Insights From The RevOps Manual

Investing in Revenue Operations aligns sales, marketing, and customer success which enables efficient, repeatable and sustainable growth. As we see a lot of companies struggle with building out their RevOps team, we’d like to offer some insights into what type of RevOps expertise is required during various growth stages of a company. We’ll get into how RevOps roles and tasks evolve, making sure your business is set up to meet market demands effectively.

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Early Stage: ARR < $1M

At the early stage, startups are primarily focused on achieving product-market fit, a critical milestone often followed by an initial seed funding to support Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies. It’s critical at this point to establish a robust operational framework and set up the systems that will allow the company to quickly adapt based on early market feedback and customer interactions.

Companies are figuring out how to best serve their customers and tweaking their product based on customer feedback. During this time, strategic oversight is necessary for identifying the most effective Go-to-Market strategies and defining your Ideal Customer Profile(s). The foundation in RevOps built here is crucial for scalability.

RevOps needs to work closely with product development to manage customer feedback and to refine the value proposition of the company. They need to ensure the operational setup can support rapid pivots and scaling. At this stage, RevOps will also be able to help founders with tracking and potentially impacting investor level metrics such as CAC:Payback, CAC:LTV, Rule of 40, etc.

This means that RevOps plays a central role in setting up foundational systems such as a CRM to handle customer interactions and setting up the basis for data analysis so the leadership team can make informed decisions.

- Main Tasks: Setting up essential CRM systems, automating primary marketing functions, and establishing metrics for tracking customer engagement and satisfaction.

- Key Hire: You will need a person with technical and strategic RevOps knowledge to help you set up your systems the right way. Look for a Systems Admin and/ or Business Analyst with experience in setting up CRM systems. This could also be the person who will manage your tech stack from this point forward. Alternatively, engaging with RevOps Consultants or leveraging RevOps as a Service provides startups with high-level expertise without the commitment of full-time hires, ensuring that foundational systems are scalable and adaptable.

Growth Stage: $1M-$10M ARR

As businesses transition from finding their product-market fit to developing efficient and scalable market engagement strategies, the focus shifts towards achieving Go-to-Market Fit. This stage involves refining sales strategies and marketing approaches to decrease customer acquisition costs and increase market penetration. It's at this stage where strategic planning starts to take shape around concrete data and more complex market segmentation.

Revenue Operations is critical in bridging the gap between data and strategy. They need to lead the development of scalable processes and the infrastructure that supports expanding sales and marketing activities. RevOps should guide the integration of more advanced CRM capabilities, marketing automation, sales outreach tools and customer success systems that provide deeper insights into customer behaviors. These tools are important for better data integration and analysis to refine customer targeting and improve operational efficiency.

During this growth stage, the Revenue Operations team typically starts focusing on customer retention and early expansion strategies in addition to client acquisition. RevOps should implement systems to monitor customer health scores and identify upsell or cross-sell opportunities effectively. This is also a good time to establish a customer success function working closely with RevOps to ensure that the customer lifecycle is being managed effectively from onboarding to renewal

- Main Tasks: Enhancing the CRM system for efficiency and scaling, setting up marketing automation and other tools, enhancing data analytics capabilities, setting up and documenting a structured sales process.

- Key Hire: It's appropriate to hire a full-time RevOps Director or Manager at this stage who can oversee the alignment between strategy, technology, processes, and business goals, preparing the company for the next stage of scaling. This person should be someone who can manage the company’s expanding tech stack, while contributing to the GTM strategy and process optimization.

Given all the tasks that need to be completed during the growth stage, it is important to hire a RevOps leader who is senior in the role but has recent experience rolling up their sleeves and getting things done. This person can still work closely with fractional RevOps services to increase the team’s overall capacity.

Scale Stage: $10M-$50M ARR

This stage is about applying what the company learned about selling its product to grow faster. It often involves entering new markets or segments, requiring adjustments in strategies. The complexity of operations can create silos without careful management, so integration and communication across departments becomes really important.

RevOps must now manage more complex and diverse customer data and expand its role to include strategic planning and revenue architecture. This includes overseeing major GTM technology integrations and possibly custom tool development to support varied GTM strategies and ensuring consistency in processes across all levels of the organization.

As the company prepares for further scaling, RevOps must increase its focus on customer retention and expansion strategies. This includes developing advanced segmentation for personalized customer retention strategies and defining key performance indicators for customer success. As the company brings on board Account Executives, SDRs, Demand Gen, and Customer Success Managers there will be a need for enablement of these roles to make sure the organization is running as efficiently as possible.

The role of RevOps expands significantly, involving detailed analytics, customer segmentation, and process optimization to support scalability and efficiency. Strategic involvement includes overseeing major system integrations and ensuring all operational activities align with broader business objectives. Additionally, expanding the data analysis team will be important for deriving insights from complex customer data sets to drive retention and identify expansion opportunities.

- Main Tasks: Implementing full revenue funnel analytics, advanced system integrations, comprehensive data management strategies, setting up enablement strategies, developing account plans, capacity planning, and designing sales territories.

- Key Hires: The expansion of the RevOps team to include specialists such as GTM Data Analysts, Revenue System Manager, Revenue Enablement Manager, and possibly a GTM Strategist is critical for managing the increasing complexity. The GTM strategist together with the head of RevOps will focus on designing and implementing advanced revenue models and identifying new revenue streams.

Expansion Stage: $50M+ ARR

As companies are expanding, they are typically looking to strengthen their position in the market and may be gearing towards activities like preparing for an IPO. This requires a high degree of operational skills and an ability to operate seamlessly across (global) markets.

At this mature stage, RevOps should have a solid system in place for tracking and improving customer lifetime value (CLV) and reducing churn. Expansion strategies should be highly data-driven, with a strong emphasis on optimizing the customer journey for different segments and geographical regions.

Strategic RevOps involves high-level decision-making to streamline (global) operations and ensure compliance across different market standards. RevOps needs to be involved in strategic planning sessions, ensuring that the operational capabilities can support long-term business goals.

- Main Tasks: Advanced capacity planning, territory design, deal desk management, implementing global compliance measures, and refining customer journey mapping.

- Key Hire: This stage often calls for a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)  and/or VP of RevOps who can oversee all RevOps activities at the executive level, ensuring alignment with global business strategies. Additionally, the company could benefit from having someone dedicated to managing the Deal Desk as well.

Final Thoughts

Investing in RevOps is not only an operational necessity but a strategic enhancement that supports business growth through every stage. Aligning RevOps investments with each developmental phase ensures that companies are not only prepared to face current challenges but are prepared for future success. This proactive approach makes RevOps the foundation of sustainable business practices, driving long-term predictable and repeatable growth.

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