Revenue Operations (RevOps) Specialist: roles, responsibilities, salary, and hiring

red sign that says for hire

Back in the day there wasn’t much need for revenue operations

Hand-offs between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success were much more clean-cut so each of these departments’ operations could be neatly siloed: nobody from marketing had to know too much about what sales were doing and vice versa. 

But that has dramatically changed in the digital era of selling. 

Customers no longer interact with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success in a silo: they’re in contact with all three departments simultaneously. 

So why are the operations of these departments still largely siloed? 

A revenue operations (RevOps) specialist helps break down these silos and align all your teams’ goals and operations to drive revenue in your growing company.

In this guide we’ll discuss the ins and outs of hiring for this increasingly important role for your company based on our years of experience both working in this field and hiring these specialists.

Hire an Entire Team of RevOps Specialists on Flat-Rate Pricing

Iceberg is a RevOps agency that takes early-stage companies from barely getting by to systems and processes that fuel revenue growth. We don’t lock you into SOWs that force us to stick to a plan before we understand your business.

What is a Revenue Operations Specialist?

Broadly speaking, a revenue operations specialist (RevOps specialist) is a centralized ops role that helps eliminate the silos that have traditionally separated Sales Operations, Customer Success, Marketing Operations, and traditional systems in other business operations.

It’s a role that doesn’t have loyalty to a specific team and rolls right up to the C level. 

Once a company moves on from founder selling to dedicated Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams, they need to start investing in revenue operations to help them scale beyond their current revenue. 

The best revenue operations specialists blend both strategic thinking and wrench work to implement solutions. They shouldn’t be a bunch of proverbial “yes people” and should be able to hit pause, zoom out, and understand where every ask fits in a greater roadmap. 

However, this is a consideration which most small, medium, and even some large businesses completely skip.

 “I think of RevOps teams as building the compass that allows leadership to steer the ship.”

Taft Love

Founder, Iceberg Ops

The Responsibilities and Duties of a RevOps Specialist

The specific roles of a revenue operations specialist will vary from company to company, but generally speaking they will:

  • Identify critical issues impacting operations and strategy including productivity insights, lead-to-sales analysis, revenue analysis, and segment/account trends
  • Facilitate sharing of reports and data with Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and other departments
  • Evaluate processes, programs, and systems to increase revenue, minimize costs, and improve customer satisfaction
  • Maintain good data hygiene 
  • Support Sales, Customer Success leaders, and Finance on pipeline and forecasting
  • Oversee administration of a company’s CRM and help drive adoption of multiple enterprise business tools
  • Provide business leaders with reliable data reporting systems
  • Work with management to prioritize business and information needs

Must-have Reporting Software for a Revenue Operations Specialist 

RevOps specialists will leverage various tools for accurate reporting that spans different functions across the entire funnel. 

Top Software used by Revenue Operations Specialists: 

Average Salary of a RevOps Specialist

Here’s a breakdown of what you can expect to pay a RevOps specialist on average in a variety of countries and cities based on data from Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and other open data sources.  Please bear in mind that outliers can bring the average up or down and many different roles might have been taken into consideration to reach these averages.

overview of average salary of a revenue operations specialist

United States:

  • New York: $77,686
  • San Francisco: $60,882
  • Chicago: $55,545
  • Austin: $56,070

Europe:

  • Spain: €39,325
  • France: €38,780
  • Germany: €33,481
  • Ireland: €47,500
  • Sweden: kr 314.807
  • Poland: zł 70 699 

UK:

  • London: £60,000
  • Bristol: £41,000
  • Edinburgh: £48,310

Australia: 

  • Sydney: AUD $143,423
  • Melbourne: AUD $83, 975

How to Hire a Revenue Operations Specialist

Hiring an admin to fix your revenue operations is like hiring a plumber to build your whole house

When hiring for a RevOps role for the first time, many companies make the mistake of taking an “admin-as-ops” approach.

If their budget is tight, they might hire a recent graduate or head over to a site like Upwork and pay someone, usually at a very affordable rate, to build out the dashboards and reports that they want. 

While great admins are an asset to any RevOps team, they are only part of the puzzle and their role is functional, not strategic. Any modifications and administration that they carry out needs to be guided by the strategic, operational thinking of a RevOps specialist who can identify the root causes of a company’s ops failures and craft a solution to fix them. 

Without this strategic, operational thinking, leadership are simply hiring someone to replicate the mistakes that created chaos in their operations in the first place.

So you need an experienced revenue operations specialist who has the ability to question you and what you want. 

Someone who can take a step back and ask questions like:

What are you trying to achieve here?

How are the upstream and downstream teams affected by this?

Rather than someone who nods their head and always tells you, “you got it!” 

But hiring someone in-house with this type of strategic thinking that only comes from years of experience in the operations trenches can be very costly. 

An alternative can be to hire a RevOps agency for a fraction of the price of hiring in-house. 

Nail Your First Ops Hire and Avoid Costly Mistakes Most Startups Make

When you’re ready to hire in-house for operations, what should you look for? What combination of skills will make the biggest impact? How can you make a smart hire today and support a long-term hiring strategy? This white paper steps through:

  • Categories for a first operations hire
  • Recommended interview questions
  • The exact evaluation matrix Iceberg uses to hire for its own team

But before running to hire an independent RevOps agency make sure to ask the following questions: 

Questions to ask a RevOps Agency before hiring them: 

  • Do you outsource any of your work or do you have a fully in-house team who’ll handle our account?
    • This is important because many agencies will outsource work to subcontractors who have no idea about you or your business. It’s best to choose an agency with a fully in-house team. 
  • How long do your clients usually stay with you?
    • This can give you a clear indication of how much their clients value their work
  • Do you have any case studies I can check out?
    • A great way to determine if the agency is able to get tangible results for their clients or not 

But if your company is ready to bring on a new in-house hire then you can start your search by looking close to home. 

Do any of your current team members show a great aptitude for analyzing data, spotting issues in your workflows and processes and driving efficiency?

Then they might be in for a promotion. 

Investing resources in upskilling your current team can pay dividends, especially as your new hire already has extensive knowledge about your company, customers, and what process issues may be holding back the operational efficiency of your company. 

However, this new hire still needs someone to learn from. The downside of promoting a current team member without access to a more experienced RevOps specialist is that you’re forcing them to build the plane while they’re free-falling. 

Before promoting any team member, ask yourself how you’re going to provide them with access to a more experienced RevOps specialist who can guide them and oversee their work. 

Alternatively, you can advertise for the position on a variety of platforms usually for a small fee.

Here are just some suggestions:

But before putting out ads for the new role you’re hiring for, you have to know what to put in the job description. 

Revenue Operations Specialist Job Description Template

Your RevOps specialist job description isn’t just a place to dump a lot of facts about requirements and aptitudes, it’s also a great opportunity to highlight your brand values to help you attract the best-fit candidates. 

Your job description template should include 4 sections: 

  • Introduction about your company 
  • Duties and Responsibilities 
  • Requirements and Qualifications 
  • Benefits of working at your company 

Here’s an example which you can use as a starting point for your own job description.

[Your Company] is Hiring a Revenue Ops Specialist

[Introduce your company and the mission you’re on, remember you want a new hire to share your core values and be excited at the prospect of working with you].

Our revenue operations team is expanding and we’re looking for a revenue operations specialist. You’ll apply your laser-focused analytical skills to help us develop smooth, effective processes and reporting systems that provide key insights to help drive decision making across marketing, sales, and customer success.

You’ll have the opportunity to work in a [describe your workplace atmosphere here] with supportive colleagues and plenty of opportunities for growth during your career with us. 

Reporting to:  CRO, CEO, RevOps Leader [whichever is relevant for your company].

The Role & Responsibilities: 

  • Design, implement and coordinate smooth processes across departments like Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success 
  • Evaluate current processes, determine how these can be improved, and implement new solutions
  • Be responsible for training and educating team members across departments on new processes and solutions 
  • Oversee the administration of CRM data and processes 
  • Work alongside management to prioritize operational tasks 
  • Create processes, automations and dashboards in Salesforce as well as other systems connected to Salesforce. Examples include: HubSpot, Pardot, Outreach.io, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Nav [personalize for your businesses tech stack] 
  • Create project plans and marshal resources internally to ensure that high quality work is delivered on time

What we’re looking for: 

  • 1-3 years of experience working in an operations/ process role 
  • Around 2 years experience using Salesforce 
  • Ability to map business processes, flows, and data models: configure workflows, fields, and objects and take requirements for other team members to execute
  • Strong project management, organization, and critical thinking skills
  • Intermediate to Advanced Microsoft Excel skills
  • Excellent writing, presentation, and verbal communication skills
  • [Your company’s tech stack] tool/admin experience preferred
  • Adaptable and can work on multiple projects at once while collaborating with different departments

Compensation and Benefits: 

[Include some information about salary and company benefits like dental care, health plans, and employer contributed 401K].

Apply today [include a link to your application form]. 

To Hire or not to Hire a Revenue Ops Specialist?

Of course we’re a bit biased over here at Iceberg, so let’s start this final section on why you might not need RevOps. 

If you have a clean handoff from marketing to Sales, your Marketing team is not doing any account based marketing (ABM), and you have a Marketing team that just does demand generation then hands everything off to sales, you might not need RevOps. 

On the other hand, if your marketing team needs to interact closely with Sales and they share common goals, you do need RevOps to break down operational silos. 

You might reach a point when your employees are unable to do their job properly because everyone is chasing tactical gremlins all day long. 

While it’s easy to say you should hire your own RevOps specialist right away, it also might not be feasible for your budget right now. Ideally, you also need your RevOps problems fixed as quickly as possible, and new in-house hires won’t be able to deliver dramatic changes in a short period of time. 

If that’s the case for your company, then contracting a professional RevOps agency may be the smartest move. 

How We help RevOps Specialists

Most companies think all they need is for us to help them build reports because right now, they don’t make sense.

A VP of Sales might be looking at their reports and failing to answer basic questions like, “how much of my pipeline has shifted this month?” 

They take a look at their reports and see that yesterday they had 1.2 million, but today they have 1.1 million. 

What happened to that $100k in the pipeline? 

Many aren’t sure how to even find out.

All the while their RevOps team are too deep in solving client problems and managing day-to-day operations to dedicate significant resources to improving internal operations. 

That’s where Iceberg steps in as your strategic RevOps partner. 

We believe that any vendor who promises full-funnel services should understand the entire revenue funnel, which is why we take a holistic approach to RevOps. 

Iceberg can help your revenue operations team with a wide variety of tasks such as:

Our services are entirely bespoke to your needs which means no matter what your current setup, Iceberg will build a custom plan that solves your specific RevOps woes (and gets you results in days, not weeks).

Get an idea of the types of revenue operations services we offer by hitting that button below.

FAQs About Hiring a RevOps Specialist

What’s the difference between a sales ops specialist and a revenue ops specialist?

Both of these roles share a common goal: to make client-facing teams successful. However, a sales ops specialist is one branch of revenue operations that focuses solely on the sales department. 

Whereas a revenue ops specialist brings together and optimizes a variety of departments’ operations like sales, marketing, and finance. Check out this article for a deeper breakdown of the difference between sales ops and RevOps.

What skills should a RevOps specialist have? 

They should have great strategic skills to be able to zoom out and analyze what a company needs from a process and operations point of view. They should have an eagle-eye attention to detail and be comfortable analyzing numbers and turning raw data into understandable metrics that leadership can use to drive decision making.

What are the benefits of hiring a RevOps specialist? 

Investing in RevOps will help bring your pipeline into focus, plug leaks in your marketing and sales funnels, and break the silos that exist between different departments. This all results in smoother processes and robust data that help keep your team productive and your company profitable. 

Keep Reading and Improving Your RevOps Knowledge