Sales Operations Manager

Some companies have a CRM. Other companies have 14,000 contacts, six versions of the same company, an opportunity last updated in February and a sales pipeline everyone quietly suspects is lying to them. This growing FinTech business would very much like to be the first kind.

They're looking for a Sales Operations Manager to sit at the heart of their commercial operation, working closely with Sales, Marketing, Finance and the CEO to make the whole thing run better. This is a hands-on role for someone who understands how a successful sales operation should work, knows HubSpot inside out and gets a strange amount of satisfaction from fixing the things that slow good salespeople down.

HubSpot will be a big part of your world. You'll own the CRM, keep the data clean and make sure the workflows, automation and pipeline stages are helping the sales team sell rather than creating seventeen extra clicks and an unhealthy relationship with spreadsheets. You'll look at how leads move through the business, where opportunities get stuck and what can be changed behind the scenes to make the whole sales process quicker and more effective.

This isn't a glorified CRM administrator role though. You'll be looking at the bigger commercial picture, from pipeline health and conversion rates to win rates, deal velocity and revenue forecasts. You'll run pipeline reviews, challenge the occasional optimistic assumption and work out whether that opportunity sitting at 90% really is about to close or has simply been there since the clocks changed.

There's plenty of data involved, but the clever bit isn't producing more of it. It's knowing what matters and what to do about it. You'll build dashboards, analyse performance and turn a lot of raw information into clear commercial recommendations that normal human beings can understand and act upon.

You'll also have visibility beyond the initial sale, looking across acquisition, renewal, expansion and churn to give the business a much clearer understanding of the complete customer lifecycle. Ultimately, your job is to make sure the systems, processes and data behind the sales team are doing everything they can to help generate revenue.

• Own HubSpot and make sure it remains clean, organised and useful rather than gradually becoming an expensive digital cupboard.
• Build and improve sales workflows, automation and pipeline stages to remove bottlenecks and reduce lead response times.
• Work closely with the sales team to improve CRM adoption, pipeline discipline and the quality of commercial data.
• Build and maintain dashboards covering pipeline health, conversion, win rates, deal velocity and wider sales performance.
• Run regular pipeline reviews, identify stalled opportunities and challenge deal assumptions where the numbers don't quite match the optimism.
• Produce quarterly revenue forecasts using historical performance, active pipeline and commercial trends.
• Take ownership of CRM data quality and introduce sensible processes to maintain accuracy and consistency.
• Analyse acquisition, renewal, expansion, churn and customer engagement to provide a clearer view of the full customer lifecycle.
• Support commercial planning around territory coverage, account allocation, sales capacity, conversion and productivity.
• Turn sales and pipeline data into useful recommendations for the CEO and leadership team.
• Help new salespeople get to grips with HubSpot, processes and tools without handing them a 73-page manual and wishing them luck.

You'll probably have around three to five years' experience within Sales Operations, Revenue Operations or a sales-focused commercial role where CRM, pipeline management and sales performance have been a significant part of what you do. Experience within FinTech, SaaS or another technology-led business would be particularly useful.

The big one is HubSpot. You'll know it properly. Not "I've logged a few deals in it" properly, but the kind of properly where you understand what is going on behind the scenes. You'll be comfortable with CRM structure, workflows, automation, dashboards, reporting, pipeline configuration and data quality and you'll know how to make HubSpot work for salespeople rather than expecting salespeople to work around HubSpot.

You'll understand sales too. You know what a healthy pipeline looks like, why salespeople sometimes need challenging on their forecasts and why the best CRM process in the world is useless if nobody actually follows it. You'll be comfortable working alongside salespeople, understanding how they operate and finding ways to give them more time to do the bit they're actually there for: selling.

You'll also be good with numbers. Excel won't frighten you and you'll be able to take a horrible-looking table of raw data and find the useful bit hiding inside it. Just as importantly, you'll be able to explain what you've found without requiring everyone else in the room to become a data analyst first.

This is an individual contributor role, so you won't need a team beneath you to make things happen. You'll be comfortable taking ownership, working autonomously and getting stuck into everything from a wonky HubSpot workflow to a questionable revenue forecast. If you know sales, really know HubSpot and can't quite leave an inefficient process alone once you've spotted it, there should be plenty here to keep you occupied.