How do you structure your revenue operations team?

The RevOps team is structured to operate as a strategic function to bridge the gap between sales, marketing and customer success teams. Within APAC, the RevOps team is structured by various countries within which HubSpot operates (for eg, there is a RevOps team for Japan), to build relevant expertise & in-depth knowledge of the micro & macro drivers of each country to drive impact. This APAC RevOps team structure follows the same structure as how other teams in APAC are structured.

Underpinning this structure is strong collaboration within the local & global RevOps team to share best practices and build a culture of learning from each other.  

By optimizing strategy, operations and processes, the success of RevOps team is measured through the role played in accelerating revenue growth (relative to planned revenue growth) and consequently growing % revenue contribution of APAC business to the global HubSpot business. 

Please feel free to reach out to me directly via LinkedIn message if you would like to discuss this further.

There are multiple ways to structure rev ops teams, the ones I've found to be the most successful capture the GTM funnel end-to-end which helps bridge silos, and builds a cohesive Ops function.

A rev ops team with Ops across CS, Sales, Marketing, Partner Ops, BA Design within one function helps capture different moving pieces across the GTM funnel. While each GTM function has a hyper focused area (territory, demand gen, retention etc.) a holistic rev ops structure helps remove friction, causes less redundancies across tools/processes, and allows a team to standardize across tools, systems, process and KPIs and helps build for scale.

Its also important to anticipate future growth and design the team structure accordingly. Adding dedicated roles for specific areas such as analytics, enablement, or automation as the organization expands can also help build a robust team structure.

Rev Ops org design needs to consider multiple variables, such as the Sales Org structure and the remit of the Rev Ops team (for example, in some firms, quota setting is owned by Finance).

Regardless of these variables, one aspect that is often a hot discussion topic is "span of control" for Rev Ops teams. In general, Rev Ops teams in companies that are past $100M in ARR should aim for a span of control of 1 Manager to 3 Individual Contributors. Higher spans of control hurt the ability for the Manager to coach their team members given the complexity and nuances of the job. Lower spans of control require the Manager to "double hat" as individual contributor, as well as create business risk when attrition happens as it is harder for the work to be re-distributed.

Additional considerations when building a Rev Ops team:

1. Separate work between "horizontal" (i.e.; it common work across all segments and regions of the business such as quota modeling) and "vertical" (i.e.; work that is focused on a specific segment or sub-region such as Sales territory design and bottom-up forecasting). "Horizontal" work is better done centrally by a single sub-team, which creates leverage and maximum efficiency. "Vertical" work benefits from dedicated focus and deep expertise from a mapped sub-team in a given area of the business.

2. Assign a disproportionately higher number of Rev Ops resources to growth segments. This is a common mistake in the function; i.e.; to solve for equity by assigning similar resourcing levels across all parts of the business and managing for the loudest voice in the room.

3. Aim for scale. One of the roles of Rev Ops is to increase the productivity of the Go-to-Market resources over time, and this should include Rev Ops resources. A good rule of thumb is that Rev Ops headcount should always grow slower than sales HC.

We're about 30 people now, aligned to four major areas covered by my direct reports. We have specialists (i.e., operations team and planning team) but others choose generalists (e.g., ops + planning). This is an important decision to make consciously because it will affect everything you do day to day, who you hire, what happens when someone is out of seat, etc. I think as teams get bigger they tend to specialize more but that creates silos and puts more pressure on the leader to be able to synthesize and see across areas that is hard or impossible for anyone else to do.

1. Core Sales Ops: ops team (daily sales management partnership, forecasting, territory management, some ticket handling) and deal desk

2. Strategy & Planning: partner with Finance, set targets and quotas, design comp plans, headcount investments, strategic projects

3. Analytics: marketing and sales analytics experts building dashboards, models, reports and running ad hoc analysis

4. GTM Ops: partly a systems team (3rd party data, marketing tech stack, sales tools) and partly process improvement (ROE, sales processes, etc.)

I also have a single IC direct report who helps me on projects, ad hoc analysis, organizing team offsites and meetings, etc. Having this role helps me synthesize across the various expert areas too.

Success is about having good relationships with key stakeholders, creating value for them and serving as an advisor and part of their leadership team. We have OKRs or big projects that we also assess ourselves against, and of course overall business performance and success is also a reflection upon us. More formally, within each level we have a job ladder that HR helped create so we have an evaluation rubric.