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

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 usually the decision maker and revenue operations is the driver or recommender of the options, and shares the tradeoff of each option.

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 sales leaders. Examples: * Automated quota models * Better dashboards to provide actionable insights * Reduce compensation errors * Sales insight models to improve account prioritization

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.

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.

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.