The First Sales Ops Hire: When to stop building it yourself

2025-12-25 | Sales Systems | by DJC AI Team

Founder-led sales is a beautiful chaos. You are the VP of Sales, the BDR, and the Salesforce Admin all at once.

But there comes a breaking point. You will know it when you spend more time fixing Zapier errors than closing deals.

The question is: Who do you hire first? A VP of Sales to manage the people? Or a Revenue Operations (RevOps) Lead to manage the machine?

The Case for Ops First

Most Founders hire a VP of Sales too early. They bring in a $250k/year leader who expects a fully functioning dashboard, but inherits a broken spreadsheet. The VP fails. The Founder blames the VP.

The Reality: High-performing sales leaders need a machine to drive. They don't build the car; they race it.

You need a mechanic first.

The Trigger Milestones

When should you hire your first Sales Ops / Systems Architect?

1. The "Rep Ratio" Trigger

Rule: 1 Ops person for every 5-7 Quota Carriers.
If you have 5 reps and no Ops, your reps are spending 20% of their time playing data-entry clerk. That is expensive.

2. The "Complexity" Trigger

If your tech stack has > 5 tools (CRM + Outreach + ZoomInfo + Gong + Slack), you need a dedicated owner.
If you don't owner it, integrations will break. And when they break, leads drop.

3. The "Data Truth" Trigger

When you and your Co-Founder have different numbers for "Last Month's Revenue."
This means your Single Source of Truth has split. You need a librarian to fix it.

What This Person Does

Do not hire a "Salesforce Admin." That is too narrow. Hire a "Revenue Architect."

Their OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) should be:

Forecast Accuracy: Getting the CRM to reflect reality (see Chapter 2).
Rep Efficiency: Removing clicks. Reducing admin time from 10 hours/week to 2 hours/week.
Data Integrity: Ensuring no field is left blank.

Summary

Building a sales team without Sales Ops is like building a skyscraper without an elevator. You can do it, but getting to the top is going to be exhausting.

Hire the mechanic before the race car driver.

DJC System is designed with all these in mind.