Sr. Sales Operations Manager

Overview

You'll run sales operations for Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup products—managing Salesforce, building reports and dashboards, optimizing territory assignments, and supporting sales leadership with data analysis. You're the person between sales leadership and the actual reps, making sure the systems work and the data is trustworthy.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (NASDAQ: BLZE, IPO'd in 2021)

Size: 363 employees

Growth: Mature company (founded 2007) competing in crowded cloud storage market; not hypergrowth but stable

Market Position: Challenger brand competing on price/simplicity against AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage

GTM Reality

Who You're Supporting:

• SMB/Mid-Market AEs selling B2 Cloud Storage (likely inbound-heavy from free trials and web signups)
• Enterprise AEs doing consultative deals with IT/DevOps teams
• Potentially a Computer Backup sales team (individual/small business)
• Maybe partners/channel reps

Your Internal Customers:

• VP Sales and Sales Directors who want pipeline forecasts, territory analysis, comp plan modeling
• AEs who need Salesforce to not break and want reports to tell them what to work on
• Finance who needs accurate bookings data for revenue recognition
• Marketing who wants lead attribution and conversion metrics

Systems You'll Own:

• Salesforce (primary CRM—probably customized over 15+ years)
• Sales engagement tools (Outreach/Salesloft or similar)
• CPQ or quoting system
• BI/Analytics tools (Tableau, Looker, or similar)
• Integrations between all of the above

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Salesforce Admin (30%) | Reporting/Analysis (25%) | Projects (25%) | Meetings/Support (20%)

Key Activities

• Salesforce Administration: Field changes, page layout updates, workflow rules, validation rules. Sales leadership decides they want to track something new, you build it. Something breaks, you fix it. Someone needs a custom report view, you create it. This is 30-40% of your week.

• Pipeline & Forecast Reporting: Weekly/monthly pipeline reviews with sales leadership. Building dashboards that show pipeline coverage, win rates by segment, rep performance, deal velocity. You're the person who gets asked "why did bookings miss forecast" and needs to have an answer with data.

• Territory & Capacity Planning: When they're hiring, you model out how many reps they need and where. When territories get unbalanced, you rebalance them. When comp plans change, you model scenarios. Lots of spreadsheet work.

• Sales Process Optimization: Sales leadership says "our deals are taking too long" or "we're losing too many deals at the demo stage." You dig into the data, find bottlenecks, propose changes, implement them, measure results. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

• Systems Integration Projects: Marketing implements a new tool, you need to connect it to Salesforce. Finance changes how they want revenue recognized, you need to update the deal stages. Product launches a new offering, you need to update the product catalog and quoting logic.

• Training & Enablement Support: New reps don't know how to use Salesforce correctly. You build documentation, do training sessions, answer "how do I..." questions in Slack.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're always saying no: Sales reps want custom reports and one-off fixes. Leadership wants ambitious projects. You have limited time. Most of your job is prioritization and managing expectations about what's feasible.

• Legacy systems and technical debt: Backblaze has been around since 2007. Their Salesforce instance has 15 years of customizations, workarounds, and "we built it that way because someone who left three years ago wanted it." You'll spend time untangling things.

• Data quality is a constant battle: Reps don't fill out fields correctly. Integrations break and create duplicates. Reports are only as good as the data, and the data is never perfect. You'll spend time cleaning things up.

• Politics and competing priorities: Sales wants one thing, Finance wants another, Marketing wants a third. Your manager will help, but you're often the person in the middle trying to make everyone happy.

• Interrupt-driven work: You're building a territory model and suddenly Salesforce is down or someone needs urgent data for a board meeting. Your planned work gets pushed.

What Success Looks Like

• Sales leadership trusts your forecasts and uses them to make hiring/investment decisions
• Reps can find the information they need in Salesforce without asking you
• Reports are accurate and available when needed (no last-minute fire drills)
• Projects ship on time and actually improve sales productivity
• You get fewer "Salesforce is broken" messages in Slack

Who You're Supporting

Primary Stakeholders:

• VP Sales / Sales Directors (your main internal customers)
• 15-30 quota-carrying AEs (rough estimate for a 363-person company)
• Finance team (revenue operations overlap)
• Marketing Ops (lead routing, attribution, campaign tracking)

What They Care About:

• Sales Leadership: Accurate forecasts, pipeline visibility, data to make decisions about hiring/territories/comp plans
• AEs: Salesforce that works, reports that help them prioritize, minimal administrative burden
• Finance: Clean data for revenue recognition, bookings accuracy, commission calculation support
• Marketing: Lead conversion metrics, attribution data, closed-loop reporting

Requirements

• 5+ years in Sales Operations or Revenue Operations roles
• Strong Salesforce administration skills (you should be comfortable building custom objects, workflows, reports without constant help from a consultant)
• SQL or similar data querying ability (you'll need to pull data from multiple systems)
• Experience with BI/analytics tools (Tableau, Looker, or similar)
• Spreadsheet modeling skills (territory planning, capacity planning, comp plan modeling)
• Experience working with sales teams selling B2B SaaS or technical products
• Ability to translate between technical requirements and business needs
• Project management skills (you'll be juggling multiple initiatives)
• Thick skin for dealing with frustrated salespeople when systems break