Revenue Operations Lead

Overview

You're the first dedicated RevOps person at a 128-person cloud infrastructure startup. Your job is to take what's currently founder-led sales and turn it into a predictable revenue machine with clean data, accurate forecasting (±5-10%), and repeatable processes. You'll spend your days in Salesforce/HubSpot fixing pipeline hygiene, building dashboards, analyzing where deals stall, and sitting in planning meetings with Sales, CS, and leadership.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Likely Series A/B (128 employees, active hiring, no funding data available)

Size: 128 employees

Growth: Hiring first RevOps lead signals GTM scaling phase

Market Position: Niche player in cloud cost optimization space - competes with manual processes, cloud-native tools, and FinOps platforms

Product: Lucidity AutoScaler dynamically resizes block storage across AWS, Azure, and GCP. They're selling cost savings (up to 70% storage reduction) and operational efficiency (no manual provisioning, zero downtime resizing). Buyers are cloud/platform engineering teams and FinOps.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• Unknown mix - likely transitioning from founder network and inbound interest to structured outbound
• Product appears technical enough to require education, so not pure PLG
• Storage cost pain is measurable, so likely some assessment tool creates leads

Sales Structure: Currently founder-led or small AE team - your job is to formalize it

SE Support: Unknown, but product is technical (cloud infrastructure)

Your Reality: You're building this from scratch. Expect messy CRM data, inconsistent stage definitions, unreliable forecasts, and sales reps doing their own thing.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors:

• Cloud-native tools (AWS EBS optimization, Azure disk management)
• FinOps platforms (CloudHealth, Cloudability)
• Manual processes and scripting

How They Differentiate: Multi-cloud coverage (AWS, Azure, GCP), automated resizing with zero downtime, no manual engineering work required

Common Objections:

• "We can build this internally"
• "Our cloud spend isn't big enough to justify another tool"
• Security/access concerns (tool needs cloud infrastructure permissions)
• Change management risk

Win Themes: Proven ROI, fast implementation, zero-downtime operations, frees up engineering time

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

CRM/Data Cleanup (30%) | Reporting/Analysis (25%) | Process Design (20%) | Meetings/Enablement (25%)

Key Activities

• Fix and maintain CRM hygiene: You'll spend significant time cleaning up Salesforce/HubSpot data - fixing stage classifications, closing duplicate accounts, enforcing required fields, and training reps to update opportunities properly. This is unglamorous but critical work.

• Build and own forecasting: Create weekly/monthly forecast models, sit in pipeline reviews with leadership, explain variances, and push back when sales forecasts don't match historical data. You're the person saying "that's going to slip" when everyone wants to believe the deal will close.

• Analyze deal velocity and bottlenecks: Pull reports on time-in-stage, conversion rates, win/loss reasons, and cycle time by segment. Present findings to leadership with specific recommendations ("We lose 40% of deals in security review - we need a standard response doc").

• Design and document revenue processes: Write out lead-to-cash workflows, define stage criteria, create mutual action plans, build territory assignment rules. Lots of Confluence/Notion documentation that people will initially ignore until you enforce it.

• Partner with Sales, CS, and Marketing on alignment: Sit in weekly meetings with each team. Handle lead routing disputes, define MQL criteria, figure out when CS should get involved, build commission calculators, and generally be the translator between teams with competing priorities.

• Manage tools and integrations: Own Salesforce, HubSpot, or whatever CRM they use. Manage integrations with marketing automation, sales engagement tools, billing systems. Troubleshoot when Slack alerts aren't firing or Zapier breaks.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're building from zero with limited resources: There's no RevOps team, no documented processes, no clean historical data. You'll spend months just getting to baseline before you can optimize anything. It's lonely work.

• Sales reps will resist your processes: They're used to doing things their way. Getting them to update Salesforce consistently, follow stage criteria, and submit forecast updates weekly will be like herding cats. You'll need exec support to enforce anything.

• The data will lie to you constantly: Reps mark deals as "closing this month" that have no signed MSA. Stages don't match reality. Old opps sit in pipeline forever. Historical win rates are meaningless because definitions changed. You'll spend weeks cleaning data before you can trust any analysis.

• You're working 2pm-11pm IST for US overlap: Most of your stakeholders are in US timezones. You're on calls late, missing context from Slack threads that happen during your morning, and always playing catch-up.

• Technical product with complex buying process: Cloud infrastructure tools have long evaluation cycles with security reviews, POCs, procurement. Forecasting is hard when deals can stall for 6 weeks waiting on InfoSec approval.

What Success Looks Like

• Forecast accuracy improves from ±40% to ±5-10%: Leadership can actually plan hiring and spending based on your revenue predictions
• Sales cycle decreases by 20-30%: You identify bottlenecks and build processes to move deals faster
• Win rate increases: Better qualification, clearer ICP, tighter handoffs between teams
• CRM becomes source of truth: Reps actually use it, data is clean, execs trust the dashboards you build

Who You're Working With

Internal Stakeholders:

• Sales Team: 3-8 AEs (estimate based on company size) who need pipeline management, forecasting support, deal desk help
• Customer Success: Renewal tracking, expansion pipeline, churn analysis
• Marketing: Lead quality analysis, MQL definitions, attribution modeling
• Finance: Revenue recognition, bookings vs. collections, commission calculations
• Leadership: Weekly forecast reviews, board reporting, strategic planning

What They Care About:

• Sales wants: Accurate quota setting, fast territory assignments, commission clarity, tools that don't slow them down
• CS wants: Clear handoff process, expansion pipeline visibility, churn early warning
• Marketing wants: Proof their campaigns drive revenue, clear lead SLAs from sales
• Finance wants: Clean bookings data, accurate accruals, no surprises
• Leadership wants: Predictable revenue, visibility into pipeline health, data-driven decisions

Requirements

• 6-8 years in B2B SaaS RevOps/Sales Ops: You've done this before at a scaling startup. You know what good looks like and can build it yourself.
• Cloud/Infrastructure/DevTools experience required: This isn't SMB SaaS. Buyers are technical, sales cycles involve security reviews and POCs, and you need to understand the problem space.
• Strong CRM and data skills: Salesforce admin-level knowledge, comfortable with SQL or spreadsheet modeling, can build reports and dashboards from scratch.
• Comfort with ambiguity and building from scratch: There's no playbook here. You're figuring it out as you go with minimal guidance.
• US timezone overlap mandatory: 2pm-11pm IST shift requirement is non-negotiable for this role.
• Process design and documentation: You can write clear SOPs, build workflows, and get teams to actually follow them (with exec backing).
• Cross-functional communication: You'll be in constant meetings with Sales, CS, Marketing, Finance. Need to translate between teams and manage conflicting priorities diplomatically.