Whether you’re leading RevOps or considering implementing it at your organization, it’s important to build a team that fosters trust, manages expectations, communicates well, and understands the particular mechanics of the go-to-market teams at your organization. Many companies have a hard time conceptualizing the outcomes that RevOps delivers, and having the right people in place enables you to demonstrate value quickly. Using a suite of RevOps tools or platforms can help the process and help your team expand the right way.
That being said, there’s no playbook for building an effective RevOps team. Since this is an emerging field that’s rapidly changing, RevOps leaders need to focus on creating a team structure that can deliver results to the larger organization and adapt when needed.
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Defining the role of RevOps
First, let’s level-set on what RevOps is. The goal of RevOps is to unify go-to-market teams. Under a RevOps structure, sales ops merges with marketing and customer success operations to work towards a unified strategy and increase revenue. Because sales, marketing, and customer success teams often exist within their own silos, RevOps plays an important role in aligning their processes, technology, and strategies.
The end goal of implementing a RevOps approach is to break down barriers to generating revenue. RevOps takes a holistic view of the entire customer lifecycle and identifies ways to make each team more effective:
- How can sales connect with customers earlier in their lifecycle?
- How can marketing be more involved throughout that lifecycle?
- How can customer success meet expectations and better understand buying decisions?
An effective RevOps team provides solutions to these challenges and creates a more consistent customer experience.
Skills that make up a great RevOps team
Breaking down silos between go-to-market teams requires a blend of technical, analytical, and interpersonal skills. Salespeople, marketers, and customer success managers have their heads in the weeds of their day-to-day work, but also depend on RevOps to keep processes and operations flowing.
Anyone working on a RevOps team needs to be able to empathize with the day-to-day issues go-to-market teams face and have the follow-through to implement solutions. They also need to be able to analyze RevOps related data, often from disparate sources, to help those teams spend more time on the tactics and target customers that generate the most revenue. And of course, they need the technical skills to manage the organization’s tech stack and ensure it’s working effectively for all users.
How to best grow and structure your RevOps team
Chargify breaks down the RevOps team structure into four key areas: operations, enablement, insights, and tools. Depending on the size and maturity of your company, you may need to start with generalists who can take on aspects of all four areas. Once you’ve laid that groundwork, and hired a RevOps director to drive the end goal outlined above, where do you go next?
In one of our recent shOPS Talk episodes, our CEO, Brad Smith, sat down with Mallory Lee, Senior Director of Operations at Terminus, and Kevin Wisniewski, Sales Operations Manager at Onna, to discuss strategies for building an ops team.
Kevin decided to prioritize sales enablement and onboarding since his company is still in its early stages and sales teams need that support to properly get off the ground. Because Terminus is more established, Mallory has been able to build her team around three pillars: data/analysis/BI, technology, and RevOps managers who are assigned to individual departments in the company.
Identify skills gaps and company priorities
To understand how to build out your teams, first let’s take a closer look at the four key areas outlined by Chargify:
- Operations: Oversees strategy and planning, as well as day-to-day processes and activities
- Enablement: Manages onboarding, coaching, and professional development
- Insights: Collects and analyzes data to assess performance
- Tools: Manages all software, ensures its functionality, and advises on new purchases
If you’re trying to identify which roles you need to fill out your team, look at the skills of the staff that you currently have. Where do you need to fill in gaps so that you can effectively support all four areas of RevOps? And which roles are most crucial to the business’ goals right now?
If you already have a generalist who is excellent at refining cross-functional work (operations) and administering related systems (the tools area), maybe you need someone whose strength is in business analytics (the insights area). If your company has a strong foundation for sales enablement and onboarding (the enablement area), then shift your focus to tools or insights, as you’ll want to be able to refine those processes over time.
The key is to create a patchwork of competencies you need to effectively remove siloes between teams. As the team grows and evolves, it will become more evident which skills you need for your next hire, and the need for specialists will become more apparent.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to staffing a RevOps department, looking at your team’s structure in terms of the four areas ensures that you cover all of your bases. Even though the titles and job responsibilities may vary from company to company, all RevOps teams cover operations, enablement, insights, and tools. Use that as your North Star as you evaluate which roles to hire for next. Schedule a free demo today.
