Is your forecast a number or an opinion?
Do your Reps each describe a qualified opportunity a little differently?
Does a new Account Executive take a full quarter to explain the product to a sceptical buyer?
If so, you may be missing someone. The harder question is who, and when.
Let's Dive In!
Why operations gets ignored until it hurts
Most security vendors reach Series A on founder credibility and a small group of strong sellers. The CRM is a shared habit, not a system. Deals are remembered, not recorded. That works for a while, because the founder is in every important call.
Then the team grows. A second segment appears, a partner starts bringing deals, and the board asks for a forecast it can rely on. Suddenly the person who knows where everything lives is also the person with no time to explain it.
That is usually when a RevOps role gets written down. And, as with most first hires, it gets written as a wish list: CRM admin, analyst, forecaster, deal desk, enablement lead and process designer, all in one person. That person rarely exists.
Start with the pain, not the title
The most useful question is not "do we need RevOps?" It is "what is the most expensive thing we cannot see right now?" The answer usually points to one of three jobs.
The numbers are not trusted. If leadership argues about the data in every pipeline review, you need someone who owns definitions, hygiene and reporting. That is classic sales operations, and it is often the right first hire.
The process is not repeatable. If every deal is run differently, handoffs between SDR, AE, sales engineer and customer success are messy, and nobody can say why deals stall, you need process design more than reporting.
The new starters are slow. If ramp time is the problem, you may need enablement before you need operations. A good enablement lead shortens the distance between a start date and a confident first discovery call.
Be honest about which one hurts most. A single hire can cover two of them at Series A. Rarely all three.
Why security deals make this harder
Security sales cycles are long and multi-threaded. There is a technical evaluation, a security review of the vendor itself, a champion who is not the budget holder, and often a reseller or MSSP in the middle. If none of that is captured consistently, the pipeline report is a work of fiction.
Partner-sourced deals add another wrinkle. Who gets credit, how it is registered and how it affects compensation all need to be written down somewhere. An operations hire who has not seen a channel motion before will learn it on your time.
What to look for in the first hire
A few things matter more than the tooling on a CV:
- Experience on long, multi-stakeholder software deals, not only high-volume transactional selling
- The ability to explain the numbers in plain English to a rep and to a board
- Credibility with sellers, which usually means they have sat close to a live deal
- A preference for the simplest process that works over another system
For enablement, add a quick learner. They do not need to be an engineer, but they do need to understand the product well enough to teach it to someone who has to sell it.
Who they should report to
This catches people out. A RevOps hire who reports into sales will be pulled towards sales priorities. One who reports into finance will be pulled towards control. Neither is wrong, but you should choose deliberately. At Series A and B, most security vendors we speak to put the role close to the VP Sales or CRO, with a clear line to marketing and customer success so the data is not owned by one team.
What the first 90 days should look like
A good first quarter is dull in the best way. Agree the definitions: what counts as a qualified opportunity, a commit and a closed deal. Clean the pipeline against those definitions. Build one weekly report that leadership actually uses. Then, and only then, look at tooling.
The warning sign is a new hire who spends the first month buying software. Systems are easy to add and very hard to remove. Ask in the interview what they would fix with the tools you already have.
Common mistakes
- Hiring a senior systems architect when the real problem is that nobody agrees on definitions
- Asking enablement to fix a positioning problem that belongs to marketing
- Treating partner deals as an afterthought in the reporting
- Writing a job spec that mixes analyst, admin and strategist, then wondering why nobody fits
When it is too early
If you have two or three reps, a clean CRM and a weekly pipeline review that everyone attends, you probably do not need a full-time hire yet. A founder or a sales leader with a clear process can carry it. The signal to move is usually a mix of team size, a second segment, a forecast the board wants to rely on and the founder's own calendar.
Where to go next
Which of those three pains is costing you most right now? If it is not obvious, that is a good conversation to have before you write a job spec.
We recruit RevOps, sales operations and enablement talent for cybersecurity vendors. We do not recruit technical security roles, and we will tell you early if a brief belongs elsewhere.
Iwan Robertson
Global Business Development Manager
