When should we hire our first RevOps person, and what should they actually own?
The trigger is not a revenue number, it is where the pain is landing. If your sales leader is spending most of a day a week in spreadsheets and CRM admin instead of coaching and hiring, you are already late. Before you have found go to market fit, a fractional or agency RevOps setup is usually the right call, because a full time senior operator has nothing stable to systematise yet. Once the motion repeats, hire a Director level person in house who can own the systems, the data model, the forecast process, and planning, and who has done it at a company one stage ahead of yours. Do not hire junior first: a junior admin will keep the lights on but will not fix the process, and process is what you are actually buying.
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Splits the RevOps hiring decision into three company phases and says plainly when to outsource instead of hiring. It is the clearest answer we found to the question founders actually ask.
The best plain English description of what a sales ops function is for, written by someone who rebuilt one from scratch. Useful whether you are taking the job or hiring for it.
Benchmarks it sets: one booked meeting per rep per day, at least one demo a day per SDR, and 50 to 60 calls a day.
Tie compensation to activities you control (meetings set, demos given) rather than to revenue attainment.
Plot reps on engagement against close ratio: high engagement with a low close ratio is trainable, and those reps moved to the top quadrant in two to three months.
Gate free trials by rule (this size range, this industry) instead of offering them to everyone.
A real career path told honestly, from sales rep to Salesforce admin to RevOps consultant, with the four skills that actually moved the needle rather than a list of tools to learn.
Sean Lane built RevOps at Drift and now advises companies on the same call, so he is direct about what a first ops hire should own and what happens when you hire junior first. The written answer states the rule, this is the reasoning behind it.
