VP, GTM Operations & Strategy

Overview

You're building and optimizing the revenue operations infrastructure for a ~500-person cybersecurity company selling anti-ransomware protection. You'll own the CRM (likely Salesforce), sales analytics, territory planning, compensation design, and cross-functional process improvement. You report to the CRO or CEO and spend most of your time in spreadsheets, Salesforce admin, and meetings trying to align sales, marketing, and customer success on definitions and handoffs.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series C/D (estimated based on 496 employees)

Size: 496 employees

Growth: Actively hiring for leadership roles, suggesting expansion phase

Market Position: Specialized player in anti-ransomware (not general EDR). They're selling a point solution against broader security platforms and need to prove ROI on a dedicated tool.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• Likely 70-80% outbound - cybersecurity vendors typically do heavy outbound to CISOs/security teams
• 10-20% inbound from content marketing, analyst relations, partner referrals
• 10% partner/channel (given the poster's role in Partner Sales)

Sales Structure: Likely have SDR/BDR team feeding AEs, with SEs doing technical demos and POCs. You're responsible for making sure this machine runs smoothly - lead routing, stage definitions, handoff SLAs.

Your Stakeholders:

• Sales leadership (need accurate forecasts, territory planning, comp plans)
• Marketing (attribution, MQL definitions, campaign ROI)
• Customer Success (churn analytics, expansion tracking)
• Finance (revenue recognition, bookings vs billings)
• Product (usage data, feature adoption)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Salesforce/Systems (30%) | Analytics/Reporting (25%) | Strategy/Planning (20%) | Meetings/Alignment (25%)

Key Activities

• Salesforce Administration: Building custom fields for ransomware-specific deal tracking, fixing data hygiene issues, updating validation rules, training reps who keep screwing up opportunity stages. You're either doing this yourself or managing an ops analyst who does it.
• Pipeline Analytics: Building weekly pipeline review decks showing coverage by segment, stage conversion rates, aging deals, forecast vs actual. You're explaining to the CRO why the commit number moved 15% from last week.
• Process Design: Mapping out the handoff between SDR → AE → SE → implementation. Writing the territory assignment rules. Defining what makes an SAO vs SQL. Running workshops where sales and marketing argue about lead quality.
• Compensation & Planning: Designing quota allocation across reps, building commission calculators, modeling different territory carve scenarios. Dealing with reps who think their quotas are unfair.
• Tool Stack Management: Owning the rev tech stack (SFDC, Outreach/Salesloft, Gong, Clari, 6sense, etc.). Evaluating new tools, managing renewals, integrating systems, troubleshooting when data doesn't sync.
• Strategic Projects: Running analysis on why win rates dropped, building TAM models for new segments, presenting to the board on pipeline health, designing the FY25 territory plan.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Politics: You're constantly mediating between sales (wants more leads), marketing (says leads are good quality), and CS (needs better account health data). Everyone thinks their metrics should be prioritized. You spend 10+ hours per week in alignment meetings.
• Data Mess: SFDC data is never clean. Reps don't update stages. Opportunities have wrong close dates. Accounts are duplicated. You can spend 40% of your time just fixing data quality issues instead of strategic work.
• Firefighting: Sales leadership wants a report by EOD that requires pulling data from three systems that don't integrate cleanly. A comp plan change broke and reps are emailing you directly. The SFDC integration to your BI tool stopped working.
• Pace of Change: At a 500-person company, GTM is still evolving. What you build this quarter might get thrown out next quarter when they reorganize sales teams or enter a new segment.
• Blame Magnet: When revenue misses, people look at ops. "Forecasting was off." "Territories aren't balanced." "The comp plan doesn't incentivize the right behavior." You don't control seller performance but you get blamed for the infrastructure.

What Success Looks Like

• Forecast accuracy within 10% by quarter's end (commit vs actual bookings)
• Pipeline coverage of 4-5x quota in early stages
• Stage conversion rates improving quarter over quarter
• Sales reps can actually find data in SFDC without Slacking you
• Comp plans get approved without 50 revision rounds
• You built something (a dashboard, a process, a model) that leadership uses every week

Who You're Supporting

Internal Stakeholders:

• CRO / VP Sales: Needs accurate forecasts, wants to know why deals are slipping, asks for territory rebalancing
• AEs/Sales Managers: Want better pipeline visibility, clearer comp calculations, fewer admin clicks
• CMO / Marketing: Needs attribution reporting, wants to prove marketing's impact on pipeline
• CFO / Finance: Needs clean bookings data, revenue waterfalls, variance explanations

What They Care About:

• Can I trust the forecast number you're giving me?
• Why is our win rate in enterprise declining?
• Is this territory plan going to cause reps to quit?
• Can you get me this analysis by tomorrow's board meeting?

Requirements

• 10+ years in revenue operations, sales operations, or GTM strategy roles
• 3+ years leading ops teams (you'll likely inherit or build a small team of analysts)
• Deep Salesforce expertise - you need to be able to build reports, edit page layouts, and understand object relationships yourself
• Experience with rev tech stack (BI tools like Tableau/Looker, sales engagement platforms, conversation intelligence, ABM tools)
• B2B enterprise SaaS background (ideally in cybersecurity or infrastructure software where deals are complex)
• Strong Excel/Google Sheets - you're building financial models and territory assignment calculators
• Player-coach mentality - this isn't just strategic, you're also doing hands-on SFDC work
• Experience scaling ops through hypergrowth (from Series B to IPO-ready)
• Ability to tell executives hard truths about pipeline health without sugarcoating