VP, Revenue Operations

Overview

You'll run revenue operations for Nasuni, an enterprise file data platform company with 585 employees. Your scope includes GTM systems (CRM, sales engagement, BI tools), forecasting processes, sales planning, and operational strategy across sales, marketing, and customer success. You'll report to Kate Ramaswamy, who is explicit about her leadership style: she asks "why" repeatedly, values accountability over politeness, and expects you to defend your recommendations with data.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage private or established (585 employees, mature product)

Size: 585 employees

Growth: Stable enterprise company, hiring for strategic leadership roles

Market Position: Established player in enterprise unstructured data management - competing against legacy storage vendors and cloud-native alternatives. Not a household name but has enterprise customers who've bought complex infrastructure solutions.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 30-40% Inbound - Enterprise prospects researching file data management solutions, some from analyst reports and thought leadership
• 50-60% Outbound - Account-based selling into large enterprises, long lead times, multi-threading required
• 10-20% Partners/Referrals - Cloud partnerships (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud mentioned on their site)

Team Structure: You'll support a sales org that likely includes SDRs/BDRs, enterprise AEs, SEs, and CSMs. At 585 people, probably 100-150 in go-to-market roles.

Your Direct Reports: You're inheriting an existing RevOps function. Likely 3-8 people covering sales ops, marketing ops, systems administration, and analytics.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Strategic Planning (25%) | Systems/Tools (25%) | Forecasting/Analytics (30%) | Executive Meetings (20%)

Key Activities

• Forecasting & Pipeline Management: You own the weekly/monthly forecast process. This means cleaning data, reconciling rep inputs, challenging assumptions, and presenting pipeline health to the exec team. You'll spend hours in Salesforce and BI tools identifying slippage patterns and conversion issues.

• GTM Systems Ownership: You're responsible for the entire revenue tech stack - Salesforce configuration, sales engagement platforms, CPQ, BI/analytics tools, data integrations. When something breaks or a process doesn't scale, you own the fix. This includes vendor management, contract renewals, and deciding build vs. buy.

• Territory & Quota Planning: You design and execute annual planning - territory carving, quota allocation, capacity modeling. This involves spreadsheet modeling, stakeholder debates, and defending your methodology when reps push back on their numbers.

• Process & Methodology: You define sales stages, qualification criteria, pipeline hygiene standards, and comp plan mechanics. You'll spend time in deal reviews identifying where deals stall and building playbooks to address it.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: You're in constant communication with sales leadership, marketing, finance, and CS. You'll run regular business reviews, build executive dashboards, and translate between what reps need and what finance requires for reporting.

• Team Leadership: You manage the existing RevOps team. This means prioritizing their work, reviewing their analyses, coaching them through complex projects, and running 1:1s where you challenge their thinking (much like Kate will challenge yours).

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Kate will push back - a lot: She's explicit about asking "why" three times a day and preferring clarity over comfort. If you don't have data to support your position or can't defend your logic, you'll have uncomfortable conversations. This is not a boss who rubber-stamps your plans.

• Enterprise sales is messy: You're dealing with 6-12 month sales cycles, complex procurement processes, and deals that slip constantly. Your forecast will be wrong. Your job is to make it less wrong over time and explain why it's wrong when it happens.

• You're inheriting technical debt: There's an existing RevOps function, which means existing systems, processes, and team dynamics. You'll spend your first 90 days learning what's working, what's broken, and what needs to be rebuilt - while still delivering on forecast and planning cycles.

• Systems are never done: Salesforce needs constant optimization. Integrations break. Reps complain about tools. Marketing wants new attribution reports. Finance needs different revenue cuts. You're constantly balancing requests, technical limitations, and competing priorities.

• You're in the middle: Sales wants simpler comp plans and more pipeline credit. Finance wants stricter controls and cleaner data. Marketing wants attribution for everything. Your job is to build systems and processes that serve the business, not just make one function happy.

What Success Looks Like

• Forecast accuracy improves: Your 90-day forecast is within 10-15% of actuals consistently. You catch slippage early and can explain variances with data.

• Pipeline quality increases: You implement hygiene standards and qualification criteria that reduce junk pipeline. Conversion rates improve because reps are working better opportunities.

• Systems enable, not hinder: Reps spend less time on admin and more time selling. Reports are trusted. Data flows cleanly between systems. Tools actually get adopted.

• Planning runs smoothly: Annual quotas are assigned on time, territories make sense, and comp plans are clear. Reps understand how they're measured and trust the math.

• Exec team trusts your data: When you present pipeline or forecast, leadership asks strategic questions instead of questioning your numbers. You become the source of truth for GTM performance.

Who You're Supporting

Sales Leadership (Your Primary Stakeholder):

• CRO and sales VPs who need accurate forecasting and pipeline visibility
• RVPs managing regions or verticals who need territory and capacity planning
• Frontline managers who need dashboards and deal insights

Sales Reps (Your End Users):

• Enterprise AEs selling $100K+ deals over 6-12 months
• SDRs/BDRs prospecting into target accounts
• Sales Engineers running technical demos and POCs

Finance (Your Data Partner):

• CFO and FP&A team who need bookings data, revenue recognition, and pipeline reporting for board meetings

Marketing (Your Pipeline Partner):

• CMO and demand gen team who need attribution data and campaign performance insights

Requirements

• 10+ years in revenue operations, sales operations, or similar roles with at least 3-5 years at VP/senior leadership level
• Deep Salesforce expertise - you've configured complex instances, designed processes, and cleaned up inherited messes
• Experience managing RevOps teams (at least 3-5 direct reports), including hiring, coaching, and developing talent
• Strong analytical and modeling skills - you build complex forecasting models, territory plans, and capacity analyses in Excel/Google Sheets
• Track record at enterprise B2B companies (preferably SaaS or infrastructure) with 6+ month sales cycles
• Comfortable challenging assumptions and defending your decisions with data - Kate is explicit about this being a requirement
• Experience partnering with exec leadership (CRO, CFO, CMO) and presenting to boards or senior stakeholders
• Technical enough to evaluate and implement revenue tools, integrations, and automation
• Strong communication skills - you'll translate between technical RevOps work and strategic executive conversations
• Comfortable with ambiguity and building structure where it doesn't exist
• Thick skin - you'll be challenged regularly and need to debate without taking it personally