How to Structure a Revenue Operations Team

Overview

Building an efficient revenue operations team helps your company address existing workflow and process roadblocks to maximize revenue. 

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to establish a RevOps team structure, understanding your business’ unique needs, challenges, and the roles and functions vital to Revenue Operations helps you lay out the foundation of a highly effective RevOps team.

This guide covers the teams necessary for Revenue Operations and the benefits of having them.

How is revenue operations structured?

Structuring your Revenue Operations team starts with having a good grasp of RevOps (Read more about Revenue Operations here). This includes revenue-related strategies, needs and your existing organization structure, particularly your marketing, sales, and customer success departments.

Your company’s size is a crucial factor to consider when developing a RevOps team. For instance, small businesses can distribute RevOps-related functions to current operations managers, and larger companies can designate someone exclusively to revenue operations under one department.    

Essentially, you can structure your RevOps team with some degree of freedom to facilitate implementing your Revenue Operations strategy.

Here are some of the leading roles and functions critical to structuring your team.

RevOps lead

The RevOps leader is often the first point of contact for the rest of the departments and other teams within your company, making it crucial for RevOps leads to be subject matter experts of your technology stack. 

RevOps team leaders ensure the work of various teams aligns with company goals. They also serve as all-rounders, providing other essential functions such as delivering analytics to executive teams.

Some RevOps leaders also act as project managers who filter and prioritize ad hoc requests to keep teams from getting distracted and ensure better workflow efficiencies.  

Project management 

RevOps teams can work collaboratively with other teams across the company on top of performing their functions. This means your Revenue Operations team can get ad hoc requests for strategy, reporting, and technical assistance (among others).  

Designate a specific team member (or the RevOps team leader, as mentioned previously) to filter and prioritize requests to avoid hurting your RevOps team’s productivity. 

Analytics team

Performance metrics are crucial to keeping your RevOps team and the entire company moving in the right direction. 

However, building and tracking performance metrics can be very time consuming.

Plus, most business applications track and generate insights in silos. When your data lives in disparate systems , you can spend hours digging into these systems to manually aggregate reports for a more holistic view.

The key is to break your analytics into dedicated teams for better efficiency. Delegate your data visualization and performance metrics to streamline generating insights. 

Platform team

While it’s vital for RevOps team leaders to stay in the loop on technology developments, such as software license renewals, cancellations, and new acquisitions, delegate day-to-day software ownership to other team members.  

This allows your revenue operations leaders to delegate admin responsibilities for your tech stack, especially for apps that are high-maintenance or those that get high volumes of external requests.

Another consideration when structuring your RevOps team is establishing functions and roles based on the four revenue operation areas. These include:

• Operations management. The ops management team manages resources to ensure the outcome of all your revenue-related and customer-facing operations align with your business’ needs. The team works across your business at the micro and macro levels, including distributed roles such as your marketing and sales operations that can be more specialized over time. 
• Enablement team. The sales enablement team focuses on bringing the practices, content, information, and tools to your marketing and customer service processes to help your company sell more efficiently and at a higher velocity. 
• Insights team. This team (which can also be your analytics team) optimizes yoursales, marketing, customer success, and other relevant data to help you make better business decisions.
• Tools team. Your tools team manages all the technology that your marketing, sales, and customer success departments use. The team’s responsibilities include tech stack evaluation and procurement, integrating software, and systems administration. 

Scale your RevOps structure as your business grows, specialize roles, and include new functions to ensure all parts of your operations work seamlessly to facilitate Revenue Operations strategy implementation.

How marketing operations work within RevOps

Marketing operations in RevOps focus on data, insights, and establishing workflow efficiency, such as managing leads for efficient lead capture, processing, and follow up.  

Marketing operations also leverage demand generation (using data in decision making to align sales and marketing teams and track your marketing efforts’ contribution to revenue) to run marketing campaigns and measure performance through the marketing technology stack. 

Below are common marketing operations processes in RevOps. 

Lead lifecycle management

Marketing operations handle the process of recording and executing proper follow-ups when leads engage with your company. It includes several sub-processes, such as:

• Lead scoring. This process identifies and tags the warmest leads for your sales team to prioritize for follow up. 
• Lead routing. This is the process of distributing your incoming and appropriate leads to your sales team. 
• Lead qualification. This process is where your marketing and sales teams work together to forecast your prospects’ likelihood to convert. Each stage of the sales journey should include lead qualification to help your marketing and sales teams determine which leads get handed off to the sales team.

Advertising and promotion

Marketing operations include promoting your marketing assets and campaigns through organic and paid channels.

The process also includes driving top-of-funnel leads using lead form strategies and other Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) efforts. 

Marketing metrics and analytics

The marketing analytics processes handle campaign performance measurement and visualization. 

This helps identify the success and gaps in marketing operations. It also helps you determine the potential process and workflow misalignments with your sales and customer success teams that hinder revenue growth. 

How sales operations work within RevOps

Sales ops is responsible for building a process that improves conversions, shortens sales cycles, and increases win rates. It also handles sales deals processing and payments, managing sales data and enablement, and strategic budgets and territory planning using the sales technology stack.

Some of the sales ops processes within RevOPs include:

• New customer handoff. This is organizing the transition of new accounts from the sales cycle to the customer success cycle. 
• Forecasting. This process handles forecasting revenue based on the current and future sales team’s capacity to build pipeline and generate revenue. 
• Deal desk. This deals with establishing consensus and approvals for non-standard sales deals among multiple teams, such as finance, sales, and customer success. An effective deal desk helps your sales team close deals with unique circumstances (quickly) and provides appropriate pricing and contracts.

How customer success operations work within RevOps

The customer success operations role within RevOps includes five main roles and responsibilities in these key areas:

• Data. This includes managing account health, renewal forecasting, and Net Promoter Score (NPS). 
• Process. This includes handling proactive touchpoints, cross-functional coordinations, and renewal playbooks (among others). 
• People.   This comprises the company targets, goals, team planning, and performance.
• Systems. This includes CRM customer elements ownership and Customer Success Manager (CSM) tool implementation and management. 
• Strategic initiatives. This is composed of the customer experience, products, engagement initiatives, and marketing.  

While it’s vital for customer success managers and leaders to gain, retain, and grow customers, it’s also crucial to have initiative, focus, and establish care of a dedicated owner on these operational areas for your customer success operations to mature. 

Here are other critical aspects of customer success operations. 

Mature customer success ops organization

How you organize your customer success functions depend on your product’s complexity and go-to-market (GTM) strategy, but generally, it should include these four functional categories.

• Professional services
• Customer support/care
• Customer success management
• Customer success operations

Customer success ops (as its own function) can drive strategy initiatives around the customer experience, including managing process implementation, data analytic systems, and renewal forecasts. 

Processes and metrics 

Customer success operations build repeatable processes for upsell and renewal process, systems implementation, customer segmentation and onboarding, revenue forecasting, adoption monitoring, account health scoring, and NPS and customer satisfaction (CSAT) metrics. 

CS ops also establish performance metrics for these processes to measure effectiveness and direct their continuous improvement.

At a minimum, customer success operations should monitor the performance metrics across these areas: Product, customer experience, customer feedback, and revenue. Each area can include several metrics but the key is to focus on those that are critical to achieving your goals.

How these teams add value and why they benefit from working together

Marketing, sales, and customer success teams that work within the RevOps model centralizes your data governance and technology stack management, streamlining Revenue Operations across your company. 

Each team has a crucial role in driving revenue, from managing leads, closing won deals, and handoffs to customer success. It only makes sense to align each department’s strategy, planning, and execution of operations for seamless and efficient Revenue Operations. 

Looking for RevOps jobs? Visit Jooble.

 “In the age of AI, the human element in the RevOps transformation journey is irreplaceable. It’s the people who envision strategies, foster relationships, and navigate complexities, ensuring the seamless integration of technology with our core objectives. At RevBrains, we champion the indispensable role of dedicated individuals in steering the RevOps helm, orchestrating a symphony of technology and human insight to drive true organizational metamorphosis. That is why when structuring your RevOps team, you need to be aware of such skills as strategic foresight, collaborative mindset, data literacy, technical acumen, and a deep understanding of customer-centric approaches.”

– Ivan Bondokov, Co-Founder, RevBrains

Next Steps

A RevOps team should help your business drive growth via operational efficiency and keep all your teams accountable to revenue. 

While establishing a RevOps team structure takes time and effort to build, understanding each team’s functions and benefits to your overall Revenue Operations helps you streamline your teams to work together seamlessly and maximize revenue.