: Sales Operations Manager

Position Overview The Sales Operations Manager will own the operating rhythm, field execution, performance governance, and commercial effectiveness of the sales function. Reporting directly to the SVP, this individual will manage and enable a team of field sales professionals, ensuring that revenue targets are translated into disciplined account plans, qualified pipelines, consistent customer engagement, and closed business.

This is not a reporting-only or CRM administration role. The successful candidate must be a hands-on sales leader who can review opportunities, coach sales professionals, participate in critical customer conversations, remove deal roadblocks, and demonstrate how to advance and close business.

The role will serve as the operational bridge between field sales and internal teamsincluding presales, delivery, marketing, finance, legal, talent acquisition, and executive leadership.

Key Responsibilities

1. Sales Target Management

- Translate annual and quarterly revenue objectives into individual, territory, account, and segment-level targets.
- Establish clear expectations for bookings, revenue, gross margin, pipeline creation, customer meetings, proposals, and closures.
- Track performance against weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual targets.
- Identify performance gaps early and develop corrective action plans with the respective sales professionals.
- Maintain clear accountability for every assigned account, opportunity, action item, and commitment.
- Ensure sales activities remain aligned with the company’s strategic priorities and margin expectations.
- Conduct periodic territory and account-allocation reviews based on market potential, performance, and capacity.

1. Field Sales Team Management

- Manage the day-to-day execution of field sales professionals across assigned territories, industries, or accounts.
- Set weekly priorities covering prospecting, customer meetings, opportunity development, proposals, negotiations, and closures.
- Conduct structured one-on-one reviews with each sales professional.
- Accompany team members to strategic customer meetings when required.
- Coach the team on discovery, stakeholder mapping, value articulation, objection handling, negotiation, and deal closure.
- Review call plans, meeting agendas, proposals, presentations, and follow-up communications before important customer interactions.
- Build a performance-oriented culture based on accountability, preparation, collaboration, and measurable outcomes.
- Recognize high performers and address continued underperformance through structured performance-improvement plans.

1. Pipeline and Opportunity Governance

- Own the accuracy, quality, and movement of the sales pipeline.
- Ensure every qualified opportunity contains:
- A clearly defined customer problem or business need
- Identified decision-makers, influencers, users, and procurement stakeholders
- Estimated deal value and expected gross margin
- Customer budget and purchasing process

- Competitive position
- Defined next action, owner, and completion date
- Realistic probability and expected closure date
- Identified technical, commercial, contractual, and delivery risks
- Run weekly pipeline and opportunity reviews with the field sales team.
- Challenge unsupported deal probabilities, outdated closure dates, and opportunities without customer-validated next steps.
- Apply a consistent qualification framework such as MEDDPICC, BANT, SPICED, or an internally approved methodology.
- Maintain appropriate pipeline coverage against upcoming revenue and booking targets.
- Improve opportunity conversion across stages and reduce pipeline ageing.
- Escalate high-value or at-risk opportunities to the SVP with a clear recovery or closure plan.
- Ensure opportunities are either advanced, requalified, nurtured, or closed out—preventing inactive deals from remaining indefinitely in the pipeline.

1. Deal Strategy and Closure Support

- Lead deal-strategy sessions for strategic and high-value opportunities.
- Help sales professionals build account-specific value propositions linked to customer priorities and measurable business outcomes.
- Guide the team in developing pricing, commercial positioning, negotiation boundaries, and concession strategies.
- Coordinate with presales and delivery teams to ensure that proposed solutions are technically credible, commercially viable, and operationally deliverable.
- Participate in customer negotiations and executive-level conversations when required.

- Help the sales team navigate complex buying committees involving engineering, business, finance, procurement, security, and legal stakeholders.
- Develop mutual action plans for strategic opportunities, with clear milestones leading to contract signature and onboarding.
- Track pending proposals, statements of work, contracts, purchase orders, and customer approvals through closure.

- Conduct win-loss reviews and convert lessons into improvements in qualification, positioning, pricing, and execution.

1. Sales Activity Management

- Define minimum activity expectations appropriate to each role and territory.
- Monitor customer meetings, prospecting activity, follow-ups, proposals, account plans, and pipeline creation.
- Ensure activity metrics are connected to business outcomes rather than treated as administrative targets.
- Review whether sales professionals are engaging the right stakeholders at the right level.

- Track lead response times, follow-up discipline, meeting-to-opportunity conversion, proposal turnaround, and sales-cycle velocity.
- Identify inactive or underdeveloped accounts and establish account-revival plans.
- Ensure meeting notes, action items, customer commitments, and next steps are documented in the CRM within the prescribed timeline.

1. CRM Governance and Sales Process Compliance

- Act as the business owner for sales-process discipline and CRM adoption.
- Ensure all accounts, contacts, activities, leads, opportunities, proposals, and forecasts are accurately recorded.
- Establish transparent definitions and entry and exit criteria for every sales stage.
- Maintain data quality across opportunity value, closure dates, probability, ownership, source, industry, territory, and next action.




- Create alerts and escalation mechanisms for stalled opportunities, overdue actions, inactive accounts, and forecast changes.

- Work with the CRM or technology team to automate dashboards, reminders, approval workflows, and management reporting.
- Establish sales data standards and operating controls so that executive decisions are based on reliable information.
- Ensure there is a complete audit trail for account ownership, pricing approvals, commercial commitments, and forecast revisions.

1. Forecasting and Executive Reporting

- Prepare weekly, monthly, and quarterly sales reports for the SVP and executive leadership.
- Maintain a reliable rolling forecast covering bookings, revenue, gross margin, and expected closure dates.

- Present a clear view of:

- Target versus achievement
- Commit, best-case, and pipeline forecast

- New pipeline generated

- Pipeline coverage

- Opportunity stage movement

- Conversion rates
- Sales-cycle duration

- Deal ageing

- Customer meetings and proposals
- Wins, losses, and slipped deals

- Revenue and margin risks

- Required management interventions
- Provide commentary and corrective actions, not merely numbers.
- Reconcile CRM forecasts with finance, delivery, and resource-planning data.

- Maintain dashboards at company, business-unit, territory, account, and individual-salesperson levels.
- Ensure forecast changes are supported by customer evidence and documented assumptions.

- Provide the SVP with timely visibility into performance risks, major opportunities, internal dependencies, and decisions required.

Weekly Sales Report – Expected Coverage The Sales Operations Manager will maintain a concise executive report containing:

Area

Required Information

Revenue performance

Target, achieved, gap, and recovery plan

Forecast

Commit, best case, pipeline, and variance from the previous week

Pipeline

Total value, qualified value, coverage, new pipeline, and stage movement

Strategic deals

Value, stage, customer stakeholders, next milestone, risk, and support required

Sales activity

Meetings, proposals, follow-ups, and opportunity conversion

Slipped deals

Reason for slippage, revised date, and corrective action

Team performance

Individual achievement, pipeline, activity, and coaching requirements

Commercials

Pricing approvals, margin exceptions, and contract status

Internal dependencies

Presales, delivery, recruitment, legal, finance, or leadership actions

Priorities

Top actions and expected outcomes for the coming week

1. Incentive and Recognition Programmes

- Work with the SVP, HR, and Finance to design and administer sales incentive schemes.
- Align incentive structures with bookings, revenue realization, gross margin, new-logo acquisition, account growth, and collection objectives.
- Define clear eligibility rules, thresholds, accelerators, caps, payment schedules, and clawback conditions.
- Ensure incentive calculations are accurate, transparent, auditable, and issued on time.
- Develop short-term incentive programmes for strategic offerings, targeted industries, new markets, or priority accounts.
- Recommend recognition mechanisms for consistent performance, strategic wins, collaboration, and pipeline development.
- Analyse whether incentive programmes are producing the intended commercial behaviour and recommend adjustments where required.
- Prevent incentive structures from encouraging low-margin, poorly qualified, or operationally unviable business.

1. Cross-Functional Coordination

- Coordinate with marketing on campaigns, target-account lists, events, lead quality, and sales enablement materials.
- Partner with presales and solution teams on discovery, solutioning, demonstrations, proposals, and technical validation.
- Work with delivery teams to validate scope, staffing, timelines, dependencies, risks, and transition readiness.
- Collaborate with Finance on pricing, margins, revenue recognition, collections, and incentive calculations.
- Coordinate with Legal on NDAs, MSAs, statements of work, liability clauses, data protection, and contractual exceptions.
- Work with Talent Acquisition and resource management teams to align hiring and deployment plans with committed and forecasted business.
- Ensure commitments made by sales teams are visible to internal stakeholders and can be fulfilled within agreed cost, quality, and schedule parameters.
- Maintain a structured escalation mechanism for dependencies that may delay proposals, customer responses, contracting, or project commencement.

1. Sales Planning and Operational Excellence

- Support the SVP in annual sales planning, territory design, account allocation, budgeting, and capacity planning.
- Develop account segmentation based on market potential, strategic fit, revenue opportunity, and relationship maturity.
- Create standardized templates for account plans, opportunity plans, meeting notes, proposals, forecasts, and business reviews.
- Document and continuously improve the end-to-end sales process—from lead generation through contracting, onboarding, and account handover.
- Establish service-level expectations between sales and supporting functions, including proposal turnaround, pricing approvals, legal reviews, and resource validation.
- Analyse productivity, conversion, cycle-time, and margin data to identify operational bottlenecks.
- Build repeatable sales playbooks for verticals, offerings, customer personas, and common competitive situations.
- Support onboarding and enablement of new sales professionals.
- Maintain a central repository of case studies, credentials, proposals, commercial benchmarks, customer references, and objection-handling material.

1. Business Reviews and Governance Cadence

The role will establish and manage the following operating cadence:
- Daily follow-up on priority actions and time-sensitive opportunities.
- Weekly sales activity, pipeline,



forecast, and closure review.
- Weekly individual coaching and performance discussions.
- Monthly business review covering revenue, margin, pipeline health, conversion, productivity, and risks.
- Quarterly territory, account, incentive, and performance review.
- Quarterly win-loss and sales-process improvement review.
- Annual sales planning, target allocation, capacity planning, and incentive-design exercise.

Key Performance Indicators Performance will be assessed using a balanced scorecard covering commercial results, pipeline quality, team productivity, and operational discipline.

Commercial Performance

- Percentage achievement of bookings and revenue targets
- Gross margin achievement
- Current-logo acquisition
- Revenue growth from existing accounts
- Average deal size
- Contract-to-revenue conversion
- Collection support and revenue realization

Pipeline Performance
- Qualified pipeline coverage
- New pipeline generated
- Stage-to-stage conversion
- Win rate
- Sales-cycle duration
- Opportunity ageing
- Forecast accuracy
- Percentage of opportunities with customer-validated next steps
- Reduction in slipped or repeatedly deferred opportunities

Team Effectiveness
- Individual target achievement
- Percentage of team members meeting quota
- Customer meetings and qualified opportunities generated
- Proposal-to-win conversion
- Coaching completion and improvement outcomes
- Salesperson ramp-up time
- Retention and development of high-performing team members

Operational Excellence
- CRM completeness and data accuracy
- Timeliness and quality of weekly reports
- Closure of overdue actions
- Proposal and approval turnaround times
- Forecast variance
- Incentive-calculation accuracy
- Compliance with sales-stage and commercial-approval processes
- Internal stakeholder satisfaction

Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Marketing, Engineering, Technology, or a related field; an MBA is preferred.
- 10–15 years of experience in B2B sales, sales operations, revenue operations, account management, or business development.
- At least 4–6 years of direct experience managing or enabling field sales teams.
- Demonstrated experience in carrying or influencing revenue targets and supporting complex deal closures.
- Strong understanding of enterprise sales cycles, consultative selling, solution selling, and account-based selling.
- Experience working in technology services, product engineering, SaaS, cloud, data platforms, enterprise software, IT services, or a related industry is preferred.
- Proven experience managing CRM platforms such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, or equivalent systems.
- Experience with sales forecasting, pipeline analytics, pricing, margins, incentive plans, and executive reporting.
- Ability to work directly with senior customer stakeholders, procurement teams, engineering leaders, and executive management.
- Strong command of Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and business-intelligence tools such as Power BI or Tableau.

Required Competencies
- Strong sales leadership and field-execution capability
- Hands-on deal coaching and negotiation skills
- Commercial and financial acumen
- Data-driven decision-making
- Pipeline and forecast discipline
- Ability to challenge assumptions constructively
- Strong executive communication and presentation skills
- Cross-functional stakeholder management
- High ownership and follow-through
- Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment
- Strong analytical and problem-solving capability
- Attention to detail without losing sight of commercial outcomes
- Ability to balance revenue growth with margin, delivery feasibility, and customer success

Leadership Profile The ideal candidate will operate as the SVP’s execution partner for the sales organization. This person must be comfortable moving between strategy and detail—from reviewing the overall revenue forecast to helping a salesperson prepare for a customer negotiation. The candidate must be willing to challenge weak pipelines, unrealistic forecasts, incomplete account plans, and inconsistent execution. At the same time, the individual must be a credible coach who can demonstrate how opportunities are qualified, customer value is established, executive relationships are developed, and business is brought to closure.

Success in this role will be measured not by the volume of reports produced, but by stronger sales execution: higher forecast accuracy, healthier pipeline coverage, improved win rates, shorter sales cycles, better margin realization, and a larger proportion of the field team consistently achieving quota.

Reporting and Stakeholder Structure

Reports to: Senior Vice President

Direct reports: Field sales professionals, business development executives, or sales coordinators, depending on the organizational structure

Key internal stakeholders:

- Senior Vice President and executive leadership
- Field Sales and Account Management
- Marketing and Demand Generation
- Presales and Solution Engineering
- Delivery and Project Management
- Finance and Commercial Operations
- Legal and Compliance
- Talent Acquisition and Resource Management
- Customer Success and Support

First 90-Day Expectations

First 30 Days

- Assess the sales team, territories, account ownership, targets, pipeline, and forecast.
- Review CRM data quality and establish immediate hygiene standards.
- Identify strategic deals, stalled opportunities, performance gaps, and internal dependencies.
- Introduce a consistent weekly review and executive-reporting cadence.

Days 31–60
- Implement standardized account plans, opportunity reviews, qualification criteria, and forecast categories.
- Develop individual performance scorecards and corrective action plans.
- Support closure plans for priority opportunities.
- Align internal stakeholders around proposal, pricing, legal, resource, and delivery workflows.

Days 61–90
- Improve pipeline quality and forecast reliability.
- Establish documented sales playbooks and operating procedures.
- Recommend territory, target, incentive, or resource changes where required.
- Present the SVP with a data-backed plan for improving revenue attainment, win rate, sales-cycle velocity, and team productivity over the subsequent two quarters.

📌 Sales Operations Lead (Bengaluru)
🏢 Calsoft
📍 Bengaluru