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Shirin Sharif

AMA: Adobe Sr. Director, Revenue Operations, Shirin Sharif on Stakeholder Management

March 12 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What's a good way to approach decisions that other teams feel they should own vs. Revenue Operations feels they should own?

    Shirin Sharif
    Shirin Sharif

    Adobe Sr. Director, Revenue Operations • 1y

    I like to align on roles for decision making before a project / initiative starts. The RAPID or DACI frameworks provide great structure to map out the decision makers. If the project has already begun, it's still not too late to propose a DACI framework and align on that with fellow leaders and team members. It's best to get the roles aligned on agnostic of the actual decisions you need to make, to avoid making it personal or political. My general rule of thumb is that the sales leader is usuall ...Read More

    717 Views
    1 request

  2. How do you structure your revenue operations team?

    How big is it, what does everyone do? How do you measure success of each function/person?

    Shirin Sharif
    Shirin Sharif

    Adobe Sr. Director, Revenue Operations • 1y

    I always structure my team to match the sales team structure that we are partnering with. For example, if I am mapped to the Sales VP, my direct reports should be mapped to her direct reports, likely not with a 1:1 ratio, but that helps determine reporting lines.

    I also like to have a person or sub-team reporting to me that can help look across the org to manage shared processes and functions and ensure that we are not duplicating efforts across the sales verticals.

    874 Views
    1 request

  3. How do you align internal Stakeholders?

    Shirin Sharif
    Shirin Sharif

    Adobe Sr. Director, Revenue Operations • 1y

    Stakeholders should be aligned to shared goals or priorities. I like to work together with my sales leaders to formulate and share those priorities and come up with success metrics for each goal. My team will ideally come up with the goals across their given sales teams so we all know what we are aiming for.

    Cross-functional partner team should also know how they are contributing to the goals, e.g. how many MQLs does it take to get to our sales target, as a marketing goal.

    742 Views
    1 request

  4. What's your advice on improving a historically tense relationship between functions?

    Shirin Sharif
    Shirin Sharif

    Adobe Sr. Director, Revenue Operations • 1y

    Let's acknowledge the tension and figure out the root causes and solutions together. Maybe it requires an offsite or working session to dig in? Based on my experience, the tension is usually caused by unclear or duplicative roles and responsibilities or misaligned incentives. Either way, it's my job as a leader to help drive alignment across those issues and document solutions together.

    639 Views
    1 request

  5. How do you measure your own success in your role?

    Shirin Sharif
    Shirin Sharif

    Adobe Sr. Director, Revenue Operations • 1y

    The ultimate measure of success is whether the sales team I partner with is hitting its targets. My job is to make my team is working on initiatives in support of that sales goal, i.e. identifying gaps to goal and what’s required to close them. My next success measures are usually related to innovation and scale for the business. So I set a joint goal with my sales leader and/or operations leaders to drive more growth in the business or scale processes to minimize manual work from my team or sal ...Read More

    830 Views
    2 requests