The Ideal Revenue Operations Team Structure for SaaS Companies

In traditional business structures, operations is typically an afterthought. As a result, teams become siloed, there’s an unwillingness to hire specialized personnel, and it is difficult to scale operations in a consolidated manner. These are the sort of businesses that ultimately become victims of their own success. Most of us are familiar with companies that have experienced a surge in growth at the expense of customer service. Such growth is unsustainable and ends up putting the entire business and its brand at risk. 

An effective SaaS RevOps team will prevent this from happening by working across all three of the major revenue-related departments: sales, marketing and customer success. In traditional structures, each of these departments operates independently, whereas in the RevOps model, there is a single team that works on aligning all three. 

In smaller SaaS companies, individual departments manage their own enablement processes supported by RevOps technology specialists, project/program managers and data analysts. Even very small companies, which don’t yet have a RevOps team, should plan to add one if they’re looking to achieve significant growth in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, if your teams face constant issues sharing and acting upon information, which is even more likely in the era of hybrid work, then it might be time to adopt a RevOps model. 

The most mature RevOps organizational structure involves managing people by functional area, with their roles and responsibilities aligned under the overarching vision put forth by the CRO. This makes sense, simply because sales, marketing, and customer success are all part of a single, unified customer experience that should not be disrupted by operational silos. This is a common setup among large SaaS enterprises, especially those with larger and more complex product line-ups.

While there are many ways to structure a RevOps team, the ideal scenario for a larger SaaS vendor should look something like this: 

• Revenue operations: In charge of RevOps strategy and planning, as well as the more tactical aspects of the work such as processes and activities. 
• Revenue analytics: BI engineers, database admins, data analysts and other experts who collect and analyze data, and translate it into actionable insights and reports. 
• Revenue enablement: Responsible for onboarding the various teams, as well as coaching them to ensure proper usage and updates. 
• Revenue systems: Work closely with IT teams to implement an environment in which everyone has access to the data and insights they need exactly when they need it. 

This hierarchy factors in all the roles that might be necessary in a larger SaaS enterprise, so you’ll need to adapt it to the specific needs and conditions of your organization. Furthermore, many operations, such as data analytics and reporting, can be largely automated, reducing the need to hire data analysts or implement BI systems. Similarly, smaller SaaS companies may not need infrastructure professionals if they host their products and services with public cloud providers. 

When determining your revenue operations team structure, it’s important to take into consideration company size, budget, and priorities. It’s also important to avoid aiming for perfection the first time since, as with any long-term business project, it’s a process of continuous improvement. 

In today’s business environment, one of the top barriers to sustainable growth is the lack of interoperability between teams. If sales, marketing and customer success teams can’t work together effectively as part of a larger, consolidated revenue operations organizational structure, they’ll face significant difficulties in aligning and reaching their goals and objectives. 

A well designed and funded RevOps team is the antidote to this issue, but there are multiple questions that need to be taken into consideration as you determine the revenue operations team structure required in order to proactively eliminate inefficiencies and other problems.

These include, among others, the questions of how to: 

• Structure a revenue operation team to ensure maximal efficiency 
• Recruit and retain the right talent, both junior and senior, for the team 
• Clearly define the roles and responsibilities for each team member 
• Work as a team to align the objectives of the entire GTM organization Setup highly effective operational cadences and workflows for the team 
• Ensure effective cross-functional communication and collaboration 
• Utilize the right revops technologies to support optimal performance Integrate resource-saving automation tools into existing processes 
• Establish the appropriate revenue operations metrics and KPIs 

Once you have the people, processes, and technology, as well as the proper revops team structure, you can drive business growth without adding risk. In a constantly evolving and highly competitive sector like SaaS, that’s a huge advantage to have on your side. 

Some of the key roles within a revenue operations team include revenue operations manager, sales operations analyst, marketing operations manager, customer success operations analyst, and data analyst. 

Structuring a revenue operations team properly is essential to ensure that all revenue-related functions are operating in sync and aligned with the company's overall objectives. A well-structured revenue operations team can also help identify and address revenue-related issues and opportunities more effectively. 

Some of the challenges in structuring a revenue operations team include dealing with siloed departments, integrating disparate technologies and data sources, managing conflicting priorities and goals, and maintaining alignment with changing business needs and market dynamics.