Today I analyzed 2,500 B2B software companies to better understand Rev Ops teams sizes, sales ratios, and how things change by stage.

You can flip a summary deck and/or comment on LinkedIn here.​

Let's go through the analysis and some take aways...

Small Teams, High Leverage

Rev Ops is a small, but important part of the modern GTM org. Rev Ops headcount is less than 1% of total B2B Software company headcount in our sample.

In aggregate we see a 12:1 overall ratio of Sales Reps (AE+SDR) to Rev Ops. That's 7,700 Rev Ops people supporting 91,000 sellers in our sample list of companies. This chart shows the average of Rev Ops as a % of total headcount and sales rep headcount.

Removing team sizes of 0 from our ratios, we can get a better sense for the ratios by stage. Startups that invest in Rev Ops ahead of the curve will naturally have lower ratio of sales to Rev Ops headcount.

Rev Ops vs Sales Headcount

Generally, Rev Ops headcount correlates with Sales Rep headcount, but there is a wide variance from the average, on both sides. Like most things, there are many factors to consider and no one "right way" to build Rev Ops as you grow sales.

Sales : Rev Ops headcount ratios go up (less Rev Ops per seller) as companies scale, especially when they pass 1,000 employees. In high-growth environments, Rev Ops teams may feel increasing pressure/workload to support bigger sales teams.

When should you build a dedicated team?

A relatively small number of early stage startups have dedicated Rev Ops teams. Anecdotally, I've seen a lot of good things come from hiring these roles early, but it's not the "common" playbook. It climbs pretty fast as companies grow. By 200 employees almost all B2B companies have hired an internal Rev Ops team.

I suspect that the early stage Rev Ops duties are covered in a combination of two ways: A.) Sales managers, demand gen marketers, and business generalists do the job but don’t hold the title; B.) Consultants, advisors, and contractors fulfill the function.

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Note on methodology:

For the purpose of this analysis we counted titles that include revenue ops, sales ops, and related (wide range of common titles), but did not include marketing ops titles. While many GTM orgs now centralized MOPs inside of Rev Ops, we focused on the more sales-centric part of Rev Ops for this analysis.

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I’m planning more GTM org benchmarking and analysis like this, powered by Keyplay's new org insights.

What else would you like to see from this data?

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Best,
Adam

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