2023 RevOps hiring landscape: What are the challenges?

For the majority of 2022, we experienced an incredibly busy jobs market and levels of investment into early-stage SaaS companies hit new highs. While the economic downturn started to impact the jobs market in Q4 last year, there are now new signs of optimism, and there were some clear trends of growth within the SaaS market which will continue into 2023.

I have seen the demand for Revenue Operations (RevOps) professionals grow increasingly as the importance for SaaS companies to streamline their revenue processes mature.

So why is this? What does it mean for the talent market? And what hiring challenges does this create?

Why have we seen an increase in RevOps?

In short, this stems from a major shift in the way SaaS businesses look at their revenue process, however, there are some further elements to this.

SaaS businesses have realised that the customer journey post-sale is just as important as the sale itself, which has had an impact on the growth of other functions such as Customer Success and Account Management.

As these functions have scaled, there has been an increasing level of focus on revenue growth so it is no longer just Sales and Marketing functions responsible for driving revenue. With more functions responsible for revenue growth, they must be all aligned for the revenue business to succeed.

From this shift, RevOps was born to align all core revenue functions from Marketing, Sales, to Customer Success, covering the full customer journey – prospect > sale > customer – upsell/renewal.

This alignment allows for greater transparency, accountability, and therefore a clearer revenue picture which creates faster growth and profit.

What does this mean for the talent market?

There are currently 617 professionals in the UK with a Revenue Operations title, and 198 of these operate in a VP/Director/Head position, which is a 41% increase from the previous year.

In comparison to other GTM functions – Sales/Marketing/Customer Success – this a significantly small talent market.

64 of these leaders changed jobs over the last 12 months, which is over 30% of the total UK RevOps talent market.

The high percentage increase of RevOps professionals and candidate movement in the last year has not only been driven by demand but also the shift in SaaS companies building RevOps functions at a much earlier stage in their growth journey.

This is creating a major challenge for SaaS companies looking to hire RevOps professionals as the growth of jobs outweighs the growth of RevOps professionals creating a talent bottleneck, particularly as there are now over 90 Revenue Operations jobs currently live in the UK and growing.

How to overcome these hiring challenges?

There is a lack of available talent for the current hiring demands of RevOps professionals in the UK, so what can be done to overcome this?

One clear method is to broaden your search horizon and look for professionals with similar skill sets that can be upskilled.

The best avenue to explore, while sounding counterintuitive to RevOps, is to consider professionals in Sales Operations.

While Sales Operations are siloed to one function of the business and solely focused on customer acquisition, there are plenty of transferable skills that can enable a smooth transition to RevOps.

What makes this the appealing alternative is that there are currently 1,925 SalesOps professionals in the UK operating within IT and Software, over 3x the number of RevOps professionals.

At Zeren, we have helped multiple SaaS businesses tackle the hiring challenges that come with building a RevOps function, from early-stage Series A & B to later-stage companies.

If you would like any advice or insight into hiring RevOps professionals, then please get in touch, eugene.scollan@zerenglobal.com