Business Development & Solutions Operations Lead

Overview

You're the right-hand operator for two VPs—Business Development and Solutions Consulting—at Braze, a public customer engagement platform company. You design how these teams plan, measure performance, and operate. You're building dashboards, running quarterly planning, analyzing pipeline conversion, and identifying where the pre-sales motion breaks down. This isn't data entry—you're in the room where strategic decisions get made.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (NASDAQ: BRZE)

Size: 2,275 employees

Growth: Mature growth stage - focus is on efficient scaling, not hypergrowth

Market Position: Established player in customer engagement / marketing automation space, competing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Klaviyo, Adobe Campaign

GTM Reality

Who You Support:

• VP of Business Development (likely oversees SDR/BDR teams generating pipeline)
• VP of Solutions Consulting (oversees pre-sales SEs doing demos, POCs, technical discovery)

What This Means: You're not supporting one sales team—you're supporting the two functions that feed and enable the entire sales org. BD generates pipeline. SC converts it. If either breaks, revenue suffers.

Your Stakeholders:

• Two VPs who need weekly/monthly operational reviews
• Rev Ops leadership (probably your boss or dotted-line)
• Finance (for headcount planning, capacity modeling)
• AE leadership (they depend on BD pipeline and SC support)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Analytics & Reporting (35%) | Planning & Strategy (30%) | Process Design (20%) | Ad-hoc Fires (15%)

Key Activities

• Build and maintain executive dashboards: BD pipeline generation metrics (meetings booked, SQLs created, conversion rates by segment/region). SC productivity metrics (demos delivered, POCs in flight, win rates when SC engaged). You're pulling from Salesforce, Outreach, Gong, maybe Tableau or Looker.

• Run quarterly and annual planning: How many BDRs do we need to hire to hit pipeline targets? What's the right SC:AE ratio? Where should we expand geographically? You build the models, run sensitivity analyses, present to VPs and C-suite.

• Design operating rhythms: Weekly BD pipeline reviews, monthly SC capacity planning, quarterly business reviews. You create the agendas, pull the data, facilitate the meetings, track follow-up actions.

• Diagnose performance gaps: Why is EMEA BD underperforming? Why are SC demos not converting in the mid-market segment? You dig into the data, interview reps, identify root causes, propose fixes.

• Enable process improvements: Maybe BD needs better account scoring. Maybe SC needs a standardized POC framework. You work cross-functionally (marketing, product, enablement) to design and roll out solutions.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're stretched across two orgs: BD and SC have different metrics, different problems, different rhythms. You're constantly context-switching. Sometimes their priorities conflict and you're in the middle.

• Data is messy: Salesforce data quality is never perfect. BDRs log activities inconsistently. SC engagement isn't always tracked properly. You'll spend hours cleaning data before you can analyze it.

• High-stakes, high-visibility: Your analyses influence VP-level decisions—headcount, comp plans, territory design. If you get the model wrong, it affects dozens of people and millions in pipeline. The pressure is real.

• Firefighting is constant: A VP needs a board deck in 48 hours. Finance wants a headcount reforecast by Friday. A region is missing targets and needs root cause analysis ASAP. Strategic work often gets interrupted.

What Success Looks Like

• VPs trust your data: They stop questioning your numbers and start asking "what should we do about this?"
• Planning cycles run smoothly: Quarterly planning happens on time, models are accurate, teams hit capacity targets
• You identify problems before they're obvious: You flag that EMEA pipeline is trending down two months before it becomes a crisis
• Cross-functional projects ship: That new BD segmentation model or SC POC framework you designed actually gets implemented and improves metrics

Who You're Working With

Direct Partners:

• VP of Business Development: Likely focused on SDR/BDR productivity, pipeline volume, SQL creation
• VP of Solutions Consulting: Likely focused on SC capacity, demo quality, technical win rates
• Their direct reports: BD managers, SC managers—you support their operational needs too

What They Need From You:

• Clear, accurate reporting on what's working and what's not
• Data-driven recommendations for how to improve performance
• Reliable planning models so they can make hiring and investment decisions
• Meeting facilitation so they can focus on coaching their teams, not pulling reports

Requirements

• 5+ years in sales ops, rev ops, or strategy roles - preferably supporting pre-sales functions (BD, SC, SDR orgs)
• Strong analytical and modeling skills - you build financial models, capacity plans, pipeline forecasts in Excel/Google Sheets
• Salesforce and BI tool expertise - you pull and manipulate data from Salesforce, build dashboards in Tableau/Looker/similar
• Executive communication skills - you present to VPs and C-suite, turning complex analyses into clear recommendations
• Experience at scale - ideally you've worked at a 1,000+ person company where process and structure matter
• Comfort with ambiguity - this role is broad, priorities shift, you need to figure things out independently
• NYC Metro location - role is based in-office or hybrid in the NYC area