Territory Planning with Meghan Gill: Data-Driven Operational Cadence for Q4 & 2027

0:10Welcome to Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. In this Revenue Builders segment, we're diving in with Meghan Gill, VP of Sales Operations who scaled MongoDB from$100 million to a multi-billion dollar enterprise over 15 years. She knows what it takes to build operational discipline at scale. In this conversation, Megan breaks down how to structure your operational cadence and territory planning so it actually enables your sales leaders instead of burying them. This is the operational foundation that separates solid execution from chaos during planning season. Let's dive in.

0:45So when I took over sales ops, it was right before we went public. So we were around 100 million in revenue, probably 60 or 70 reps. And so it was me, one analyst and a couple of Salesforce folks. By the time I left MongoDB, we were a$2 billion public company. We had probably six or 700 reps and sales operations was organized into a few different pillars. There was a field operations team that was sitting close to each of the sales leaders and supporting each of the leaders in their geo and was kind of the interface between centralized ops, finance, and the field. Then we had a team that was focused on planning and comp.

1:32And then we had a team that was focused on systems, process, analytics, and reporting. So it definitely evolved over time into being a much more specialized function.

1:43Meghan Gill: And what did the people, let's go through each one of those. What did the field ops people do that couldn't be done, you know, centralized? Well, what happened over time was a lot of the stuff that was being done centralized got pushed to those field ops teams. So, for example, like, you know, you probably remember, John, we went through many planning cycles where we worked together on things like territories and comp plan design and how many reps are we going to put in each region. All that stuff eventually got pushed into the field ops team. So there would be like a leader for, say, North America, and they would sit with that.

2:21The sales ops leader was kind of like their COO who would figure out how many, what resources are we putting where in each of the different functions? So not just reps, but SAS, SDRs, partner reps. They would figure out what the territories were going to look like. They would be running the operational cadence on the ground. And then a lot of the reporting to support that was done centrally so that everybody was kind of singing from the same hymn sheet, if you will. So we had centralized like dashboards to track, you know, productive capacity and pipeline and things like that. But, you know, when you're in the field, there was someone there to sort of run it locally.

2:59Meghan Gill: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because they have more local knowledge than you do at the corporate level. Right. And then so comp and planning, compensation, that's comp plans. Right. And then what's planning? You talked about planning. What is that? Is that for planning for next year? Yeah. I mean, it's funny because my husband was always joking with me. You're always planning. You're always planning. And that was like a big shift, I would say, as we got bigger is it wasn't like, okay, we're just going to have a few meetings about the comp plans in Q4, and then we'll be ready to go. Planning became basically a full year process.

3:38So in Q1, you're issuing all the new plans, you're enabling on the decisions that you made. In Q2, you're starting to think about, okay, like what are the changes we might want to make for next year? What are the big needle movers? And then also what kind of growth do we want to have for the following year? By the beginning of Q3, you have preliminary, we would have preliminary numbers and we would spend Q3, basically the exec team would come up, like me and the exec team would come up with like the high level numbers, then we would distribute them out to the main regions and they would go back and do their bottoms up planning.

4:13And then Q4 was all about systems and implementation. So, and we never sort of like left that cycle. We're always, always in planning mode because if you make, you know, changes that might've been easy to make when you're smaller, as you get bigger, can have a much larger downstream impact, whether it's on how Salesforce is configured, how you're enabling the reps, how you're paying the reps, So it became it became quite an endeavor. And that became like the big basically where I was spending most of my time. I was like, OK, it's FY24. I'm thinking about FY26. Yeah.

4:47Meghan Gill: And when you talked about the evolution of sales operations. You know, when you go when I go to different companies and talk to different companies, sales ops means different things to different companies. And it basically is probably because of what you've outlined as you get bigger and bigger sales ops and the definition for sales ops really changes. It does. And yeah, as you get bigger, it becomes much more of a focus on definitely focus on the planning. Early on, there was much more of a focus on just like building the tools, making sure you have the right reporting and dashboards, that you have the right capabilities to do pipe gen or inspect deals.

5:29And then once that infrastructure is in place, then it really shifts towards how do we make sure we're segmenting the sales force the right way, that we're utilizing our resources in the most optimal way. So it definitely changed over time. Yeah.

5:46Meghan Gill: Now, just just for my understanding, because you hear a lot of companies now is calling it revenue ops. So what's the difference or is there a difference between sales ops and revenue ops from what you know? So my understanding of rev ops is that the concept is that you bring together all of the different operations functions. So not just sales, but marketing, CS, maybe you have a services ops team into one function so that you are all aligned on the same metrics. And it sort of allows better cross-functional collaboration. I have a bit of a contrarian view on that. I think that it's probably great early on when you're resource constrained, like, you know, to build a set.

6:37If you're an early stage startup, like why build a marketing ops team and a sales ops team? Probably easier to build one cohesive team. But over time, you know, you want your operations team to be close to the business. And I mean, who likes working with a big centralized function? Which is why it was so important to have to me to have that field operations function within sales ops, because I didn't want to I you know, you see it happening all the time. It's like you're not getting what you want from the centralized function. So then the team starts going rogue. They build their own tools. And then you're just undermining the whole point of having a centralized function.

7:14So I think there needs to be a bit of a balance between having some things that are centralized and some things that are very close to the field. Yeah.

7:22Meghan Gill: Now, you talked a little bit about structuring, you know, territory planning, account assignments. And you talked about how, you know, probably in the beginning it was done more centrally. And then later it was done more through the field ops. Can you talk a little bit at least about the process of doing more territory planning as your ICP changes every year, product changes, you acquire a company, ICP changes, so territory, maybe account assignments need to change? Yeah, I should say we always left the decisions about territories to the sales leaders. That was ultimately their decision. And the job of operations was more of an enablement function, like giving the reps, the leaders the data that they needed to make those calls.

8:12And we had this idea at MongoDB. I mean, it's an open source database, right? So there's lots and lots of adoption and lots of signal that people might be interested in using it. And we called that smoke as in where there's smoke, there's fire. So we built a lot of reports. We had something called the smoke report that showed people's engagement from both internal systems and external systems. And then over time, we actually built our own internal tool built on MongoDB, of course, to enable the leaders to see all of the different data points and actually change territories dynamically. And then the next sort of iteration was, OK, now you're going to have a field ops partner and that field ops partner will help you build those territories using all of this tooling.

9:01But the hardest part, to be honest, is getting the data right, because, you know, nobody has a perfect CRM with perfectly scrubbed data. And so keeping the database clean, that was always one of the biggest challenges that we had.

9:18Meghan Gill: And that always that fed into the tool that you built. I think you called it Argos or something that that tool. And that tool could be used at the corporate level or at the local level to try to divide territories evenly. Yeah, exactly. So the, you know, you could see as a leader, you know, these are the accounts in my under my purview. And this is how I'm going to distribute them across the different reps. Yeah. And that's so important because, sorry, Johnny, because you see so many times, especially with first line managers, especially first time first line managers that have, let's say, five reps.

9:57Meghan Gill: Two of them are bringing in, have been there like four or five years. And then they start saying they're going to pull some accounts away from them for the three or four new reps in the territory. And then they say, well, if you do that, you know, I'm going to quit. And then the poor new reps that come in don't really have a chance at making the number because they got a little sliver of the pie. So it's so important for productivity, as you know, to make sure that those territories are evenly divided. Give everybody a chance to make the number. Yeah. And we had I mean, we've changed the process many times.

10:30And, you know, I left MongoDB back in February, so they could have changed it since I've been there for all I know. But for a while, we were working off this concept of total addressable MongoDB market. So TAM. And so we tried to quantify the value of each account and give each rep, show them like, OK, you have X million dollars of TAM. It's the same as the guy sitting next to you. So you have an equal shot at hitting your number. And then that really helped us see like, OK, well, this person doesn't really have enough to work with or this person's got more than they can possibly prospect into.

11:06Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate, and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.