Let’s play a quick word association game. When you hear “sales operations,” what do you think of?
For me, sales operations means growth ?
But that hasn’t always been the case.
Here’s a little history lesson. The first sales operations team was started out of Xerox in the 1970s. The group leader at the time described the function as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do but need to do to make a great sales force.”
Now let’s fast forward about 50 years. Sales operations has evolved. It’s not about putting out fires and crunching numbers. Instead, it’s become a strategic arm of the business that directly supports the revenue engine.
Today’s sales ops pros are in the trenches with sales reps – constantly looking for ways to use data to drive strategy, make reps’ jobs easier, and reduce friction in the sales process.
In other words, sales ops pros will grow your business. They bring a system and a science to selling. And they’re often working their magic behind the scenes.
That’s why, for the second year in a row, we’re recognizing the top B2B sales ops pros who are driving growth for their organizations.
In addition to some much-deserved time in the spotlight, each winner will also get two tickets to the HYPERGROWTH 2019 location of their choice ??
So here they are – 24 sales operations leaders and up-and-comers you should keep an eye out for in 2019.
Know someone great that we missed? Send a tweet to @Drift and let us know who we should add to the list!
Hilary Headlee is someone who loves bringing order to the chaos of pre- and post-IPO companies. Her sweet spot? Companies that fall in the $100M+ category. So it’s no wonder she’s found a great home at Zoom Communications, which made one of the most talked about IPO debuts (so far) in 2019. She’s the one you want cracking the code on GTM strategies to quickly grow revenue engines with scalable sales operations and enablement.
Joseph Snider heads up sales operations at Palantir Technologies, where he’s worked with every team at the company to solve their technical challenges. That means anything from improving sales tracking to helping the ops team manage Palantir’s global real estate growth. Joseph has been with Palantir since 2012, and most recently was responsible for building the sales operations team from scratch.
If you’re scaling a hypergrowth company, Heidi Rawding is the person you want to run your sales ops team. She’s led the charge at companies like Rapid7 and Acquia – building out the systems and teams responsible for contract processing, RFP responses, sales territory planning and analysis, and sales forecasting. Now Heidi has taken on an expanded operations role at RapidMiner, where she heads up sales, channel, and customer success operations.
Jeramie Parsons is a versatile sales ops leader who is a competitive pricing manager, financial analyst, and Salesforce.com administrator all wrapped into one. Prior to making the move into sales ops at TaskUs, he worked in demand generation, so he’s got a deep understanding of both the sales and marketing side of the business. Jeramie is someone who has a mind for creative problem-solving – give him your reporting and data challenges, and he’ll come back with an innovative solution.
Han Wang has deep expertise in global sales and marketing operations for complex B2B software solutions. While at IBM he oversaw marketing automation before making the move to Dynatrace to lead sales ops. Now in his role at Tufin, Han is in charge of sales strategy and planning, sales forecasting, sales intelligence, sales systems and tools, sales processes, and territory and commission management.
For many people, business systems and processes are complex and intimidating– but for Gloria Antaya, they’re fascinating. In fact, she says that managing business applications, the tech stack, and processes are her passion. Gloria got her start as a business analyst, then became a Salesforce admin, and then moved onto revenue operations. Now she brings those skills into her current role at Upserve where she manages business applications.
Doron Almog is a well-rounded operations professional who knows his way around complex B2B software solutions. He’s held ops roles at EMC, HPE SimpliVity, and Applause, and now focuses on business applications at MathWorks.
Steve O’Neill is a finance and sales executive with extensive experience in both startups and large-scale enterprises, having worked at companies including Oracle, SAP, Dell EMC, and Box. Steve is someone who thrives in periods of transformation and change. And that perfectly suits his current role at Blue Prism, where he’s building a world-class sales ops team to scale the company through hypergrowth.
Pam Bragan has more than 15 years of experience accelerating sales growth – having worked in all major areas of sales operations and enablement including sales planning and budgeting, forecasting, pipeline management, compensation and incentive design and execution, and CRM deployment and management. Pam began her career as a sales admin at Sophos and is now responsible for the planning and budgeting of the rapidly growing 250 person, $200M sales organization at Acquia.
Jacklyn Flores is a sales and marketing operations pro who is passionate about translating analytical data insights into actionable strategies that support revenue generation. She got her start on the program and project management side of the house, which means she’s the kind of leader who can see the big picture – and then lay out the right steps to get the team to a successful outcome.
Anu Krishnakumar is a sales operations leader who’s had quite the journey at SmartBear. He got his start as an account executive, was a founding member of the European customer success team, and now runs global sales operations and enablement for the company. He’s well-known for building teams, implementing process improvements, and developing new metrics that increase overall efficiency and drive profitable growth.
Denis Malkov has more than 10 years of experience in B2B software and services companies. He’s developed go-to-market and post-sale strategies for both consumer and enterprise startups. In his role at PandaDoc, bring a customer-centric approach to revenue operations – he and his team serve as the builders and stewards of the revenue funnel and they work tirelessly to enhance the buying experience every step of the way.
Kaitlin MacKenzie is a Brightcove boomerang story. She got her start at the company on the business development team, working her way up to run the channel partner program. Then she went on to run sales ops at Applause until she returned to Brightcove in 2016 to join the customer success organization. And now? Kaitlin leads Brightcove’s global sales operations team.
Richard Hoffman is a rare breed in the tech world – he’s been at PCM for 23 years and counting. In that time, he’s led the enterprise marketing division for the company before making the move to the sales operations side of the house.
Tim O’Toole is an experienced sales operations professional with a strong finance background. In fact, he got his start at Fidelity Investments before eventually making his way into the sales ops world. Since then, he’s supported sales teams through information analysis, systems and workflow management at companies including Autodesk and Peoplefluent. Tim now runs sales ops at Applause.
If you’re looking for a seasoned enterprise sales ops exec, look no further than Darlene Grant. She’s held leadership roles at companies like Compaq, Hewlett Packard, and Dyn prior to its acquisition by Oracle in 2016. Now she’s responsible for the strategic planning and execution of key initiatives in sales, marketing and customer operations, as well as driving revenue growth and customer retention for the Oracle Dyn global business unit.
George Goodman is experienced in building and leading sales operations and regional finance teams with a focus on business intelligence, sales forecasting, sales strategy, and commercial support. He’s spent the bulk of his career at Edwards Lifesciences, starting out as a financial analyst, later working in project management, and then moving over to the sales ops team. Now he brings together those disciplines as a sales ops and finance manager.
Kim Stites has spent her career focusing on the CRM platform – specializing in the systems and processes that help businesses increase efficiency. Kim worked at Marketo and managed system administration for both marketing and sales ops. She later moved on to Looker, where she built and managed the sales ops team as the company grew from 70 employees to more than 350. Now she runs sales ops at Cloudinary.
Victoria Moss is a revenue-driven ops leader who’s focused on building and scaling the people, process, technology, and metrics that drive high-growth sales organizations. In her role at Greenhouse Software, Victoria is responsible for measuring performance, setting KPI’s, and forecasting. She also leads growth and go-to-market strategies, sales budgeting and planning, learning and development, and change management initiatives. Prior to joining Greenhouse, Victoria held operations roles at Conductor and IntegraMed.
Ryan Walsh is a sales operations manager at Snyk, a rapidly growing open source security company. Before joining Snyk to help scale the company through its next stage of growth, Ryan was a financial and business analyst at ZeroTurnaround.
Moira Sherry cut her teeth in the health and wellbeing industry – she ran sales ops at ShapeUp and later oversaw sales analytics and systems at Virgin Pulse. Now she’s taken her talents to Predictive Index and has broadened her scope to include business operations.
If you’re looking to develop strategic sales and marketing initiatives that drive revenue growth, Gerard Sample knows how to get the job done. He’s spent more than 20 years in marketing and business development roles at SaaS, enterprise software and online service companies such as CA Technologies, Match.com, and Sun Microsystems. Now Gerard leads global sales operations at Axway.
Frank Loughan is a sales operations executive at ARC Document Solutions, where he provides global support of the more than 300 member sales team. In his 11 years with the company, Frank has been able to grow his responsibility over time – first managing a branch, then a state, and then a region. Now he currently holds a national role where he’s focused on developing and deploying worldwide go-to-market strategies, leading marketing campaign development and rollout, and coordinating special projects.
Palen Schwab is a results-driven marketing and sales operations professional with more than 10 years of experience in business-to-business, high-tech, network security and WAN optimization markets. Palen’s background is in marketing – he’s held leadership positions at companies like Procera Networks and ThreatStack. He made the jump over to marketing and sales ops while still at ThreatStack, but now leads an ops team at C&K.
Want to learn from some of the best ops pros in the business? Subscribe to our Operations podcast and we’ll take you under the hood of companies big and small to find out what it takes to scale through hypergrowth. Here are a few examples of episodes we’ve aired so far:
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Metrics are Meaningless without Segments with Brett Queener, VC & Former Salesforce EVP
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Apple Product Launches and 10,000 Handwritten Notes with Michelle Palleschi (COO of Sendoso)
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Inside Salesforce’s Annual Planning Process with Bala Balabaskaran (aka The Guy Who Built It)
