Sales Strategy & Operations Lead - Product Incubation

Overview

You partner with Rubrik's Product Incubation Sales team to design and execute the go-to-market strategy for new products before they hit general availability. You're creating the sales playbook, process, and enablement from scratch—then iterating fast when the market responds differently than expected. This is not steady-state RevOps; it's building the plane while flying it.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (IPO April 2024, trading as RBRK)

Size: ~3,500 employees globally

Growth: Adding new product lines beyond core data backup/recovery (cyber recovery, data security posture)

Market Position: Leader in cloud data management, competing with Veeam, Commvault, Cohesity. Expanding into adjacent security markets.

GTM Reality

Your Scope: Product Incubation team, which means:

• New products still finding product-market fit
• Small, specialized sales team (not the full field org)
• Limited existing playbooks or benchmarks
• Fast iteration cycles based on early customer feedback

What This Means for You:

• You're creating sales materials before Product Marketing exists for these products
• You're defining what "qualified" means before anyone's closed a deal
• You're setting quotas without historical data
• You're building Salesforce workflows for products that might pivot in 6 months

Cross-Functional Chaos:

• Product teams are building features while you're trying to sell current state
• Engineering priorities shift; your sales messaging has to shift with it
• Pricing and packaging are TBD—you help figure that out
• Legal/compliance reviews slow everything down

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Depends on which incubation product, but Rubrik generally competes with:

• Veeam, Commvault (backup/recovery)
• CrowdStrike, SentinelOne (security products)
• Varonis, BigID (data security posture)

Differentiation Challenge: New products don't have the brand trust of core Rubrik platform yet. You're selling to existing Rubrik customers (easier) and net-new accounts (harder—why buy v1.0 from Rubrik vs mature product from specialist?).

Common Objections:

• "Why not just use [incumbent]?"
• "Is this production-ready or beta?"
• "When will [feature X] be available?"
• "Can we wait for the next release?"

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Strategy/Planning (25%) | Enablement/Training (30%) | Process/Systems (25%) | Firefighting (20%)

Key Activities

• Design the sales process: You map out discovery questions, demo flow, POC requirements, and deal stages before reps have run any deals. Then you revise it monthly as you learn what actually works.

• Create sales enablement: Battle cards, objection handling, pitch decks, demo scripts, ROI calculators. Product Marketing may or may not exist for these products yet, so you're often filling that gap.

• Build the operational infrastructure: Salesforce opportunity stages, lead routing rules, forecasting models, comp plans. You're setting this up with incomplete information and changing it constantly.

• Enable the sales team: Run training sessions, shadow calls, debrief lost deals, coach reps. The team is small and specialized, so you're close to the deals—not operating from a dashboard.

• Report to leadership: Weekly updates on pipeline, conversion metrics, win/loss themes. You're translating early signals into strategic recommendations (double down, pivot, or kill the product).

• Coordinate cross-functionally: Daily Slack threads with Product, weekly syncs with Marketing, ad-hoc asks from Sales leadership. You're the connective tissue between teams that don't always agree on priorities.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Ambiguity is constant: You're making decisions with 30% of the data you'd want. The product roadmap shifts, competitive landscape changes, and your carefully crafted sales process becomes obsolete.

• No one knows the "right" answer: Unlike core Rubrik products with years of data, you're inventing benchmarks. What's a good win rate for a brand new product? What should quota be? You're guessing educated, but still guessing.

• Everything is urgent: Product launches have hard deadlines. Sales needs enablement yesterday. Leadership wants forecast updates daily. You're constantly reprioritizing.

• Limited resources: You don't get the full marketing budget, headcount, or executive attention that core products get. You're doing more with less and justifying every dollar.

• Your work might get shelved: Incubation products sometimes don't make it to GA. The strategy you spent months building might get deprioritized if the product doesn't gain traction.

What Success Looks Like

• Sales team hits 70%+ of quota in first two quarters post-launch (benchmark for new products)
• Clear, repeatable sales motion emerges by month 6 (documented playbook that new reps can follow)
• Win rate trends upward quarter-over-quarter (you're learning what works)
• Product team uses your deal feedback to prioritize roadmap (you're influencing what gets built)
• Leadership decides to invest more in the product line based on your data (you proved it's worth scaling)

Who You're Selling To (Indirectly)

You're not carrying a bag, but you need to understand Rubrik's buyers:

Primary Buyers:

• VP/Director of IT Infrastructure
• CISO / VP Security (for security products)
• VP Data/Analytics (for data governance products)

What They Care About:

• Reducing data breach risk and recovery time
• Simplifying multi-cloud data management
• Meeting compliance requirements (SOC2, GDPR, etc.)
• TCO vs current backup/security stack

Buying Process:

• 3-6 month evaluation for new products (faster if expanding existing Rubrik relationship)
• POC required for most deals
• Procurement/legal reviews add 4-8 weeks
• Budget typically comes from IT infrastructure or security, depending on product

Requirements

• 7+ years in sales strategy, revenue operations, or sales leadership at B2B enterprise software companies
• Experience launching new products or going 0-1 (not just optimizing existing GTM)
• Strong Salesforce and sales tech stack skills (you're building reports and workflows, not just analyzing them)
• Data-driven but comfortable with ambiguity—you can make decisions without perfect data
• Excellent cross-functional communication (you're translating between Product, Sales, and executives who speak different languages)
• Enterprise SaaS or security/infrastructure software background (understanding Rubrik's buyer helps)
• Bias toward action—you ship 80% solutions fast rather than perfect solutions never