Revenue Operations
RevOps for the First Marketing Hire
Your first marketing hire should set up RevOps before they run a single campaign. Here is the 30-day playbook.
The first marketing hire at a Series A or Series B company has one job in their first 30 days: set up RevOps. Not run campaigns. Not build a brand. Set up the data infrastructure that every future program will sit on top of.
The 30-day RevOps checklist: connect CRM and marketing automation cleanly, define lead source taxonomy, define lifecycle stages (Lead, MQL, SAL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer), instrument lead routing, set up basic attribution (first touch, multi touch), build a single source-of-truth pipeline dashboard, define the weekly marketing-to-sales SLA, and document everything.
Skipping this step is the single most common cause of first-marketing-hire failure. The leader runs campaigns, generates leads, but cannot tell anyone what is working, where pipeline is coming from, or whether their work matters. Six months later, they get fired and the founder concludes 'marketing does not work.' Marketing does work. RevOps was missing.
If you are the first marketing hire, push back hard on any pressure to run campaigns in your first 30 days. The cost of building RevOps later is 10x the cost of building it first. The compounding return on a clean data foundation across the next 24 months is the difference between a measurable function and a guess.