What's the most effective way to scale a revenue operations team beyond the first revenue operations manager?

The best way to scale your revenue operations team is to really assess where your largest gaps are and invest in resources to close those gaps.

• Do you have a strong systems team, but poor processes - hire for operations
• Strong operations, but poor execution in systems - hire for systems
• Determine if you want to hire specialists or generalists (know that finding really strong experienced generalist can be a challenge)

This really comes down to mapping out your roadmap and the assessment of what you need to deliver and making the right investments accordingly. It is also important to understand where you can augment full-time resources through leveraging consulting to help deliver on critical projects were it makes sense.

Scaling a revenue operations team beyond the first revenue operations manager can be a complex process, as it involves balancing the needs of the team with the goals and constraints of the business. Here are a few tips that may be helpful as you scale your revenue operations team:

1. Define clear roles and responsibilities: As you bring on additional team members, it's important to define clear roles and responsibilities for each team member to ensure that everyone understands their scope of work and how their efforts fit into the overall goals of the team.
2. Establish processes and systems: To ensure that your team can operate efficiently and effectively as it grows, it's important to establish clear processes and systems for managing tasks, tracking progress, and communicating with other teams and stakeholders.
3. Foster collaboration and teamwork: Encouraging collaboration and teamwork among team members can help ensure that everyone is working towards common goals and can support one another as the team grows.
4. Invest in training and development: Providing training and development opportunities for your team can help ensure that team members have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in their roles, and can also help build a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
5. Focus on team culture and engagement: Building a positive team culture and engaging with team members can help foster a sense of belonging and purpose, which can be especially important as you scale the team and bring on new team members.

The optimum way to scale a team I believe is to take a step back and assess the current status of the team and conduct a gap analysis. This entails:

• Understanding clear roles and responsibilities and establishing swim lanes if they are not obvious. This should provide a good framework for understanding the current gaps.

• Bumping this framework against the feedback you've heard from your stakeholders during initial conversations is where the rubber meets the road and you start to get a good sense of where to invest in resources. This could also surface some pockets of opportunities to move resources around to parts of the business where the gaps are critical.

• Once you have this understanding, resourcing boils down to alignment with the strategic direction of the org. This could mean beefing up in areas of strategic importance for the business. Alternatively, especially in the current environment, this could also mean leveraging platforms such as Upwork for ad-hoc resourcing or leveraging AI and/or Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for manual and repetitive tasks.

Beyond the first revenue operations manager, I'd think about where your new revenue is coming from.

• Are you generating most of your net new demand through marketing and acquiring net new customers?

• Is a large % of your new customers and revenue coming from sales prospecting?

• Or is the biggest chunk of revenue coming from your existing customer base?

Assuming the first RevOps manager is working across all functions, these questions can help you determine where revenue operations resources will be most impactful on your bottom line. If it is pretty even across the board, I'd suggest focusing on a revenue operations manager who can help drive connection an integration between pillars (i.e. connecting Sales and Marketing success metrics.)