Sales Operations & Excellence Lead

The Sales Operations & Excellence Lead is a key member of ZainTech's Sales Operations and Excellence function, responsible for the planning, forecasting, pipeline governance, CRM effectiveness, and analytical insight required to drive predictable and profitable growth across the regional, multi-country sales organization. The role partners closely with country leadership and sits at the intersection of sales, strategy, systems, finance, and execution, translating business requirements into a consistent operating rhythm, trusted reporting, and practical Salesforce solutions.

The successful candidate will not only identify gaps, but will design the process, establish the rule, embed it into the system where appropriate, measure adoption, and work with senior commercial stakeholders across countries to sustain the change.

Responsibilities:

Forecasting & Forecast Governance

• Own the regional forecast process and cadence (weekly forecast calls, monthly and quarterly roll-ups) across all countries
• Consolidate country forecasts into a single regional view; challenge assumptions and govern commit, best-case, and pipeline categories
• Measure and improve forecast accuracy by country, segment, and account manager, and explain variances to leadership
• Partner with Finance to align bookings, revenue, and gross-profit forecasts with budgets and targets

Pipeline Management

• Define and govern pipeline standards, including stage definitions, exit criteria, coverage ratios, conversion, and velocity metrics
• Run structured pipeline reviews with country leaders to surface gaps, at-risk deals, and slippage early
• Set pipeline generation targets with Sales and Marketing and track conversion through the funnel

Sales Planning & Strategy

• Lead the annual and quarterly sales planning cycle, including market sizing, target setting, quota allocation, and capacity and headcount planning
• Design territory, segment, and account coverage models across countries
• Support go-to-market strategy and sales incentive design in partnership with Finance and HR
• Run quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and track country performance against plan

Salesforce / CRM Ownership & Hygiene

• Act as a business owner and subject-matter lead for Salesforce sales processes
• Translate commercial requirements into scalable CRM design, including fields, validation rules, workflows/flows, approvals, reports, dashboards, user stories, and adoption
• Set and enforce CRM data standards (mandatory fields, opportunity stages, close dates, amounts, account ownership) and drive regular hygiene reviews with country teams
• Identify CRM data gaps and inconsistencies, coordinate cleansing and remediation, and improve completeness, accuracy, and consistency of sales data

Analytics & Insights

• Develop and maintain dashboards, reports, datasets, and KPI frameworks covering forecast, pipeline, sales performance, productivity, conversion, activity, and operational metrics
• Turn data into clear insights, risks, opportunities, and recommended actions for regional and country leadership

Process Design, Automation & Continuous Improvement

• Map end-to-end sales processes, identify root causes, bottlenecks, duplication, and manual work, and redesign processes for simplicity and scale
• Apply the principle: eliminate first, then automate, then optimize
• Identify and implement reporting and workflow automation opportunities with IT, data, and business teams, reducing manual effort and improving control, speed, and user experience

Commercial & Cross-Functional Alignment

• Partner with Sales, Finance, Marketing, Delivery, and other functions to reconcile business requirements, commercial metrics, and system/process dependencies
• Understand revenue, gross profit, margin, pricing, and other commercial drivers sufficiently to challenge and validate the numbers

Requirements

• 4+ years of relevant experience across Sales Operations, Revenue Operations, Sales Strategy & Planning, Sales Excellence, Commercial Operations, or related roles, including at least 3 years in a lead or senior capacity
• Proven hands-on ownership of sales forecasting and pipeline governance in a multi-country or regional sales organization, with a track record of improving forecast accuracy
• Demonstrated experience leading annual sales planning, including target setting, quota allocation, territory design, and capacity planning
• Strong Salesforce experience, ideally spanning administration, business analysis, Sales Cloud process design, reporting, automation, data quality, UAT, and user adoption
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capability, with advanced Excel skills including PivotTables, Power Query, lookups, and advanced formulas
• Strong proficiency in Power BI, Tableau, Salesforce analytics, or comparable business intelligence and visualization platforms
• Experience working with CRM data alongside ERP, finance, delivery, or other enterprise systems; familiarity with platforms such as Oracle or SAP is advantageous
• Demonstrated ability to build management reporting, dashboards, KPI frameworks, and actionable performance insights
• Strong requirements-gathering, process-mapping, gap-analysis, documentation, UAT, and solution-validation skills
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and change-management skills, with the confidence to work directly with senior sales, country, and functional leaders
• Experience supporting regional or multi-country sales organizations
• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Finance, Economics, Engineering, Statistics, Data Analytics, Computer Technology, Information Systems, or a related field

Originally posted on Himalayas