Sales Strategy & Operations Lead

Overview

You own strategic projects and operational infrastructure for a Google sales organization. You're building territory plans, modeling compensation changes, designing processes, analyzing pipeline health, or figuring out how to enter new markets. You work with sales leadership, finance, HR, and product teams—spending most of your time in spreadsheets, presentations, and cross-functional meetings.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (Alphabet/Google)

Size: 333,846+ employees globally

Growth: Massive scale with constant GTM experimentation across products (Cloud, Workspace, Ads, etc.)

Market Position: Dominant player in multiple categories, constantly entering new ones

GTM Reality

What This Role Supports:

• Google has dozens of sales orgs across products—Cloud, Workspace, Ads, Hardware, etc.
• Each has different GTM motions: enterprise field sales, inside sales, channel partners, PLG-assisted
• Your scope depends on which org you're in—could be focused on one product or working horizontally

Org Structure:

• Sales Strategy & Ops sits between sales leadership and the field
• You report into a Head of Strategy & Ops, who reports to a sales VP
• You coordinate with Finance (for quota/comp), People Ops (for hiring/org design), Product (for GTM launches), and Marketing (for pipeline planning)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Analysis/Modeling (35%) | Cross-functional Meetings (30%) | Presentations (20%) | Strategic Planning (15%)

Key Activities

• Territory & Quota Planning: Build models to carve up accounts and assign quotas. You're balancing TAM data, historical attainment, and internal politics. Reps will complain if territories feel unfair. You spend weeks in spreadsheets and then present to leadership.
• Compensation Design: Model changes to sales comp plans—adjusting accelerators, thresholds, or SPIFs. You run scenarios, forecast cost, and work with Finance and HR. Small changes affect hundreds of reps and millions in payout.
• Process & Tool Optimization: Identify bottlenecks in the sales process (e.g., deal approvals taking too long, Salesforce data quality issues). You map workflows, propose solutions, and coordinate with IT/Sales Ops to implement. Progress is slow because you're dealing with legacy systems and bureaucracy.
• Pipeline & Forecast Analysis: Pull data on pipeline health, conversion rates, or sales velocity. You build dashboards, flag risks, and present findings to leadership. You're the one telling VPs their forecast is off or a segment is underperforming.
• Strategic Projects: Lead big initiatives like entering a new market, launching a new product GTM motion, or restructuring the sales org. These involve discovery (interviewing stakeholders), analysis (modeling scenarios), and change management (getting buy-in across teams).

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Stakeholder Management at Scale: You're influencing without authority across massive orgs. Getting alignment requires endless meetings, pre-calls, and Docs comments. Projects take months because everyone has input.
• Data Challenges: Google has tons of data, but it's often messy or siloed across systems. You'll spend time cleaning data, reconciling numbers between sources, or waiting on data engineers.
• Slow Decision-Making: Google moves deliberately. Your brilliant proposal might sit in review for weeks. Launches get delayed. Priorities shift because a VP changes focus.
• Internal Politics: Quota planning and territory changes are contentious. Sales leaders will push back on your models. You need to defend your work with data while navigating competing agendas.
• Ambiguity: Projects are often open-ended—"Figure out how to improve win rates in EMEA" or "Design a better overlay model." You have to scope the work, find the data, and define success metrics yourself.

What Success Looks Like

• Your territory plan rolls out smoothly, reps feel their quotas are fair, and attainment improves YoY
• A process change you designed reduces deal cycle time by 15% across the segment
• Leadership adopts your strategic recommendation (e.g., a new market entry plan, org restructure)
• Your dashboards become the source of truth for pipeline reviews

Who You're Working With

Key Stakeholders:

• Sales Leadership (Directors/VPs): You present insights, build plans for their orgs, advise on strategy
• Finance: Partner on quota planning, comp modeling, budget forecasts
• Sales Reps & Managers: You don't manage them, but they're affected by your work—and they'll give feedback (loudly) if your changes don't work
• Product & Marketing: Coordinate on GTM launches, pipeline planning
• Other Strat & Ops Teams: Google has Strat & Ops everywhere—you'll collaborate horizontally

What They Care About:

• Sales leaders want actionable insights and plans that help them hit their number
• Finance wants rigor in your models and no budget surprises
• Reps want fair territories, achievable quotas, and tools that don't waste their time

Requirements

• 5+ years in sales strategy, sales operations, management consulting, or finance—ideally in B2B tech
• Strong analytical skills: SQL, Excel/Sheets modeling, data visualization (Looker, Tableau, or similar)
• Experience with sales systems (Salesforce) and GTM metrics (pipeline coverage, win rates, sales productivity)
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders without direct authority
• Comfortable with ambiguity and scoping open-ended projects
• Experience at scale—managing programs that affect hundreds of reps or hundreds of millions in revenue