Business Analyst (Revenue Operations)

Overview

You'll work on Zappi's RevOps team pulling data from Salesforce, their product analytics platform, and billing systems to create reports and dashboards. Most requests come from the VP of Sales, finance, or account executives trying to understand customer health or pipeline trends. You're analyzing how a SaaS company sells market research software to big CPG brands.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth stage (315 employees, established customer base)

Size: 315 employees

Growth: Actively hiring across multiple roles, indicates expansion mode

Market Position: Established player in consumer insights/market research software - competing against traditional research firms and newer tech platforms

Customer Base: Large CPG brands (Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola types) with real budgets for market research

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Data Pulls & Analysis (40%) | Report Building (30%) | Meetings/Ad-hoc Requests (20%) | Documentation (10%)

Key Activities

• Pulling pipeline reports: Sales leadership asks "show me all deals over $100K that slipped this quarter" - you write SQL queries, join tables, clean data, and send them a spreadsheet. This happens multiple times per week.
• Building retention dashboards: You track which customers are using the platform, renewal rates by segment, expansion revenue trends. You refresh these monthly and present findings to leadership.
• Analyzing sales productivity: How many calls are SDRs making? What's the demo-to-close rate by rep? You dig into activity data to find patterns and spot underperformers.
• Ad-hoc investigations: An AE loses a big deal and leadership wants to know why - you pull all the activities, emails, call recordings to piece together what happened. Or finance needs to forecast Q4 revenue and you model it based on historical close rates.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Data quality issues: Salesforce data is messy. Reps don't update stages consistently, deal amounts change without notes, contacts are duplicated. You spend time cleaning before you can analyze.
• Ambiguous requests: Someone asks for "pipeline health" but doesn't define what that means. You build a report, they say "not quite what I meant," and you rebuild it. Happens constantly.
• Repetitive work: Same reports every week/month with slightly different parameters. You're not doing cutting-edge analytics - you're pulling numbers so others can make decisions.
• Low visibility: You're a support function. When sales hits their number, the AEs get credit. When they miss, no one blames the data quality.
• Meeting overload: Every department wants to review their metrics with you. Your calendar fills up with "quick syncs" that aren't quick.

What Success Looks Like

• Leadership stops asking you to pull numbers because the dashboards you built answer their questions automatically
• You catch a data trend (e.g., "demos scheduled on Fridays convert 20% worse") that changes how the team operates
• Your pipeline forecast is within 5% of actual results for three quarters straight
• You automate a weekly report that used to take 4 hours into a 10-minute refresh

Who You're Supporting

Primary Stakeholders:

• VP Sales Strategy & Operations (your boss)
• Sales leadership (VPs, Directors who need board reports)
• Account Executives (want to understand their territory/accounts)
• Finance team (need revenue forecasts)

What They Care About:

• Is pipeline growing or shrinking?
• Which reps are performing and which need help?
• What's our renewal rate and are customers expanding?
• Can we hit our revenue target this quarter?
• Why did specific deals close or fall apart?

The Day-to-Day Tech Stack

You'll Live In:

• Excel/Google Sheets: 50% of your output ends up in spreadsheets
• Salesforce: Source of truth for deals, activities, pipeline
• SQL: To pull data from their data warehouse (they probably use Snowflake or similar)
• BI Tool: Tableau, Looker, or Power BI for dashboards

You'll Sometimes Use:

• Product analytics platform (Amplitude, Mixpanel) to see how customers use Zappi
• Billing system (Stripe, Zuora) for revenue/churn data
• Gong or Chorus if they record sales calls

Requirements

• Excel comfort: You need to know pivot tables, VLOOKUP/INDEX-MATCH, basic formulas cold. They'll test this.
• SQL basics: Can you write SELECT statements with WHERE clauses and JOINs? They want someone who can learn their schema and pull data independently.
• Intellectual curiosity: They said "gets excited about finding insights" - they want someone who digs into anomalies, not just runs reports robotically.
• Communication skills: You'll present findings to senior people who don't care about your methodology. Can you distill "here's what the data says" into 3 bullets?
• Meticulous attention to detail: One wrong number in a board report and you lose credibility. You need to double-check everything.
• Sense of humor: RevOps can be thankless - you need to laugh when a VP asks for a report at 4pm Friday that requires 3 hours of work.
• East Coast based: They want someone in EST timezone, probably because the sales team is NYC-based and you'll need to sync with them.

Career Path

What This Leads To:

• Senior Analyst → RevOps Manager → Director of RevOps
• Pivot to sales strategy, enablement, or operations leadership
• Some people go into product management (you understand customer behavior from the data)

What It Doesn't Lead To:

• You won't become a sales rep from this (different skill set)
• Not a path to data science/ML engineering (you're doing business analytics, not modeling)

Real Talk: This is a good entry point if you want to understand how B2B SaaS companies actually work without the pressure of carrying quota. You'll learn the entire customer lifecycle, what makes deals close, and how companies scale. But it's a support role - you're not in the arena, you're keeping score.