Hire RevOps too early and you've bought a £150k CRM administrator

A pattern I've seen more than once. A software business gets to around £5m ARR. The board is fed up with arguments about the pipeline. Someone says "we need RevOps", and a few months later a capable person starts with a decent salary and a vague brief.

Six months on, they're running reports. Fixing CRM fields. Building dashboards for whoever asked most recently. The forecasting model, the deal desk and the comp plan redesign they were hired for haven't started, because there's always something more urgent.

That's not the hire's fault. They were brought in to fix something nobody had defined, at a size where the urgent work swallows the important work every single week.

What it costs

A good Head of RevOps in the UK typically earns £99k to £162k base, according to Glassdoor. Add employer's National Insurance, pension and a bonus, and the real annual cost is somewhere around £135k to £225k. Add a recruiter's fee of 20% to 25% and eight to twelve weeks to fill the role, and then three to six months before they're producing anything the board would notice.

That's a lot to pay for someone to clean up a CRM.

When to hire

Most experienced operators put the first full-time RevOps hire somewhere between £4m and £8m ARR, or once you have 10 to 15 quota-carrying reps. Below that, a permanent head rarely pays for themselves. Well above it, without RevOps, you're already paying for the gap in missed forecasts and leaked revenue. You just can't see the invoice.

But the size of the business is only half the question. The other half is whether you know what the job is.

Decide what they're fixing first

Before you hire, write down the answers to these:

How do we define each stage of the pipeline, and what has to be true to move a deal forward?

How is the forecast called, by whom, and how do we measure whether it was right?

Who can approve a discount, and how much?

What goes in the monthly board pack, and where does each number come from?

Who owns renewals, uplifts and the gap between what's contracted and what's billed?

If you can answer all five, hire. Your new Head of RevOps walks into a defined job and makes it better.

If you can't, the first year of that hire will be spent working out the answers while also doing the admin. Which, as above, means the answers don't get worked out.

The options in between

A fixed-scope project. Someone builds the stage framework, the forecast method and the board pack over a few weeks, documents it and trains the team. Then you hire into it.

Fractional. A senior operator a day or two a week, setting direction for whoever's already doing the work. Useful when you have people who need leading rather than replacing.

Fully managed. RevOps run as an outsourced function: a defined list of weekly and monthly deliverables, one operator accountable for them, a fixed monthly fee. Good for the stretch between "we need this" and "we can justify a full-time head".

The test for any of them is the same. At the end, does the business own a forecast method, a deal desk, a set of definitions and a board pack that someone else could pick up and run? If yes, the next hire starts on day one with something that works. If not, you've rented help without building anything.

When the time comes

Hire. Seriously. A good full-time Head of RevOps in a business that's ready for one is worth every pound. The mistake isn't hiring. It's hiring before you know what you're hiring for.

Veridian runs outsourced revenue operations for software businesses that aren't ready for a full-time hire, and helps write the spec when they are. Start a conversation.