Sales Strategy & Operations Manager

Overview

You'll run sales strategy and operations for Verkada's Salt Lake City office, reporting to Uli Gerlach who's building out the team. Your main job is optimizing the prospecting motion—territory design, account assignments, activity metrics, pipeline health. You're the person between sales leadership and reps, making sure territories are fair, quotas are realistic, and the team has the tools and process to hit numbers.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage (2,640 employees, well-funded)

Size: 2,600+ employees

Growth: Aggressively expanding - opening new regional hubs like SLC

Market Position: Leader in cloud-based physical security competing against legacy players like Avigilon, Genetec, Milestone

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40% Outbound - cold outreach to facilities managers, security directors, IT leaders
• 35% Inbound - website inquiries, demo requests from security-conscious orgs
• 25% Referrals/Upsells - existing customers expanding to new sites

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDR teams feeding AEs (you'll be optimizing this handoff)

SE Support: Heavy SE involvement - demos require technical depth on camera placement, network requirements, integrations

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Traditional on-prem systems (Avigilon, Genetec, Milestone), newer cloud players (Rhombus, Spot AI)

How They Differentiate: Fully cloud-native platform, plug-and-play hardware, integrated ecosystem (cameras + access control + alarms)

Common Objections: Price premium vs traditional systems, IT security concerns about cloud, "we already have cameras"

Win Themes: Ease of deployment, no NVR/servers needed, remote access, AI search capabilities, single pane of glass

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Data Analysis (35%) | Strategy/Planning (30%) | Cross-functional Meetings (25%) | Tools/Systems (10%)

Key Activities

• Territory planning: Carving up accounts for SDRs and AEs. You're looking at firmographics, existing customer density, rep capacity. Building assignment rules in Salesforce and dealing with reps who think their territory got the short end.
• Pipeline forecasting: Weekly pipeline reviews with sales leadership. You're pulling Salesforce reports, spotting deals that are stalled, identifying which reps are light on pipeline, and figuring out if the team will hit quarterly numbers.
• Prospecting motion optimization: Analyzing outbound activity—how many calls/emails does it take to book a meeting? What messaging works? Which industries convert better? You're A/B testing cadences and working with enablement on talk tracks.
• Quota and comp modeling: Helping finance and leadership set realistic quotas. You're looking at historical conversion rates, ramp time for new hires, territory quality. Reps will complain quotas are too high; leadership will want them higher.
• Cross-functional projects: Working with marketing on lead routing, with enablement on onboarding, with finance on commission disputes. Lots of Slack messages and meetings where you're the person who "owns the data."

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're constantly balancing what reps want (easier territories, lower quotas, better leads) with what leadership wants (aggressive growth targets, efficient spend). Everyone thinks their suggestions are "strategic" but most are just complaints.
• Data quality in Salesforce is perpetually messy. Reps don't update stages, forget to log activities, and you spend way too much time cleaning data before you can analyze anything meaningful.
• You're measured on outcomes you don't directly control—if the sales team misses quota, it reflects on your territory planning and pipeline management even if the real issue is product-market fit or rep execution.
• The SLC office is new, so you're building processes from scratch without clear precedent. Lots of ambiguity and figuring things out as you go.

What Success Looks Like

• Territory assignments that produce balanced results—no one rep consistently outperforms or underperforms by 2x
• Pipeline coverage stays at 3-4x quota with healthy stage distribution
• Forecast accuracy within 10-15% of actuals quarter over quarter
• Prospecting activity metrics improve—SDRs book more meetings per hour of outbound work

Who You're Supporting

Primary Stakeholders:

• Regional Sales Directors (you help them understand pipeline health and territory performance)
• SDR and AE teams (you design their territories and measure their activity)
• Sales leadership (you provide the data for strategic decisions)

What They Care About:

• Sales Directors: "Is my team going to hit quota? Where are the gaps?"
• Reps: "Is my territory fair? Why is my quota higher than theirs?"
• Leadership: "Can we scale this motion to other regions? What's our cost per meeting?"

Requirements

• 3-5 years in sales operations, strategy, or analytics (ideally B2B SaaS or hardware)
• Strong Salesforce skills - you need to build reports, dashboards, and understand data structure
• Excel/Google Sheets power user - pivot tables, VLOOKUPs, modeling scenarios
• Experience with territory planning and quota setting in a growth environment
• Comfortable working in ambiguity - the SLC office is new and you'll be defining processes
• Willingness to be in Salt Lake City full-time (this isn't a remote role)