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How should a Revenue Operations function be structured?

By Eugene Scollan. Eugene is a Senior Consultant at Zeren, and is based within our London office, as a member of our Commercial hiring team.

 

In the current macroeconomic market conditions, it is more important than ever for businesses to act as efficiently as possible.

When it comes to technology businesses from early seed stage to public companies the prevalence of Revenue Operations is growing, and companies are starting to adopt these functions at an increasingly earlier stage – in a recent poll we ran 62% of respondents said they were starting to see Revenue Operations leaders being hired at Series A.

The need to drive efficiency across revenue-generating functions and break down the barriers between sales, marketing, and customer success is growing – so the big question is… what should a Revenue Operations function look like?

There is no one size fits all answer and there are multiple aspects to consider, however, this article aims to look at some of the approaches that are being adopted by different businesses within the software industry.

 

Where should RevOps report to?

The first fundamental point to consider when looking at building a Revenue Operations function is who the function report to.

Typically, Revenue Operations reports to the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) who has responsibility across all revenue-generating teams. The major advantage of this brings us back to the purpose of Revenue Operations – to break down the silos between sales, marketing, and customer success. By having the CRO as the functions report it will enable transparency between each revenue function and therefore drive efficiency.

For earlier stages businesses that have less evolved organisational structures it is common to see Revenue Operations report to Founder/CEO or COO, depending on who has responsibility for overall revenue functions across the business.

 

Early-stage Revenue Operations Structure

When Revenue Operations are being implemented it is typically the first time the business is moving away from a siloed operations structure, and therefore the easiest transition can be to move sales, marketing, and customer success operations under the new Head of Revenue Operations, or CRO if a leader has now yet been brought into the business.

In smaller businesses, DevOps can be the first operational hire brought into the business and typically reports to a Founder, CEO, or Sales leader. From this point, the RevOps function can be scaled to meet the bespoke goals of the business.

 

Mid-stage Revenue Operations Structure

Once a Revenue Operations function has been established and embedded into the organisation, Revenue Operations can begin to scale.

How the function grows can vary across different businesses but typically hires across operations, data, and systems/CRM are brought into business to enable further efficiency across revenue teams and the tools and CRM the business uses daily.

As the function grows into different areas – operations, systems, and data – it is important to ensure that these are collaborative and do not create silos in themselves. Businesses can achieve this for example through a Project Manager who can bring operations and data together.

 

Matured Revenue Operations Structure

For more established Revenue Operations functions with Operations, Systems, and Data/Insights in place, the next step for many businesses is enablement.

Enablement is an additional string to the bow of Revenue Operations by empowering the business and its employees by ensuring the process is efficient and creating continued development for revenue teams in the business.

A good enablement function will deliver exceptional onboarding plans and built content for the people within the business which can be designed to complement the work and methods of the Revenue Operations function.

Being so close to people within the business – both new and existing – they can provide great feedback to the wider Revenue Operations function from what their challenges are to any issues they have with tooling.

 

An example Revenue Operations org structure

What you envisage your Revenue Operations function to look like can be defined by many factors from the individual needs of the business and what it requires from RevOps, to simply budget and how much resource can be brought in to support the Revenue functions.

 

Here is an example org chart as to how many businesses have structured their Revenue Operations function and how many more are looking to achieve.

Example RevOps org chart (Source: GoNimbly)

 

This example shows a defined structure across the different units within the RevOps function across operations, systems, data, and enablement.

For this or any org structure to be a success it is pivotal for RevOps to be aligned with the business strategy and revenue goals. A business that is looking to make significant growth in revenue and therefore scale Revenue Operations be a huge influence in achieving those targets, particularly if there are any issues between revenue teams when sharing information, resources, and collaboration.

 

I would more than welcome any thoughts on the above and would love to hear what experiences you have faced when scaling a RevOps function.

 

 

Zeren exists to empower the world’s change makers. We do this by building high-performing teams in the world’s most innovative businesses, to accelerate growth by connecting visionary leaders and ambitious talent.

 

We are a leading global Executive Search & Recruitment firm with teams and offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London, Berlin, Paris and Frankfurt.

 

We partner with both high growth, VC/PE-backed businesses and ambitious Corporate brands placing senior leaders, building exceptional teams, or providing critical interim and consulting talent.