Senior Manager, GTM Business Systems

Overview

You own the business systems infrastructure for Affirm's go-to-market org—primarily Salesforce, but also the 10-15 tools that feed into it (Outreach, Gong, LeanData, etc.). You're managing configurations, building reports for the VP of Sales, troubleshooting why leads aren't routing correctly, and deciding whether to build custom solutions or buy another tool. You report to Alex Stowell (RevOps Leader) and likely manage 1-2 Salesforce admins or analysts.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (IPO Jan 2021, raised $1.7B+ before going public)

Size: 3,030 employees

Growth: Expanding capital partnerships (New York Life deal in Oct 2025), applying for banking charter, competing hard in crowded BNPL space

Market Position: One of the big 3-4 BNPL players (with Klarna, Afterpay, Sezzle). Differentiate on "no hidden fees" and 0% APR vs credit cards, but merchant fees are higher than competitors—common objection for sales team.

GTM Reality

Who You're Supporting:

• Merchant sales AEs selling Affirm integrations to e-commerce brands (Shopify, BigCommerce, custom builds)
• SDR/BDR teams doing outbound to mid-market and enterprise retailers
• Likely 50-100+ sellers across multiple segments (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)

Current State (5 months into buildout):

• Alex joined 5 months ago, so RevOps is being rebuilt/professionalized
• Systems were likely messy before—expect technical debt and "we've always done it this way" inertia
• Sales team probably has workarounds and shadow processes you'll need to uncover

Tech Stack You'll Own:

• Salesforce (core CRM)
• Likely: Outreach/Salesloft (sales engagement), Gong (conversation intelligence), LeanData or similar (lead routing), Tableau or Looker (BI layer), maybe ZoomInfo/6sense for prospecting data
• Integration nightmare: Affirm's product data (merchant onboarding, transaction volumes) needs to flow into SFDC for account health scoring

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Salesforce Config (30%) | Reporting/Dashboards (25%) | Stakeholder Mgmt (20%) | Firefighting (15%) | Strategy/Roadmap (10%)

Key Activities

• Salesforce Administration: Building custom objects for merchant pipeline stages, fixing broken validation rules that block deal creation, managing profiles/permissions for 6 different sales roles, updating page layouts when Product changes how integrations are packaged.

• Reporting & Dashboards: Building pipeline reports for the CRO's QBRs, creating conversion funnels from MQL→SQL→Opp→Closed Won, troubleshooting why AE activity reports don't match what's in Outreach, maintaining forecast accuracy reports that leadership actually trusts.

• Tool Integrations: Managing the Outreach↔Salesforce sync (which breaks monthly), setting up Gong data to flow into SFDC for deal coaching, integrating merchant onboarding data from Affirm's internal systems so AEs can see which merchants are actually processing transactions.

• Stakeholder Management: Sitting in weekly syncs with Sales Ops, Product Ops, and Finance to align on definitions (when is a merchant "live"?), fielding Slack messages from AEs who can't find their accounts, saying "no" to custom report requests that would take 40 hours, negotiating with IT on API rate limits.

• Process Optimization: Documenting lead routing logic (inbound signups go to SMB team, outbound enterprise goes to named AEs), building automation to auto-assign merchant renewals, creating hygiene rules so reps can't move deals to Closed Won without required fields.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Technical Debt: You're inheriting a system that grew fast without governance. Expect duplicate records, fields nobody remembers creating, reports that are "close enough," and integrations held together with duct tape.

• Conflicting Stakeholder Demands: Sales wants speed and flexibility ("just give me the data"), Finance wants accuracy and controls ("nothing closes without PO number"), Product wants simplicity ("stop adding custom fields"). You're the person who has to say no and get yelled at.

• Always Behind: The backlog of requests will never get to zero. Every new sales play ("we're doing an ABM motion into retail now") means rebuilding objects, reports, and workflows. You'll constantly be triaging.

• Firefighting Tax: Systems break at the worst times—lead routing fails during a big campaign launch, Outreach stops syncing before month-end, a rep accidentally mass-deleted 500 accounts. You'll spend 15-20% of your time on unplanned emergencies.

What Success Looks Like

• System Uptime: Salesforce and core integrations work 99%+ of the time. Reps trust that data is accurate and can run their day without Slack-bombing you.

• Forecast Accuracy: Leadership can make hiring and budgeting decisions because pipeline data is clean and conversion rates are predictable within ±10%.

• Adoption Metrics: Reps actually log activities in Salesforce (80%+ compliance), use the dashboards you built, and follow the processes you designed instead of keeping Excel trackers.

Who You're Supporting

Primary Internal Customers:

• VP of Sales / CRO (needs exec dashboards, forecasting models, board-level reporting)
• Sales Managers (need team performance dashboards, pipeline reviews, coaching insights from Gong)
• AEs and SDRs (need the system to not slow them down—fast account lookup, easy opp creation, mobile access)
• Sales Ops (your peer team—you own systems, they own comp plans and territory design)

What They Care About:

• Sales Leadership: "Can I trust this forecast?" and "Why is our win rate dropping in enterprise?"
• Frontline Reps: "Don't make me click 8 times to log a call" and "Why isn't this lead assigned to me?"
• RevOps Peer Teams: "Can you pull merchant LTV data into SFDC so we can build propensity models?"

Requirements

• 7+ years in Revenue Operations or Business Systems roles, with at least 3 years managing Salesforce at scale (500+ users preferred)
• Experience managing Salesforce admins or analysts—you're not doing all the config yourself, you're owning the roadmap and unblocking your team
• Deep Salesforce knowledge: custom objects, validation rules, Process Builder/Flow, API integrations, data modeling for complex sales orgs
• Familiarity with GTM tech stack: Outreach/Salesloft, Gong/Chorus, LeanData, ZoomInfo, BI tools (Tableau/Looker)
• Comfortable with SQL for pulling data from data warehouses (Snowflake/BigQuery)
• Ability to translate between technical teams ("the API rate limit is 10K calls/day") and sales teams ("you can sync 2,000 contacts per hour max")
• Experience in fast-growth or public tech companies where systems have to scale quickly
• Thick skin—you'll get blamed when things break and rarely thanked when they work
• Bonus: Experience in fintech, payments, or two-sided marketplace companies where you're tracking both merchant and consumer data