Sales Strategy & Operations Lead, Programmatic Sales

Overview

You run sales strategy and operations for tvScientific, Pinterest's programmatic CTV advertising platform. You're building the operational foundation for a sales team selling performance-driven TV ads to consumer brands. This means designing comp plans, building pipeline models, and creating the Salesforce workflows for a product that's newer and more technical than Pinterest's core offering.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: tvScientific is a ~153-person division inside public company Pinterest

Growth: Pinterest acquired tvScientific to expand into CTV advertising. Building out the programmatic sales team for 2026.

Market Position: tvScientific competes with Roku OneView, Amazon DSP, YouTube TV, and The Trade Desk. Their angle is performance-based CTV (tracking installs/sales, not just impressions) with AI optimization.

Your Challenge: Build sales ops for a growth-stage ad tech product within a public company's structure.

GTM Reality

What tvScientific Sells:

• Programmatic platform for buying CTV ad inventory
• Performance-based model—brands pay for conversions (installs, purchases) not just impressions
• AI-powered optimization to improve campaign ROI
• Competes in crowded CTV ad space against much larger players

Who Buys It:

• Consumer brands (DTC, mobile apps, fintech, insurance, travel)
• Performance marketers who currently buy Facebook/Google ads
• Advertisers looking for TV reach with digital attribution

Sales Team Structure:

• Mix of account executives (likely 10-20 people)
• Possibly SDRs for outbound (unclear from post)
• Sales engineers for technical pre-sales demos
• Growing fast—your job is to scale ops as team doubles

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Roku OneView, Amazon Ads (Fire TV), The Trade Desk, YouTube TV ads

tvScientific's Differentiator: Performance guarantees and outcome-based pricing (not just impressions/reach)

Challenges: Educating market that CTV can drive bottom-funnel conversions; competing with platforms that have more inventory and bigger sales teams

Your Job: Design incentives and processes that help reps sell against larger competitors

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

GTM Planning (35%) | Systems/Process (30%) | Analysis/Forecasting (20%) | Stakeholder Mgmt (15%)

Key Activities

• Build the Sales Ops Foundation: tvScientific is scaling. You're creating processes from scratch. How should pipeline stages work? What fields do we need in Salesforce? How do we track performance vs brand campaigns differently? What reports does leadership need? You're defining all of this.
• Comp Plan Design: Work with finance and sales leadership to build commission structures. Programmatic sales might have different economics than traditional media buys (self-serve platform revenue vs managed service deals). Model out different scenarios. Make sure incentives drive the right behavior.
• Territory and Capacity Planning: How many reps can we hire? How should we divide up accounts (by vertical? by deal size? geography?)? Build models showing revenue per rep, ramp time, and ROI of new headcount. Present recommendations to leadership.
• Forecast Management: Run weekly pipeline reviews. Pull Salesforce data, analyze deal velocity, flag risks. Build executive dashboards showing if the team will hit their quarter. Adjust forecast models as the business changes.
• Cross-functional Projects: Product is launching a new self-serve feature. Marketing is running campaigns to generate leads. Finance is changing how they recognize programmatic revenue. You're the ops person making sure these work for sales and don't break systems.
• Process Optimization: Sales team says quote-to-contract takes too long. Or Salesforce reports don't match what they see. You diagnose the problem, design a fix, and implement it (working with IT, legal, whoever needs to be involved).

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're building in a gray zone. tvScientific has startup needs (move fast, iterate, build new things). Pinterest has corporate requirements (legal approvals, privacy reviews, IT roadmaps). You're constantly navigating this tension.
• Programmatic ad tech is complex. You need to understand DSPs, SSPs, attribution models, and campaign optimization to do this job well. If you don't know ad tech, you'll spend months getting up to speed.
• The product is still evolving. tvScientific's platform changes frequently. Your ops processes have to flex as new features launch and the sales motion shifts. What worked last quarter might not work next quarter.
• You're building from scratch with limited resources. There's no playbook. You can't copy what another team did. You have to figure it out, and you probably won't get more headcount to help.
• Stakeholder management is constant. Sales leadership wants things yesterday. Pinterest corporate functions move slowly. You're in the middle, managing expectations and delivering what you can.
• The market is competitive. tvScientific is smaller than Roku and Amazon. Reps lose deals. You'll be asked to figure out why and what ops can do to improve win rates.

What Success Looks Like

• Programmatic sales team hits their number two consecutive quarters
• You ship 3-4 major projects in your first year (comp plan, Salesforce rebuild, territory model, capacity plan)
• Forecast accuracy is within 10% most quarters
• Sales leadership says ops is a strategic partner, not just a support function
• You hire 10-15 reps successfully—onboarding process is smooth, ramp time is predictable
• You identify a bottleneck (like long legal reviews killing deals) and fix it, measurably improving sales velocity

Who You Work With

Internal Partners:

• Sales leadership for tvScientific's programmatic team
• Alexis L. and Jason Huang (Sales Strategy & Operations leadership)
• Finance (for revenue planning and comp approvals)
• Product team (tvScientific platform features)
• Marketing ops (lead routing, attribution)
• IT/Salesforce admins (for system changes)
• Legal (contract templates, deal approvals)

What They Need:

• Sales leadership: Pipeline visibility, accurate forecasts, comp plans that motivate reps
• Reps: Clear processes, tools that work, fast answers when they're stuck
• Finance: Predictable revenue and commissions that stay in budget
• Product: Feedback from sales on what's working/not working in the platform

Requirements

• 5-7 years in sales operations or revenue operations, ideally in ad tech or SaaS
• Programmatic advertising knowledge is critical—you need to understand DSPs, RTB, attribution, and campaign optimization
• Experience building ops processes from scratch (early-stage startup or new business unit)
• Strong in Excel/Google Sheets for financial modeling and capacity planning
• Salesforce power user (custom objects, reporting, automation)
• Experience designing compensation plans and running planning cycles
• Can work in ambiguity—you define the scope and figure out the solution
• Comfortable presenting to senior leadership and handling pushback
• Worked with technical sales teams (sales engineers, platform sales)
• Startup mentality but can navigate corporate processes