Ratios are a big part of budget planning. And with budget season upon us, it’s a topic that seems to be top of mind for many (I don’t think I’ve fielded as many questions on the topic as I have recently - possibly because budgets are being scrutinized like it’s 2009). Ops ratios are particularly tricky since the role of ops continues to evolve and varies across companies.
A handful of benchmarks exist (and often repeated). Sales ops at 15:1 is a common one. But what is included in the 15? and what is the role of that 1?
Below are my thoughts on ratios, and some context that I hope is helpful. Applicable for b2b enterprise companies, and generally relevant starting at ~$30M+ ARR.
#salesops. 30:1
Most industry commentary has sales ops ratios at 15:1. I've broken out tech/processes and analytics from core sales ops, which allows the 30:1. The sales side includes all AEs + sales mgmt, and the ops side includes anyone aligned to support those functions - excluding specific roles like comp/quota (if separately staffed). Like other ops roles, this ratio will scale towards 50:1 as you climb to $1bn. For organizations looking to hire sales ops for the first time, you’ll need a minimum of two (one for strategy and the other to be in the weeds - and always hire the strategy person first). For alignment, a senior ops leader partners with the head of sales, and then an ops resource aligned to each of the sales leader’s direct reports who manages a team of ~50+.
Sales Dev Ops. 50:1
SDR/BDR/ADR + mgmt. This role becomes a requirement when the sales dev headcount approaches 50, and the role can scale to 100:1.
Quota / Capacity Ops. 200:1
Managing quotas / comp plans. 200:1 (comp plans per FTE). If you don’t have a comp tool in place, reduce that by up to half.
SE/SC Ops (sales engineer / sales consultant). 50:1
One of the more nuanced and challenging ops roles that generally doesn’t appear until later stages. Becomes a requirement around 50 headcount, and can scale to 100:1.
#marketingops. 8:1
This team often helps deliver on campaigns and is more of an extension of the marketing org than some of the other ops roles. Same as with Sales Ops, a minimum of 2 required by the time $50M+ is realistic. By $100M, this team needs ~4 FTEs, and figure adding one more every $150M-ish. This tends to relate to an 8:1 ratio with marketing headcount, which I've found to be fairly standard. You’ll know it if you don’t have enough.
#csops. 30:1
Customer success being one of the more underserved parts of an enterprise organization relative to its impact on the business, and not as many cool technologies to support them either. Similar to sales ops, resources are aligned to the senior leader and any other leader that has a 50+ team and/or has distinct needs, like renewals or services. Hence the ratios are similar. This role also scales up to 50:1 when approaching $1bn.
#partnerops. 15:1
Partner organizations can vary dramatically, but require their own focus on reporting, infrastructure and planning. Metrics, attribution are all unique, and building out a Partner operating plan is a big undertaking. PRM is a thing now, but still the partner ecosystem is as underserved as customer success, maybe more-so, but that’s been changing over the last few years.
#enablement. 40:1
People know the word “enablement’, and often apply it to everything related to sales or cs execution needs. The reality is that enablement is a deceivingly difficult role to do well, and requires the entire organization to be bought in on enablement as a strategy. Areas that deserve enablement resources: role-based skill enablement (sales, CS, sales dev, managers), onboarding, content, tech enablement, events (e.g. kickoffs), communications, regional alignment, etc. Minimum of 4 by $50M. 50:1 once programs are built and sustainable.
The other ops-related orgs which are too nuanced to have standard ratios (yet):
This is your source of truth. Hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are. In the perfect world, I would align resources to each of the following: marketing, sales, cs, partners, product, pipeline, data management, data systems, product, exec reporting, and a few for deep deep deep, room with no windows deep, analysis. You’ll keep adding junior members under these core pillars as needs grow. This is another role when you’ll know when you don’t have enough. You’ll need 2 to start (functional and data management), and most likely need at least the list above by the time you crest $100M.
This is the team focused on tech stack, processes and pmo. Really difficult to outline a ratio, and I’ll exclude CRM to keep focus. Ideally at least one for each GTM org (marketing, sales, cs) and a pm to help manage all the joint efforts. This team can generally each support 1 major application and handful of smaller ones, and due to the specific nature of the tech stack within each GTM org, it often helps to have the team specialized. Ratios just really depend on what you have and what you’re trying to do. Sorry, not super helpful I know.
Deal Desk (deal strategy) and Deal Admin (deal processing) can scale dramatically if the right processes and technologies are there to support them. I’ve seen these teams support anywhere from 100 to 3,000 transactions each per quarter. Yeah, that’s a big disparity.
This team or person aligns to PDE, a group often overlooked by ops teams. Think about the needs of your product organization - why wouldn't they have an ops resource? If you have analytics support, you can live with 1 product ops resource for every sizable product line you maintain.
Ultimately, you’ll never have as many resources as you need, so prioritization of what the team focuses on will be paramount for success. And building / scaling always requires more resources than when everything is already built. Good luck.
