Founders ask me this all the time: "Should my next hire be sales ops?"
My honest answer is usually "not yet." A sales ops hire can't fix a sales process that doesn't exist. What they can do is scale one that already works.
Hire too early, and you'll pay someone $100K+ to build dashboards on top of bad data. Hire too late, and your reps spend a quarter of their week on admin instead of selling.
Here's how to tell which side of the line you're on.
Five signs it's time
1. You have five or more quota-carrying reps. Below five, a good sales manager can own the CRM, reporting and tools. Above that, the admin load starts crowding out coaching.
2. Your sales manager spends more time on reports than on reps. If your sales leader is building spreadsheets on Sunday night, you're paying leadership salary for admin work.
3. Nobody trusts the forecast. When the board number, the CRM number and the manager's gut all disagree, you need someone who owns data quality.
4. Your tools don't talk to each other. Leads fall between marketing and sales. Deals close but CS doesn't hear about it for a week. Someone has to own the plumbing.
5. Comp and territory disputes are eating time. When reps argue about who owns an account or how a deal was credited, you need clear rules and someone to run them.
If three or more of these are true, it's time.
Signs it's too early
- You're under $1M ARR and the founder is still closing most deals
- You don't have written pipeline stages with clear exit criteria
- You're hoping sales ops will "figure out" your process
In those cases, the problem isn't operations. It's that the sales process hasn't been built yet. Fix that first.
What your first sales ops hire should own
Keep the scope tight in year one:
- CRM administration. Stages, fields, required data, hygiene.
- Reporting. A weekly pipeline and forecast view leadership actually uses.
- Tool stack. Integrations, access, and cutting what nobody uses. (See how to audit your sales stack.)
- Comp and territory administration. Tracking attainment, credit rules, payout calculations.
What they shouldn't own: strategy, hiring or coaching. That's the sales leader's job.
Full-time, part-time or fractional?
For most companies between $2M and $5M ARR, a part-time or contract sales ops person works well. Maybe 20 hours a week to clean up the CRM and build reporting, then maintenance mode.
Once you're past roughly $5M ARR with 8 to 10 reps, a full-time hire usually pays for itself in time saved and deals that stop slipping through the cracks.
Build the process first
If you're not sure whether you need ops or a real sales process, that's usually your answer. A fractional VP of Sales can build the process, the stages and the reporting, then help you hire the ops person to run it. Book a free strategy call and we'll figure out which you need.