When should you hire your first RevOps person?

The honest answer: when your forecast stops being something you can read straight out of the system, and nobody clearly owns the machinery behind it. In most B2B companies that moment arrives somewhere between fifteen and sixty people, usually around £2m to £15m of revenue. The mistake almost everyone makes at that point is going straight to a full-time job ad. Most companies don't need five days a week of this work yet. They need the right few days, aimed at the right problems.

What does a first RevOps hire actually do?

Not what the job boards suggest. The title gets used for everything from CRM data entry to board reporting, so it's worth being precise before you spend money on one.

A first revenue operations hire owns the systems behind your revenue: the CRM and how it's configured, the stages a deal moves through, what counts as a qualified lead, who follows up when, and which numbers everyone agrees to answer for. I've written a fuller explanation of what RevOps involves, but the short version is this: marketing generates, sales closes, and operations is what makes those two handovers not leak.

What the role is not: a CRM administrator who resets passwords and merges duplicates when asked. An admin maintains what exists. An operator decides what should exist, then builds and documents it.

What are the signs you need one?

None of these are dramatic on their own. That's the trap. They arrive gradually and get absorbed as "just how things are":

• Pipeline reviews start with twenty minutes of "actually, that deal moved last month"
• The forecast is assembled by a person, in a spreadsheet, the night before the board meeting
• Deals go quiet because follow-up depended on someone remembering
• Sales says marketing's leads are junk; marketing says sales ignores leads; both are looking at different numbers
• Nobody can say, quickly, which source produces customers worth having
• You're about to grow the team and realise all your process lives in one person's head

If you recognise three or more, you're past the point where another tool or another training day fixes it. You have an ownership problem. Some of these overlap with the seven signs your CRM needs an audit, and an audit is often the right move before any hire, because it tells you whether you have a systems problem or a discipline problem wearing a systems costume.

How big should the company be?

Rough bands, from watching this play out repeatedly:

The failure mode is jumping rows. Companies at twenty-five people hire a full-time head of revenue operations because it feels like a scaling milestone, then discover there wasn't forty hours a week of operator work to do. The new hire fills the time with projects, some useful, many not, and eighteen months later the fundamentals still wobble.

Should you hire full-time or fractional first?

Fractional first, in about eight cases out of ten. Here's the reasoning.

At the stage where the pain shows up, the work is lumpy. One month is a pipeline redesign and a reporting rebuild; the next three are steady-state: running the forecast cadence, tightening follow-up, keeping definitions honest. Buying five days a week means paying full-time rates for the quiet months too. A senior operator on a couple of days a month handles the lumpy phase and the steady state, and costs a fraction of a salary once you count recruitment fees, notice periods and ramp-up time.

The maths is set out plainly in my breakdown of what fractional RevOps costs, but the shape is simple: a UK RevOps manager runs £55,000 to £80,000 a year before employer costs, and realistically nine to twelve months pass between deciding to hire and seeing impact. Fractional starts inside a week.

Go full-time when the work genuinely fills a week, every week. That's usually north of eighty people, multiple product lines, or a sales team large enough that pipeline hygiene is itself a daily job. By then you'll also know exactly what to hire for, because someone will have documented the operation. Often the fractional operator hands over to the full-time hire, which is the cheapest recruitment process you'll ever run.

What should their first ninety days fix?

Whatever you hire, fractional or full-time, sequence matters. The order I use:

1. Agree the language. Define a lead, a qualification, a stage exit. Unpopular and non-negotiable, because every number downstream depends on it.
2. Make the pipeline tell the truth. Stages that match how deals actually move, close dates that mean something, rot flagged automatically rather than discovered in the meeting.
3. Build one dashboard everyone reads. Not fourteen. One, covering pipeline created, coverage, conversion and forecast, refreshed without anyone touching a spreadsheet.
4. Automate the memory-dependent bits. Follow-up nudges, task routing, the stuff that currently fails whenever someone takes a holiday.

Notice none of that is "buy a new tool". If the first ninety days involve a procurement process, you've hired the wrong person or briefed them wrong.

What if you're not sure you're there yet?

Then don't take anyone's word for it, including mine. Run a free commercial systems health check: a few minutes, a score out of 100 across your CRM, pipeline, data and follow-up, and the three fixes worth doing first. If the leaks turn out to be small, you've saved yourself a salary. If they're big, you now know exactly what to point your first hire at, and you can price full-time against fractional against doing it yourself with evidence rather than a hunch.