Sales Strategy & Operations Associate

Overview

You're the analytical backbone for G2's sales organization. You build reports, analyze pipeline data, optimize Salesforce workflows, and create the dashboards that sales leadership uses to make decisions. Your output directly influences quota setting, territory planning, and how reps get compensated.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage private / Pre-IPO (1,428 employees)

Size: 1,428 employees

Growth: Established market leader in software reviews - not hyper-growth startup chaos, but steady expansion

Market Position: Category leader - they ARE the software review marketplace

GTM Reality

What G2 Sells: G2 sells vendor profiles, review generation tools, and buyer intent data to software companies. Two main motions:

• Vendor side: Software companies pay for premium profiles, review solicitation tools, and competitive intelligence
• Buyer side: Intent data showing which prospects are researching specific categories

This is a high-velocity sales org with both SMB and Enterprise segments. Likely 50+ sellers across multiple teams.

Your Role in It: You don't sell anything. You make sure the sellers have clean data, accurate forecasts, and systems that don't break. When a VP asks "Why did the East region miss quota?", you build the analysis. When comp plans need updating, you model scenarios.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Data Analysis (35%) | Salesforce Admin (25%) | Meetings & Reporting (25%) | Ad Hoc Requests (15%)

Key Activities

• Salesforce Cleanup & Maintenance: Fix duplicate accounts, update fields that reps enter wrong, build validation rules to prevent bad data entry. At least 20% of your week is data hygiene that wouldn't be necessary if reps used the system correctly.

• Dashboard & Report Building: Create Tableau or Salesforce dashboards showing pipeline health, conversion rates, rep activity metrics. Sales leadership will request something urgent, you'll build it, then they'll forget about it two weeks later.

• Forecasting & Pipeline Analysis: Pull weekly/monthly pipeline reports, analyze where deals are stuck, identify which stages have conversion issues. You're always chasing reps to update their close dates and stage progressions.

• Territory & Quota Planning: Model different territory splits, help design quota allocation across segments, analyze rep capacity. This happens during planning cycles (Q4 for next year) and involves a lot of spreadsheet scenario modeling.

• Comp Plan Administration: Help design and track sales compensation plans, resolve comp disputes when reps claim they didn't get credit for a deal, explain to confused sellers how their variable pay is calculated.

• Ad Hoc Analysis: Random questions from sales leadership like "How many demos does it take to close an Enterprise deal?" or "Which industries have the highest win rates?" You drop what you're doing to pull data and make slides.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're constantly cleaning up after sales reps. They don't update Salesforce correctly, they create duplicate records, they don't log activities. Your analysis is only as good as their data hygiene, which is usually poor.

• Competing priorities. You'll be mid-project when a VP needs something "urgent" for a board meeting tomorrow. Everything becomes a fire drill, and strategic projects get pushed.

• You're in meetings explaining the same metrics over and over. Different leaders ask for similar reports formatted differently. You spend a lot of time translating between what they ask for and what they actually need.

• Thankless work. When forecasts are accurate, no one notices. When they're off, it's "the data was wrong." You don't get credit when things go well, but you hear about it when they don't.

• Limited influence. You can show that a process is broken, but whether it actually gets fixed depends on sales leadership prioritization. You'll identify the same problems repeatedly without authority to change them.

What Success Looks Like

• You deliver weekly/monthly reports on time with no errors that leadership actually uses to make decisions
• Salesforce data quality improves measurably - fewer duplicate accounts, higher field completion rates
• You build a dashboard or analysis that becomes the "source of truth" that everyone references
• You successfully lead a territory reorg or comp plan redesign that rolls out without major complaints
• Sales leaders stop asking you to pull one-off reports because your existing dashboards answer their questions

Who You Support

Primary Stakeholders:

• VP/SVP of Sales - wants forecast accuracy, pipeline visibility, performance metrics
• Sales Directors - need territory analysis, rep scorecards, pipeline reviews
• Finance - requires bookings reports, revenue forecasts, variance analysis
• RevOps Manager (your boss) - delegates projects, sets priorities

What They Care About:

• Accurate forecasts (they're reporting numbers up to executives)
• Fair territory distribution and quota allocation
• Understanding what's working and what's not across the sales org
• Clean data they can trust when making hiring, comp, or strategy decisions

Requirements

• 3-5 years in sales operations, business operations, or FP&A (ideally at a B2B SaaS company)
• Advanced Excel/Google Sheets skills (pivot tables, vlookups, complex formulas are daily work)
• Salesforce experience - you need to understand how it works, not just run reports
• SQL or data visualization tools (Tableau, Looker) - if you can't query databases or build dashboards, you'll struggle
• Comfort with ambiguity - requirements are often vague, you need to figure out what people actually need
• Thick skin - you'll get blamed for data issues that aren't your fault and field complaints from reps about comp/territory/quota
• Ability to context-switch rapidly - your day is interrupted constantly with urgent requests