The fastest-growing function nobody knows how to structure
VP of Revenue Operations titles have grown over 300% in the last five years. Director of RevOps roles are up 73%. The function is expanding rapidly, driven by the recognition that fragmented sales, marketing, and customer success operations can't support modern go-to-market motions at scale.
But growth in titles hasn't been matched by clarity in structure. Most companies building RevOps teams are making it up as they go: pulling a sales ops person into a broader role, hiring a "RevOps manager" without defining what that means, or creating a fancy title for what is still a CRM admin function.
The result is that RevOps teams are frequently under-scoped, under-resourced, or misaligned with the problems they're supposed to solve. The org design decisions you make early (who reports to whom, which roles you hire first, how you balance centralization with embedded support) determine whether RevOps becomes a strategic function or just another layer of overhead.
Here's how to get the structure right at every stage.
RevOps team structure by company stage
There's no universal RevOps org chart. The right structure depends on your ARR, go-to-market complexity, and how many distinct revenue motions you run. Here's what works at each stage.
Startup ($1M to $5M ARR): The RevOps generalist
At this stage, you don't need a RevOps team. You need one person who can do it all: manage the CRM, build reports, set up lead routing, design territories, and keep the data clean. This person is typically your first operations hire, and they report to the head of sales or the CEO.
What this person does:
- Administers the CRM and core tools (Salesforce or HubSpot, outreach platform, marketing automation)
- Builds and maintains reporting dashboards
- Designs and implements basic processes: lead flow, deal stages, handoff criteria
- Runs ad-hoc analysis for the executive team
- Troubleshoots everything that breaks
What this person does not do (yet):
- Strategic planning and modeling
- Dedicated enablement programs
- Complex data engineering or integration architecture
The mistake at this stage is hiring too senior. A VP of RevOps with no team to manage and no budget to deploy will be frustrated and ineffective. Hire a strong individual contributor with systems thinking skills and the ability to operate across functions. The title matters less than the scope.
Growth ($5M to $25M ARR): Specialization begins
As you scale past $5M, the generalist is overwhelmed. You start to feel it when the CRM admin work crowds out the strategic analysis, when reports take too long because the data is messy, and when no one has time to build the processes that sales and marketing are requesting.
This is where you build a small team of 3 to 5 people, with the beginning of role specialization:
| Role | Focus |
|---|---|
| RevOps Manager / Head of RevOps | Strategy, process design, cross-functional coordination |
| Systems Administrator | CRM and tool administration, integrations, automation |
| RevOps Analyst | Reporting, dashboards, data analysis, ad-hoc requests |
| Data Quality Specialist (or part-time) | Deduplication, enrichment, hygiene |
At this stage, the RevOps manager typically reports to the CRO or VP of Sales. The team handles all three operational domains (sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops) but probably spends 60% to 70% of its time on sales operations because that's where the loudest requests come from.
The key tension at this stage: Marketing and CS will start complaining that RevOps is really just "sales ops with a new name." This is a valid complaint, and it's the first structural decision you need to make deliberately. Either resource the team to truly serve all three functions, or be honest that you're building sales ops first and will expand scope later.
Scale-up ($25M to $100M ARR): Sub-teams emerge
At this stage, RevOps becomes a department, not just a team. You're likely running multiple sales segments (SMB, mid-market, enterprise), your marketing operations are complex enough to need dedicated headcount, and customer success operations (renewals, health scoring, expansion) demand specialized attention.
A typical structure at this stage is 8 to 12 people organized into sub-teams:
RevOps Leadership: VP or Senior Director of RevOps, with 2 to 3 managers leading sub-teams.
Operations sub-teams:
- Sales Operations (2 to 3 people): deal desk, territory management, quota and compensation, sales process
- Marketing Operations (1 to 2 people): campaign operations, lead management, attribution, marketing tech stack
- CS Operations (1 to 2 people): renewal process, health scoring, customer lifecycle, expansion pipeline
Shared functions:
- Systems and Data (2 to 3 people): CRM administration, integration architecture, data quality, data engineering
- Strategy and Planning (1 to 2 people): capacity planning, territory design, forecasting models, GTM analytics
The shared functions serve all three operational sub-teams, which prevents each sub-team from building its own data infrastructure and reporting stack.
Enterprise ($100M+ ARR): Full departmental structure
At scale, RevOps typically has 15 or more people with dedicated directors for each domain. The VP or SVP of RevOps is a peer to the CMO and VP of Sales on the leadership team, with a direct line to the CRO or CEO.
The key structural addition at this stage is dedicated enablement (sales enablement, onboarding, ongoing training) which often sits within RevOps rather than as a standalone function. You may also add a dedicated GTM strategy and planning team that owns annual planning, capacity modeling, and market analysis.
Core RevOps roles defined
Regardless of stage, these are the roles that every RevOps team eventually needs. Understanding them helps you sequence your hires and write job descriptions that attract the right candidates.
RevOps Manager / Director
The operational leader. This person owns process design, technology decisions, and the day-to-day coordination between sales, marketing, and CS. They're the person who decides how lead routing works, what data is required at each deal stage, and how the tech stack fits together. At larger companies, this role evolves into a VP who manages managers.
Key skills: Systems thinking, cross-functional influence, process design, strong opinions about technology, ability to translate business requirements into operational workflows.
RevOps Analyst
The data brain. This person builds dashboards, runs analyses, and turns raw CRM data into insights that drive decisions. They answer questions like "why did pipeline velocity drop 15% this quarter?" and "which lead sources produce the highest LTV customers?" At scale, this becomes a team of analysts, often with specializations by function or segment.
Key skills: SQL proficiency, BI tool expertise (Tableau, Looker, or similar), statistical fluency, ability to communicate data findings to non-technical stakeholders.
Systems Administrator
The CRM and tool specialist. This person manages Salesforce (or your CRM of choice), builds automations, maintains integrations, and handles the technical implementation of every process the RevOps team designs. They're the ones who actually build the thing when the RevOps Manager says "we need a new lead routing workflow."
Key skills: Deep CRM expertise (Salesforce Admin certification is table stakes), integration tools (Workato, Tray, or native integrations), automation design, strong troubleshooting ability.
Enablement Lead
The training and adoption specialist. This person ensures that the processes, tools, and methodologies RevOps designs actually get used by front-line teams. They build onboarding programs for new hires, create ongoing training for new tool rollouts, and produce the content (playbooks, reference guides, recorded walkthroughs) that reps use daily.
Key skills: Instructional design, sales methodology knowledge, content creation, facilitation, ability to measure training effectiveness.
Data Analyst / Data Engineer
The data quality and infrastructure specialist. This person goes deeper than the RevOps Analyst into the actual data architecture: building enrichment pipelines, designing data models, ensuring that information flows correctly between systems, and maintaining the quality standards defined in your data governance framework.
Key skills: Data modeling, ETL/ELT tools, enrichment platforms, data quality frameworks, potentially Python or similar for custom data work.
Strategy and Planning Lead
The model builder. This person owns territory design, capacity planning, quota modeling, and annual planning processes. They work closely with finance and the CRO to translate revenue targets into operational plans. This is often the most senior individual contributor role on the RevOps team.
Key skills: Financial modeling, advanced Excel or Sheets, capacity planning frameworks, territory design principles, strong analytical judgment.
The reporting structure debate
Where RevOps reports in the org chart is not an administrative detail. It determines the function's scope, authority, and effectiveness. There are three common models, each with distinct tradeoffs.
Reporting to the CRO (most common)
Approximately 26% of RevOps teams report to the Chief Revenue Officer. This is the most common structure, and it makes intuitive sense: the CRO owns the revenue number, and RevOps provides the operational infrastructure to hit it.
Pros: Direct alignment with revenue goals. Short feedback loops with sales leadership. Clear mandate to optimize the selling motion.
Cons: Risk of becoming sales-centric. Marketing and CS may view RevOps as "sales ops in disguise" and resist its authority over their processes and tools. The CRO's priorities (closing this quarter) can override RevOps' need for long-term infrastructure investment.
Reporting to the COO
This model positions RevOps as a cross-functional operational discipline rather than a sales support function.
Pros: Natural cross-functional credibility. The COO typically has authority over processes that span multiple departments. RevOps gets to be a neutral party that optimizes the whole engine, not just the sales motion.
Cons: The COO may be too far from the day-to-day revenue motion to provide useful guidance. RevOps priorities can get diluted with other operational initiatives. There's a risk of becoming too process-oriented and not responsive enough to sales execution needs.
Reporting to the CEO
This is rare, but it happens at companies where the CEO views RevOps as a strategic lever rather than an operational function.
Pros: Maximum authority and scope. Direct strategic influence on company direction. No functional bias.
Cons: The CEO typically doesn't have time to manage RevOps directly. Without a strong day-to-day connection to a revenue leader, RevOps can become disconnected from execution realities. This works best when the RevOps leader is very senior (VP or SVP) and highly autonomous.
Bottom line: The reporting structure matters less than the authority granted. A RevOps team that reports to the CRO but has clear mandate over marketing and CS operations will outperform a RevOps team that reports to the CEO but only controls Salesforce administration.
Centralized vs. federated vs. hub-and-spoke models
Beyond the reporting line, you need to decide how operational work is distributed across the organization.
Centralized model
All operations professionals sit on one RevOps team under one leader. Sales ops, marketing ops, and CS ops people all report up through RevOps.
Best for: Companies that need tight alignment and a single source of truth. Most effective at growth and scale-up stages where you want to prevent duplicate work and conflicting processes.
Risk: Front-line teams feel underserved because RevOps is balancing competing priorities. The sales team needs territory changes, marketing needs campaign reporting, and CS needs a renewal workflow, but the centralized team has to prioritize.
Federated model
Each function (sales, marketing, CS) has its own dedicated operations team. A RevOps coordination layer sits above them to ensure alignment on shared processes, data standards, and technology decisions.
Best for: Large enterprises where each function is complex enough to need dedicated operational support. The coordination layer prevents silos without forcing everyone into a single reporting structure.
Risk: The coordination layer has no direct authority over the functional ops teams. If the VP of Marketing doesn't want to adopt the shared lead definitions, the RevOps coordinator can escalate but can't enforce. This model requires strong executive alignment to work.
Hub-and-spoke model
A central RevOps team owns strategy, data, and technology decisions (the "hub"). Embedded specialists sit within each function to handle day-to-day operational needs (the "spokes"). The spokes have a dotted-line report to RevOps and a solid-line report to their functional leader.
Best for: Companies that want the alignment benefits of centralization with the responsiveness of embedded support. This is increasingly the preferred model for companies in the $50M to $200M range.
Risk: Dotted-line reporting creates ambiguity. The embedded specialist serves two masters, and when priorities conflict, the solid-line manager usually wins. Make the dotted-line relationship real by giving RevOps input on hiring, performance reviews, and prioritization for embedded specialists.
Hiring your first RevOps person
If you're building RevOps from scratch, the first hire is the most consequential. Get it right and you accelerate everything. Get it wrong and you create a bottleneck.
Generalist over specialist. Your first hire needs to operate across CRM administration, reporting, process design, and stakeholder management. A Salesforce expert who can't build a dashboard or facilitate a cross-functional process discussion will be too narrow. A data analyst who can't configure a workflow automation will be too specialized. Look for someone who's done a bit of everything and can figure out the rest.
The skills that matter most:
- Systems thinking. Can they see how a change to the lead routing process affects pipeline metrics, which affects forecast accuracy, which affects board confidence? RevOps is about connections between things, not individual processes in isolation.
- Data fluency. Not necessarily a data engineer, but someone who can query data, spot inconsistencies, build a clean report, and explain what the numbers mean.
- Stakeholder management. RevOps sits between functions that have competing priorities. Your first hire needs to build trust with sales, marketing, and CS leaders simultaneously, without becoming any one team's order-taker.
- Bias toward action. At early stage, you need someone who ships, not someone who builds a 60-page strategy document and waits for approval. The best first RevOps hires deliver visible improvements in weeks, not quarters.
Where to find them: The best early RevOps hires often come from sales operations or business operations roles at companies one to two stages ahead of yours. They've seen what "good" looks like at scale and can work backward to build the foundation at your stage. Marketing ops or CS ops backgrounds work too, as long as the person has genuine cross-functional experience.
Common org design mistakes
Building RevOps as "super admin." If RevOps spends 80% of its time fielding Salesforce configuration requests and building one-off reports, it's a support function, not a strategic one. Establish clear boundaries between administrative work (handled by a dedicated admin or outsourced) and strategic work (owned by RevOps leadership).
Putting a sales ops person in charge without expanding the scope. Promoting your best sales ops manager to "Head of RevOps" is fine, but only if you also expand their mandate, their team, and their authority to include marketing and CS operations. Otherwise, you've just relabeled the role and created resentment from the other functions.
Not giving RevOps authority over technology decisions. If marketing can buy its own tools without RevOps input, and sales can add point solutions without integration review, your tech stack will become fragmented and your data will be unreliable. RevOps should own (or at minimum co-own) every technology decision that touches the revenue data model.
Hiring too senior too early (or too junior too late). A VP of RevOps at $3M ARR with no team and no budget will be frustrated and will leave. A solo RevOps analyst at $50M ARR will be buried in requests and unable to operate strategically. Match the seniority of the role to the stage and the scope.
Ignoring the enablement gap. RevOps designs processes and builds tools. Enablement ensures people actually use them. Without enablement, your beautifully designed lead routing workflow sits unused because nobody trained the SDR team on how it works.
Structure follows strategy
The right RevOps team structure is the one that matches your company's stage, complexity, and go-to-market motion. Don't copy another company's org chart. Start with the problems you need to solve, define the roles that address those problems, and build from there.
For a deeper look at the function itself, see the complete revenue operations guide. If you're specifically building the sales operations track within RevOps, the building a sales operations team guide covers the roles, skills, and sequencing in more detail.
The structure will evolve. What matters is that you're intentional about it at each stage rather than letting it happen by accident.
Designing your RevOps org? RevenueTools provides the frameworks, benchmarks, and operator playbooks to help you build the right team structure for your stage and scale.