Revenue Operations Lead
The plumbing between marketing, sales and finance: one funnel, one set of definitions, one forecast everyone believes.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
The role that exists because three departments count the same thing differently. Marketing reports leads, sales reports pipeline, finance reports revenue, and without RevOps the three never reconcile — which is why the board meeting turns into an argument about the numbers instead of a decision. Hire when there is more than one person selling and more than one channel feeding them; before that, the GTM lead owns it.
Education
Any. Analytical comfort and a tolerance for other people's data entry matter far more than a degree.
Experience
4+ years in sales, marketing or business operations, including one CRM they rebuilt or migrated. Ask what their funnel stage definitions were and who had to agree to them — the second half of that answer is the job.
Vertical / domain experience
Light on industry, heavy on motion: instrumenting self-serve, SMB and enterprise funnels are genuinely different problems. Territory and account-based work also brings in geo-intelligence, which is its own skill.
What it pays, roughly
$119,995 median, Canada — for Administrative services managers, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $104,000 to $123,718 over 192,795 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Certified Administrator | Salesforce Trailhead | The most concrete credential in this area, and directly useful if you run Salesforce. |
| HubSpot certifications | HubSpot Academy | Free, practical, and the right one if that is your stack. |
| Google Analytics certification | Google Skillshop | Attribution literacy; table stakes rather than a differentiator. |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Nobody. One spreadsheet, maintained by the founder, with the stages written down.
Part of the GTM lead's job, or a contractor for a fortnight to set the CRM up properly. The deliverable is small and permanent: stage definitions, required fields, and a dashboard finance agrees with.
A real seat. Owns the CRM, the funnel definitions, the forecast process, territory and quota mechanics, and the attribution model — and is the one person allowed to change what a stage means.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Head of Go-to-Market (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Marketing Manager
- Chief Financial Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Director of Data (Technology)
RevOps sits deliberately between marketing, sales and finance, and in a small company it merges with any one of them. Marketing is the usual home and the usual go-between — it already owns the top of the funnel and talks to finance about budget — while HR sits adjacent, because quota, commission and headcount planning are built from the same numbers. Wherever it reports, the definitions must be owned in one place.
Keep separate from
Whoever is measured by the pipeline should not also be the person who defines what counts as pipeline.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Asks who currently disagrees about the numbers, and why
- Writes definitions down and gets them signed off
- Cleans data before building a dashboard on it
Red flags
- Buys tools before fixing definitions
- Reports attribution with more confidence than the data supports
- No relationship with finance
What this role runs on
The software categories this seat lives in, each linked to the screen of who sells it — the incumbent, the challengers and what the lock-in is.