Every start-up begins with founder led sales, if you’ve been through an accelerator, read any content on start-up life you’ve heard this a million times. You know that your enthusiasm and knowledge of the problem you are solving is what gets you into those early meetings and helps you secure your first customers. The problem is as soon as you start building momentum, there are a gazillion other problems and decisions that you need to make and suddenly building pipeline and closing deals becomes the thing that you need to delegate and so you hire someone who can lead and build a sales team. This is why that is a classic mistake.

A VP of C-suite leader of any function is a huge role and the person who is best suited to it is someone who has done it before. Executives are responsible for hiring, creating strategy, coaching, leading a team and most importantly hitting “the number”. They expect you to have created a scaleable operating-model before you hire them and that is why you don’t need them yet.

First, you need some sales reps or at the very least you need some Sales Development Reps. When you have them in place you then need someone who can make sure that you have a repeatable, scaleable process that provides your early sales hires with some structure while also remaining flexible enough to change when your business changes. You also need someone who can assess and understand the data that you already have, spot the patterns that you have not spotted, remove obstacles to selling efficiently and coach your reps on building pipeline. Someone who can work across sales, marketing and customer success teams to eliminate silos and make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction together.

Who is this magical unicorn? Why Revenue Operations, of course! Revenue Operations or Rev Ops, sometimes referred to as GTM Ops or Commercial Ops is the secret weapon of any scaling SaaS business. The right person in this role can run your weekly team cadence, assess pipeline (and tell you if it’s real), create processes and more accurate forecasts, enable your sales reps, measure marketing, align your tech stack and if they have enough experience, triage and negotiate contracts, help structure deals, create a sales strategy, hire new reps…in other words they help you to create the right operating model for your commercial teams.

I know what you’re thinking…”that sounds expensive” and yes, It can seem counter intuitive to spend runway on someone who is not generating revenue directly. But it will be the best investment you make in your company. Rev Ops professionals are operators, they are used to hitting the ground running so you will see results fast; they are typically generalists who have a had a wide and varied career, so you can throw them in at the deep end and an increasing number of GTM Operators are available on a fractional basis, so you can scale their services alongside your company’s growth.

If you’re interested in exploring how a fractional Rev Ops hire can help you, give me a shout or book an intro session with me.