quality team members to join your staff is more important than the exact structure. Effective RevOps teams can make all the difference to businesses, given their capability to:

• Boost productivity
• Enhance your customer experience
• Bolster revenue growth 19% faster than organizations without RevOps teams

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Key Roles in a RevOps Team

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The following provides a succinct breakdown of some of the most common roles in contemporary RevOps. Keep in mind that this isn’t a comprehensive list, but covers some of the more prominent positions in the field. Likewise, job titles may vary across organizations despite the duties of the role being relatively similar. 

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Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)

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Whether they’re called the Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Growth Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, or Chief Experience Officer, your CRO’s job is to create a single revenue engine. In essence, that means aligning teams across:

• Lead generation
• Digital marketing
• Closing
• Other organizational tasks

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CROs understand the revenue cycle inside and out. They’re adept in customer success and understand how to incentivize, engage, and motivate people to work together harmoniously. In short, CROs have a strong general understanding of the revenue generation process and oversee other roles to ensure their RevOps responsibilities are handled adequately.

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When searching for a CRO, be sure to look for someone who:

• Has a long history of experience in a variety of RevOps-related roles
• Understands the sales pipeline and can effectively align downstream colleagues to work together on shared tasks
• Understands scaling and can implement a sustainable revenue generation system that not only maintains current success but expands overall revenue going forward
• Has the courage and confidence to make bold organizational moves and take responsibility for their outcome

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RevOps Manager

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Similarly to your CRO, your RevOps Manager coordinates between different teams to facilitate a unified RevOps strategy. However, unlike CROs, RevOps managers aren’t dictators of techniques and operations. 

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Instead, their main tasks include:

• Optimizing efficiency and revenue growth by setting up streamlined workflows
• Identifying solutions that will cut costs and save time—including choosing what tasks to automate and the tools to get the job done
• Creating a customer-centric culture and nurturing client relationships whenever possible

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RevOps Managers often act as intermediaries between daily operations. They’re essential for organizing teams, improving cost efficiency, and ensuring customer data quality.

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RevOps Managers should be data-oriented and possess adept people skills since they work with various colleagues. They should also be confident decision-makers since they’re responsible for directing multiple different departments. 

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Sales Operations Specialist

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Sales Operations Specialists assist RevOps professionals within your sales department. Some of their primary duties include:

• Building out a functional tech stack to support their colleagues’ sales duties
• Troubleshooting issues with organizational sales processes
• Maintaining data integrity and currentness
• Training sales staff to ensure smooth organizational operations

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Sales teams simply can’t do their jobs without proper tools and data. They need accurate CRM information to contact and nurture leads, effective tools to automate time-consuming tasks, and other digital solutions to efficiently complete their duties—all of which your Sales Operations Specialist supplies and maintains.

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Since they often work behind the scenes on your tech stack, your Sales Operations Specialist should know technological solutions like the back of their hand. They should also have some experience in client-facing sales to understand how a certain tool can be leveraged to simplify lead nurturing and conversion.

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Marketing Operations Specialist

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Your Marketing Operations Specialist fills a role similar to your sales operations specialist but for your marketing team. Their main responsibilities include:

• Managing marketing automation tools
• Ensuring data accuracy within your marketing department
• Organizing data to make more informed marketing decisions

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Marketing Operations Specialists are essential to RevOps teams as their value far outweighs their cost to your company. Amongst top-performing brands, over 60% claim a diversified marketing strategy is their primary driver of success—despite only a quarter of marketing specialists claiming to have an adequate operational budget. 

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To pick the perfect Marketing Operations Specialist, seek out someone with a complex understanding of marketing automation software. They should also be detail-oriented, independently motivated, and possess stellar communication skills. 

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Customer Success Operations Specialist

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In line with the previous two specialists covered, Customer Success Operations Specialists provide technological and practical support to their teams. In this case, they work with Customer Success departments to:

• Structure and organize your Customer Success process to optimize satisfaction and retention
• Effectively onboard customers with minimal objections and confusion
• Remove barriers—whether they’re software glitches, product misconceptions, or other issues—between the customer and the successful use of your product

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Customer Success Operations Specialists increase customer retention by making the renewal process simple and seamless. Similarly, they bolster customer satisfaction by addressing clients’ issues and adjusting your services as necessary. 

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Like other RevOps specialists, they need a strong understanding of technological solutions and data quality to effectively support their teams. They must also have a high degree of personal responsibility, as they’re the backbones of their departments and, ultimately, the ones other Customer Success professionals look to for direction.

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Structuring an Effective RevOps Team

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As mentioned, there are multiple ways to structure a RevOps team. You may want to draw out a RevOps organizational chart to track workflows throughout your business. When doing so, be sure to keep these considerations in mind.

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Team Structure Models

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There are two different kinds of team structure models you can leverage when building up your RevOps crew:

• Centralized: These structures rely on top-down decision-making, in which a singular (or small group of) leader(s) calls most of the shots. On the one hand, a talented, visionary leader can help elevate everyone else in an organization, and with no debates or voting, decisions can be made much more quickly. On the other hand, a misinformed or out-of-touch leader can steer your organization in the wrong direction. With little to no input, employees may feel disengaged and disloyal toward your company. 
• Decentralized: Decentralized models share decision-making responsibility across a variety of individuals, teams, and departments. Such a model can be more inclusive and, with an actual say in the organization, boost employee morale. Unfortunately, it can be conducive to slower decision-making, and when things go wrong, employees may scramble to deflect rather than take responsibility for blame. 

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Smaller organizations often opt for a centralized structure as, with fewer members, one leader can handle RevOps across the entire company. As your business scales, however, it’s important not to add another singular manager to work in tandem with your original RevOps manager or CRO. 

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Aside from the potential to butt heads, the key to hiring for RevOps is to diversify skills and attract specialists who can address the exact issues arising in your organization. As you grow and expand, you may naturally adopt a more decentralized structure to adapt to the shifting demands of your larger base. 

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Collaboration and Communication

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Communication and collaboration are essential to RevOps as they prevent information and accounts from becoming siloed in singular departments. A robust CRM is your best tool to facilitate organizational communication, and now, you can build one in just two months. Besides communicating key information between all teams working on a project, add any new client data to your CRM repository so it's available for future use. 

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Measuring RevOps Team Performance

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After building and training your team, assessing their performance and ensuring they excel at their jobs is essential. Every set of revenue operations best practices involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:

• Revenue
• Revenue retention
• Revenue growth rate
• Customer lifetime value
• Lead response time
• Conversion rate

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With an effective RevOps team and a unified revenue strategy, nearly all KPIs should improve with time. To give your employees the ultimate chance at success, offer them open access to these KPI scores, counseling on organizational processes and personal improvement, and intermittent performance reviews.

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Partner With Operatus to Fill Your RevOps Positions

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Sometimes, you don’t need an entire team to handle your organization's RevOps needs. You might just want someone to set up your tech stack or oversee operations for a few months during transitional periods. For these and similar needs, there’s fractional RevOps by Operatus.

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Fractional RevOps allows you to use RevOps professionals for whatever purposes you need, when you need them. At Operatus, our seasoned crew of RevOps veterans is waiting for your call to remaster your revenue processes, unify your teams, and optimize your tech stack.

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Drop us a line today—a more efficient, profitable RevOps experience awaits.