ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Companies hire 14 sellers for every person who builds the system
Not a survey. Every number here comes from counting the open requisitions companies publish themselves.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Not a survey. Every number here comes from counting the open requisitions companies publish themselves.
14:1
Sellers hired per operator
Across every open requisition in the sample, 29 seller roles against 2 revenue operations roles.
67%
Hiring 2+ sellers with zero ops
Of companies adding two or more sellers, two thirds had nobody building the system those sellers work inside.
83%
And no sales leader either
The same group, with no open sales leadership requisition. The founder is still running sales.
A company can buy selling capacity in a week. It takes a quarter to build the thing that makes capacity repeatable. So capacity gets bought and the system gets postponed, and the gap shows up two quarters later as a forecast nobody trusts and a new hire who never ramps.
BENCHMARK YOUR OWN
Two numbers. No email, no signup, nothing stored. The result is a link you can send to whoever needs to see it.
AEs, BDRs, SDRs, account managers
RevOps, sales ops, enablement
METHOD
Companies were identified from public directories, filtered to 15 to 200 employees, then matched to their own applicant tracking system. Every open requisition on each board was classified as a seller role, an operator role, a leadership role, or neither, and counted.
It uses only what companies publish themselves. There is no survey and no self-reported data, which removes the usual problem where the companies that respond are the ones with something to say.
The honest limitation: this first cut covers 23 companies with live boards. That is a pilot, not a census. The ratio is stark enough that the direction is unlikely to reverse, but treat the exact figure as indicative until the sample is larger. It is refreshed as the index grows, and the method above is published so anyone can check it.
Only companies using Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby are visible. Firms on Workday or their own careers page are absent, which likely biases the sample toward venture-backed technology companies.
QUESTIONS THIS RAISES
There is no universal rule, but the ratio is the signal. In StageOne's index of live job postings, B2B companies opened 14 seller requisitions for every one revenue operations requisition. A company hiring four or more sellers with nobody building the system those sellers work inside is adding capacity faster than it is adding the ability to use it.
Revenue operations is the function that owns the system sellers work inside: stage definitions, the CRM record, forecasting, territory and quota design, and the data that tells you which deals are real. Without it, every rep improvises, results cannot be attributed, and a new hire has nothing to ramp into.
Sometimes. It is the right answer when a documented, repeatable motion exists and the constraint is genuinely capacity. It is the wrong and most expensive answer when two reps are hitting for reasons nobody has written down, because you are then buying more of a result you cannot reproduce.
It usually means the founder is still running sales without saying so. That works until the team outgrows the founder's personal attention, typically somewhere between the third and sixth rep, at which point results stop being attributable and hiring becomes a coin flip.
By reading the complete open job list published by companies through their own applicant tracking systems, classifying each requisition as a seller, an operator or a leader role, and counting. It uses only public data published by the companies themselves. No survey, no self-reported responses.
If your ratio came back ugly, that is worth a conversation. If it came back fine, the ratio is not your problem and I will say so.