When should a company hire RevOps versus a sales manager?

Q: When should a company hire RevOps versus a sales manager?

Hire a sales manager when the problem is the people: reps need coaching, targets need owning, someone needs to run the Monday meeting and the hard conversations. Hire, or rent, RevOps when the problem is the system: nobody agrees what the stages mean, the CRM is worked around, follow-up depends on memory, and the forecast is a guess. Under about twenty people, most founder-led businesses need the system built first, because a manager hired into no system spends their first quarter building one badly.

The answer, firstHire a sales manager when the problem is the people: reps need coaching, targets need owning, someone needs to run the Monday meeting and the hard conversations. Hire, or rent, RevOps when the problem is the system: nobody agrees what the stages mean, the CRM is worked around, follow-up depends on memory, and the forecast is a guess. Under about twenty people, most founder-led businesses need the system built first, because a manager hired into no system spends their first quarter building one badly.

Chanel Greeff · 23 August 2026 · 3 min read

The two jobs, side by side

Question	Sales manager	RevOps / sales ops
Works on	The people	The system
Typical week	1:1s, deal coaching, pipeline meeting, hiring	Stage design, CRM build, automation, reporting, onboarding
Measured by	Team quota attainment	Conversion, cycle time, forecast accuracy, adoption
Full-time at	4–6+ reps	Usually 15–25+ reps; fractional below that
Wrong hire looks like	A manager building spreadsheets instead of coaching	A systems person being asked to hit a number

Why the order matters

A good manager hired into a business with no process does one of two things. Either they build the process themselves, slowly, while also being expected to hit a number, and you’ve paid a manager’s salary for six months of systems work they weren’t hired for. Or they don’t, and they manage by instinct on top of the same tribal knowledge the founder had, and the ceiling moves from one person’s head to another’s.

Build the system first, with the founder’s method written down while it’s still one person’s method. Then the manager inherits a process to run rather than a mess to fix, and their first quarter is coaching.

The fractional middle

Below fifteen or twenty reps, a full-time RevOps hire is hard to justify and a full-time manager may be premature. That gap is what I work in: the system built as flat-priced fixes, then maintained part-time with Keep it running, with the founder or a senior rep running the people until a manager earns their seat. It’s also the cleanest handover when that manager arrives: they get a working engine and a person who can explain it.

The honest tell

If you’re about to hire a manager because “someone needs to get the CRM sorted”, you don’t need a manager yet. If you’re about to hire RevOps because “the reps aren’t hitting target and nobody’s holding them to it”, you don’t need RevOps; you need a manager, and possibly a conversation. The first call I have with anyone is mostly working out which of those two sentences they’re actually saying.

When should a company hire RevOps versus a sales manager?

The two jobs, side by side

Why the order matters

The fractional middle

The honest tell

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