What does your revenue operations team org structure look like?
The sales ops team is organized by a "Global" team and a "Regional" team. We have three global teams: 1. sales strategy & planning, 2. sales analytics & insights, and 3. sales process & tools. There are two teams within the regional team covering EMEA, NAMER, and APAC. I'll go into more detail on each team.
- Sales strategy & planning team: Responsible for org/role design, market segmentation, TAM analysis, headcount and productivity analysis, quota planning, sales comp plan designs, etc.
- Sales analytics & insights team: Responsible for managing and building data foundations, building dashboards & reports, and analyzing trends and health of the business to help drive decisions.
- Sales process & tools team: Responsible for defining sales processes, rules of engagement, and sales methodologies. Manages and builds a strategy for sales tools, gathers systems requirements from stakeholders, and collaborates with business systems teams to roll out system updates.
- Regional operations team: Responsible for supporting sales leaders and sellers in each region. Helps with headcount planning, territory planning, account planning, forecasting, reporting, regional strategy, etc.
My specific team is focussed on post-sales revenue operations. We are structured around a few aspects:
1. The Craft: Meaning merchant facing roles (ex. Customer Success, Sales, etc). My team is first split by that grain so they can really get to know the roles of those areas and develop strong stakeholder relationships to build the best process/systems/etc they can.
2. Segment: The second grain they are structured to is customer segment. The customer experience can differ greatly between segments depending on how many you have, size of those segments, and difference in the customer base avatar of those segments. (Ex. I have someone on my team that leads Customer Success Operations for Segment A while I have another person that leads Customer Success Operations for Segment B).
This structure has really allowed the team to become highly impactful and to be able to ship impactful work quick while staying in tune with multiple teams for their areas.
The Revenue Operations team at Zapier consists of four sub-teams focused on making sure that Zapier prospects and customers receive a seamless experience across marketing, sales and customer success interactions.
To be more specific, we work to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of go-to-market programs with technology (like our email platforms and CRM tools), data (like sales forecasting and reporting) and process (like lead and deal management). We identify, implement, and manage GTM tooling, we bridge data and system gaps, and we deliver insights to inform strategic decision-making for GTM leadership.
We have four small teams:
Operations: They are the automation heroes behind all GTM programs. Operations is the team that builds and maintains the Marketing, Sales and CS workflows and processes in our CRM tools.
Tooling and Technology: The systems experts who develop technical solutions in partnership with data and engineering teams. They implement the underlying tools and system improvements that drive alignment between GTM stakeholders (marketing, sales, and success.)
Planning and Analytics: This team enables GTM leaders to focus on the teams and tactics that need attention to hit revenue goals. This includes highlighting trends through analysis and feedback loops, areas of misalignment, and opportunities to explore.
Sales and Success Enablement: They develop structured onboarding and coaching programs for customer-facing teams plus evaluate and optimize the sales process.
My organization is called EMEA & LATAM LTS Sales Strategy and Operations and is part of our broader GTM Ops team. My teams partner with a large sales workforce spanning the entire region, to promote the growth of our talent SaaS business in EMEA & LATAM. To accomplish that, I lead around 25 people, most of which engaged in market coverage (being mapped to sub-regional sales leaders and closely collaborating to provide optimal territories for them to grow our footprint) and a small subset (~15%) in a “growth and transformation” capacity, acting as a solutions squad. They conceive and optimize data assets uniquely relevant to the region, recommend enhancements to our workflows, and promote global operational integration.
We also partner with regional cross-functional partners (e.g. Business Operations, Marketing) to provide the organization with a regional lens of the state of the business and its growth opportunities.
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.
We have a centralized ops team at dbt Labs - rolling up to the G&A org. I've worked in both siloed and centralized operations teams in the past and have a strong preference for a centralized structure (i.e. all rev ops functions roll up to one leader vs. marketing ops rolling up to a CMO and sales ops rolling up to a VP of Sales). The rev ops team is broken into specific functional groups (marketing ops, sales ops, CS/Support Ops and Business Systems Engineering). Our functional roles are 'embedded' into their respective teams (e.g. our marketing ops lead is part of our marketing leadership group and our VP of marketing takes part in quarterly reviews for that role). So although marketing ops does not roll up to the marketing department, most of his day-to-day work and stakeholders are on that team. This centralization allows for several benefits:
- Unbiased decision making and reporting - ops can remain truly objective when not rolling up to a department lead
- Less duplicative work - there is a lot of overlap between rev ops projects so this allows for better project management and coordination of our technical resources
- Better communication within the ops team - we aren’t getting conflicting asks from different leaders and are able to work more collaboratively with this structure
Our revenue operations team consists of four key pillars:
Revenue Systems Team: This pillar is dedicated to managing Salesforce and other connecting technologies. The primary focus here is to ensure that our technology stack can scale effectively to meet the evolving needs of the business. This team plays a crucial role in optimizing our CRM system and integrating it with other tools to enhance efficiency and data accuracy.
Contracts Administration Team (Deal Desk): This team works closely with our sales organization to expedite the processing of quotes, proposals, and agreements. Their role is to ensure that these crucial documents are handled swiftly and consistently, enabling our sales teams to move deals forward efficiently.
Enablement Team: Our enablement team is responsible for change management across our customer success and sales teams. They partner with GTM leaders on implementing new processes, methodologies and tools in a thoughtful and proactive way. They collaborate closely with the product marketing department to equip our customer-facing teams with all the necessary resources and training needed to effectively deliver value to our clients. This ensures that our teams are well-prepared to meet customer needs.
Operations Analysts: This close-knit group serves as business partners for our go-to-market leaders. They play a pivotal role in executing the tactical elements of our strategy, planning the rhythm of business, and overseeing quarterly and yearly planning initiatives. Their work is essential for aligning our operations with our strategic objectives.
As our organization continues to grow, we anticipate expanding these functions to further meet the evolving needs of our stakeholders. This structured approach ensures that we are well-equipped to drive revenue growth and operational excellence.
The Growth Team: responsible for the expansion and bringing second-order revenue. Includes Sales & Business Development.
The Success team: responsible for managing customer lifecycle, relationships, and Churn. Includes CSMs, TAMs, and Onboarding Managers.
The Support teams: provide support for customers and internal tooling and operational support to the entire org. Includes Tech Support, Customer Service, Operations & Data Analysts, and PMs.
These are the three pillars under the broader RevOps umbrella in our org. You can have enablement bucketed under your Support team or have them live separately, but is also an important piece of the puzzle.
LinkedIn is large and complex with many business lines that have slight nuances to their org structure. Rather than share my company’s org chart, I’ll share what an optimal org chart looks like for an established team.
I am a fan of centralized rev ops teams where Sales Ops, CS Ops, Marketing Ops, Enablement and our Tech stack leader all report into a VP of Rev Ops. This isn’t always the case, many times the Sales Ops leader may report into the CRO or the CS Ops leader may report into the head of CS. However, I find the central structure allows the teams to share tech stacks, data foundations and best practices that can be leveraged by all the customer facing teams. This central structure prevents teams from becoming too siloed and makes it easier for marketing, sales and CS to collaborate optimally. The org structure could look something like this:
VP of Rev Ops
Data & Tech Stack Leader with teams under them that oversee the CRM, data foundations and other sales, marketing and CS tools.
Sales Strategy & Operations Leader with regional leaders reporting to them that map to your business regions.
Marketing Strategy & Operations Leader that focuses on top of funnel metrics and processes.
Customer Succes Strategy & Operations Leader that collaborates with CS and Support on post sales metrics, planning and processes.
Enablement Leader that focuses on sales training and effectiveness and may also have program management under them to help launch global initiatives.
Central planning and GTM leader who drives recommendations on global strategic Initiatives and top-down planning.