RevOps Lead

50-person performance agency

Outcome

Sales cycle reduced by 30%

Client context

The agency had scaled from a five-person founding team to 50 staff across two offices in under four years, running paid media retainers for mid-market e-commerce brands. Average retainer value sat around £8,500 a month, with the top decile of clients well above £20K. The book had grown almost entirely on referrals and inbound from the founders' personal networks, and the new business pipeline was tracked across a HubSpot account that three different people had set up at three different times. Forecast accuracy was a running joke at leadership meetings. Utilization across the delivery team hovered between 62% and 91% depending on which spreadsheet you looked at, and the finance lead had stopped trusting the project profitability reports a year earlier. Annual revenue was on track to land near £5.2M, but margin had compressed for two consecutive years and nobody could say with confidence which client cohorts were actually carrying the P&L.

The challenge

The MD had never hired a RevOps person before and was genuinely unsure what the role should look like inside a service business. He had spoken to two SaaS RevOps leaders through his network, both of whom had walked him through Marketo and Salesforce workflows that bore very little resemblance to how a performance agency actually made money. He told us he did not want a CRM admin and he did not want a strategy consultant. He wanted someone who would own the entire revenue stack from first touch through renewal, and who understood that capacity planning and project margin mattered as much as deal conversion. The cost of the wrong hire was visible on every leadership dashboard. Sales cycle had stretched from 38 days to 61 days inside a year, and two recent six-figure deals had stalled in late stage because nobody on the commercial team could give the prospect a clean answer about delivery capacity.

Search strategy

We spent the first 48 hours with the MD and the head of new business reshaping the job, not just the scorecard. The role was redrawn around four owned outcomes: pipeline accuracy inside a 10% variance, sales cycle compression, monthly utilization reporting that the delivery team actually trusted, and per-client gross margin visibility by retainer tier. Once the role was real, the search was fast. We mapped 47 candidates across UK independent agencies in the 30 to 150 headcount range, plus a small cohort of operations leaders inside MarTech and AdTech vendors who had agency client-side experience. 22 were approached, 9 had substantive first conversations, 5 went through a structured RevOps-specific case study using the agency's own anonymized data, and 3 were presented to the MD on day seven. Every finalist had personally implemented HubSpot or similar inside a service business with at least 30 commercial users.

Result

The new RevOps Lead inherited a stack that nobody owned and an organization that had stopped trusting its own numbers. In her first 30 days she rebuilt the HubSpot pipeline stages, removed 11 dead deals, and instituted a weekly forecast call with the new business team where every deal had to have an exit criterion. By day 60 she had launched a capacity dashboard that the delivery team helped build, which immediately surfaced two account managers who were running at 110% and two who were under 70%. By day 90 the average sales cycle had compressed from 61 days to 42, a 31% reduction, and forecast variance was inside 8%. The MD told us the unlock was less about tools and more about a single person who would not let a deal move forward without clean data. She has since taken on commercial finance responsibilities as well and reports directly to the MD.