Sales Strategy & Operations Lead

Overview

You sit at the intersection of sales leadership, finance, and product teams to design the commercial strategy and operational frameworks for Google's sales organization. This means building territory models, setting quotas, analyzing pipeline health, and shaping how new products get sold. You're in lots of meetings with VPs and Directors, but you also spend significant time in spreadsheets and building executive-ready presentations.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (Alphabet - $1.7T+ market cap)

Size: 330,000+ employees globally

Growth: Mature but still expanding - hiring for AI/Cloud growth areas

Market Position: Dominant in Search/Ads, growing in Cloud (competing with AWS/Azure), launching AI products aggressively

GTM Reality

What This Role Supports:

• Google has multiple GTM motions: SMB self-serve, mid-market sales teams, enterprise strategic accounts
• Cloud sales is heavily consultative with long cycles; Ads has more transactional SMB motion
• Strategy & Ops builds the infrastructure that makes all of this run

Your Stakeholders:

• Sales VPs and Directors who need data to make decisions
• Finance teams who own headcount and budget
• Product teams launching new offerings who need go-to-market plans
• HR/Compensation teams on comp design

Competitive Landscape

Context You Need to Understand:

• Google Cloud competes with AWS (market leader) and Azure - you need to understand competitor sales motions
• For Ads, competition is Meta, Amazon, TikTok - different buying dynamics
• Sales teams face "why not AWS?" or "why not Meta ads?" constantly - your strategy work influences how reps position

Strategic Challenges:

• How to allocate quota across products (Search/Cloud/YouTube/etc.)
• Whether to hire more AEs or invest in SDRs/SEs
• How to comp reps when selling multi-product deals

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Meetings/Stakeholder Management (40%) | Analysis/Modeling (35%) | Presentations/Docs (25%)

Key Activities

• Territory Planning: Build models for how to carve up accounts and assign quotas. This involves analyzing historical performance, market potential, and arguing with sales leaders who all want the best territories.
• Strategic Projects: Work on "big bet" initiatives - like how to structure the sales org for a new AI product, or whether to change the commission structure. These are high-visibility but move slowly through approvals.
• Pipeline & Forecast Analysis: Pull Salesforce data, analyze pipeline health, identify gaps, present findings to leadership. Lots of SQL queries and Looker dashboards.
• Cross-functional Alignment: Endless meetings coordinating between sales, product, finance, and HR. You're often the translator between technical teams and sales leadership.
• Process Design: Build playbooks, define stages in the sales process, create frameworks that hundreds of sellers will use. Then manage change management when people don't want to adopt new processes.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Bureaucracy: Getting anything approved at Google takes forever. Multiple layers of review, stakeholders who need to weigh in, legal/finance/privacy checks. A project that should take 4 weeks takes 4 months.
• Data Complexity: Google's data infrastructure is powerful but fragmented. You'll spend time just figuring out which database has the numbers you need and why three different systems don't match.
• Stakeholder Politics: Sales leaders all want what's best for their team, not necessarily what's optimal company-wide. You're stuck mediating competing interests with limited authority.
• Ambiguity: "Big bets" and "bold change" means you're often working on problems without clear answers. You need to be comfortable making recommendations with imperfect information.
• Pace: Google moves slower than startups. If you're used to fast iteration, this will be frustrating. Everything is measured, reviewed, and socialized extensively.

What Success Looks Like

• You ship a major strategic initiative (new comp plan, re-org, GTM strategy for new product) that gets exec buy-in
• Sales leaders actually use the frameworks and tools you build
• You get pulled into high-stakes conversations because people trust your analysis
• You move from reactive (answering ad-hoc questions) to proactive (shaping strategy before it's asked for)

Who You're Working With

Internal Stakeholders:

• Sales VPs/Directors: Your primary customers - they need data and recommendations to hit their numbers
• Finance Teams: They control budget and headcount - you need their approval on anything with cost implications
• Product/Engineering: They build what you're creating go-to-market plans for
• Other Strat/Ops Teams: Google has multiple strategy and ops functions - you'll coordinate with them

What They Care About:

• Sales leaders: "Will this help me hit my number?" and "Is this fair to my team?"
• Finance: "What's the ROI?" and "Can we afford this?"
• Product: "Will sales actually sell this?" and "What feedback are you hearing from the field?"

Requirements

• 5-8+ years experience in sales operations, strategy consulting, or corporate strategy (investment banking/MBB consulting backgrounds are common)
• Strong quantitative skills - you need to build territory models, forecast scenarios, analyze pipeline data
• Executive presence - you'll present to VPs and SVPs regularly
• Stakeholder management - ability to influence without authority and navigate corporate politics
• Experience with Salesforce, SQL, and data visualization tools (Looker, Tableau)
• Comfortable with ambiguity and driving projects without clear instructions
• Bias for action despite slow-moving environment - you need to find ways to make progress even when things are blocked