Revenue Operations Analyst/Manager

Overview

You're a Rev Ops analyst/manager supporting SPS Commerce's sales organization—a public company with 3,200+ employees selling EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and supply chain connectivity software to retailers, distributors, and manufacturers. You'll spend your time in Salesforce building reports, cleaning data, supporting forecasting processes, and helping sales leadership make sense of pipeline metrics. You're the person they come to when deals aren't showing up right in reports or when they need to understand conversion rates by segment.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (NASDAQ: SPSC since 2010)

Size: 3,211 employees

Growth: Mature, stable growth company - not a hyper-growth startup. They've been around since 1987.

Market Position: Leader in retail EDI/supply chain connectivity space. They're the established player, not the disruptor. Think "enterprise software with a large installed base" rather than "hot new SaaS."

GTM Reality

Sales Team Structure:

• Large field sales organization with dedicated enterprise AEs, mid-market teams, and SDRs
• Separate customer success/account management teams handling the massive existing customer base
• Mix of new logo acquisition and expansion within current accounts

Your Role in the Machine: You're not building the Rev Ops function from scratch. There's already established processes, a full CRM implementation, reporting infrastructure, and sales methodology. You're maintaining and improving what exists, not creating it. The Director of Rev Ops (your likely manager) reports up through the CRO's office.

Systems You'll Live In:

• Salesforce (heavily customized for their specific deal flows and product lines)
• BI/analytics tools for reporting (likely Tableau, Looker, or similar)
• Sales engagement platforms (Outreach, Salesloft, or similar)
• CPQ/quoting systems
• Integration with their 100+ ERPs and WMS systems (though you won't touch the product side)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Salesforce Admin (30%) | Reporting/Analytics (35%) | Project Work (20%) | Meetings (15%)

Key Activities

• CRM Hygiene & Data Quality: Cleaning up duplicate accounts, fixing field mappings, creating validation rules. You'll spend a lot of time tracking down why certain deals aren't showing up in forecasts or why opportunity stages aren't progressing correctly.
• Building Reports & Dashboards: Sales VPs want to see pipeline by segment, conversion rates by rep, forecast accuracy trending. You create these, then field questions about why the numbers look the way they do.
• Forecasting Support: Helping regional directors and the CRO pull together weekly/monthly forecast calls. You're aggregating data, identifying risks, flagging deals that haven't moved.
• Sales Process Optimization: Running projects like "improve lead routing" or "implement new qualification framework" or "build out multi-product deal desk process." These take months and involve lots of stakeholder management.
• Territory Planning & Comp: Supporting annual planning cycles - dividing up accounts, modeling quota allocation, updating compensation plans in the system.
• Training & Documentation: Writing guides on "how to create an opportunity correctly" or "when to engage a sales engineer." Running onboarding sessions for new reps on CRM usage.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Data is always messy: Reps don't update Salesforce consistently. You'll spend hours fixing bad data before you can do any actual analysis. "Garbage in, garbage out" is your reality.
• Everyone wants something different: Sales leaders all want custom reports. Marketing wants attribution. Finance wants revenue recognition forecasts. You're constantly juggling competing priorities with limited bandwidth.
• Legacy system complexity: SPS has been around since 1987. Their systems have layers of customization and technical debt. Changing anything takes longer than you think because of dependencies.
• You're a cost center, not revenue: When budgets tighten, Rev Ops tools and headcount get scrutinized. You have to constantly justify your existence through "impact on sales productivity."
• Politics: You'll get caught between sales ("make the numbers look better") and finance ("show us the real forecast"). Walking that line requires diplomacy.
• Repetitive work: A lot of what you do is maintaining existing reports, answering the same questions, and doing monthly/quarterly recurring processes.

What Success Looks Like

• Sales leadership trusts your forecast accuracy - they're using your data to make real decisions
• You've automated manual reporting that used to take hours each week
• CRM adoption improves - fewer "I can't find my deal" tickets
• You ship a major project (new sales stage framework, improved lead scoring) that measurably impacts conversion rates
• Reps actually follow the processes you design (this is harder than it sounds)

Who You're Supporting

Primary Stakeholders:

• VP/Director of Sales (your main customer - they want clean pipeline visibility)
• Regional Sales Directors (they need territory performance reporting)
• CRO (wants board-level metrics and forecast accuracy)
• Finance (needs revenue forecasting and deal approval workflows)
• Sales Enablement (you partner on training and process rollout)

What They Care About:

• Forecast accuracy: Can they trust the pipeline numbers for quarterly planning?
• Rep productivity: Are reps spending time selling or fighting with systems?
• Pipeline visibility: Where are deals stuck? What's at risk?
• Data integrity: Can they segment and analyze performance reliably?
• Process compliance: Are reps following the methodology or going rogue?

Requirements

• 3-5+ years in Revenue Operations, Sales Operations, or CRM administration (preferably at a B2B software company)
• Strong Salesforce skills - you need to be comfortable building reports, creating custom fields, understanding automation (flows, workflows)
• Excel/Google Sheets proficiency for data analysis and modeling
• Experience with BI tools (Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, etc.)
• SQL is a plus but not always required - depends on how technical the role is
• Understanding of B2B sales processes (opportunity stages, forecasting, pipeline management)
• Project management skills - you'll be running cross-functional initiatives
• Communication skills - you translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders constantly
• Patience with ambiguity and changing priorities - sales orgs are dynamic
• Bachelor's degree typically required (business, analytics, or related field)

What This ISN'T

• Not a strategic role (yet): As a mid-level Rev Ops person, you're not setting company strategy. You're executing on priorities handed down from the Director/VP level.
• Not a sales role: You won't carry a quota or talk to customers. You're behind the scenes.
• Not a data science role: You're doing business intelligence and reporting, not building predictive models or machine learning algorithms.
• Not a fast-paced startup: This is a 3,200-person public company. Things move slower. There's process for everything. You'll spend time in committee meetings.

The Real Question

Do you like being the "systems and process" person who enables sellers to do their job better? Are you comfortable doing analytical work that most people find tedious? Can you handle sales leaders who want reports yesterday and don't understand why data cleanup takes time?

If you want to be in the strategic planning room eventually, this is a stepping stone. If you want to build Rev Ops from zero at a startup, this isn't it. If you want stability, good benefits, and to learn enterprise Rev Ops at scale, SPS could be a solid move.