Q&A with Sauce Labs Senior Manager of RevOps Jessica Tucker

In our Experts in ICM & SPM series, we’re sitting down with experts across compensation, RevOps, and GTM (Go-to-Market) functions to hear their perspectives on the biggest challenges and opportunities in incentive compensation and sales planning today.

We recently sat down with Jessica Tucker, Senior Manager of Revenue Operations at Sauce Labs, to learn more about learning opportunities for RevOps folks, why process documentation is king, and how to address some of the function’s biggest challenges (read: maintaining data hygiene).

Tell us a little bit about your background – you graduated with a degree in Psychology, how did you end up managing commissions?

I’ve been working in various forms of operations or finance since I was in college working as a bookkeeper for a small company, minus a short but meaningful stint post college where I worked in a group home with adults with severe mental illnesses, and briefly as a 911 operator. 

People are often confused when I tell them that I have a psych degree but now work in RevOps, and while there can be a lot of “math” involved in what I do, a lot of it is about working with people and being able to communicate with them, understand them, and support them. I feel like my psych degree helps with that - I see people for more than what they are presenting at the surface. I understand that maybe there’s something else going on that’s causing them to respond in this way. Trauma informed care teaches us not to ask “what’s wrong with you” first, but rather to ask “what happened to you?” Of course it’s easier to get frustrated first when someone isn’t doing what you need them to, or speaking in a way that doesn’t bring harmony, but seeing them as a whole person with a history allows me to be slow to judge. 

I enjoy being in supporting roles, uplifting people to succeed. I don’t want to be the front person talking to customers, but I do want to make sure you have the necessary tools and information to get through that conversation and get paid for it in the end. As a supporting role, I get to cheer for our sales team from the sidelines. I work so closely with their data and names that I think that I know them when in reality, some of them I’ve never interacted with one on one. But regardless, I’m excited to see their name and their attainment and saying “Yes! Go them!”. They may not know it, but I’m rooting for them. 

We know that the RevOps function encompasses many  responsibilities, opportunities, and challenges, so we’re of course curious – what's most exciting to you about working in Revenue Operations?

The most exciting part of RevOps to me is the chance to wear a lot of different hats. Especially in a smaller startup environment, there’s always a lot to do and it might not all be within my realm of expertise or job title, but it’s all a learning opportunity.

While my main task is to run commissions and everything that goes into that – which includes territory planning, quota builds, and revenue and attainment tracking – we often have to be flexible in small team settings, and just step in and help with what needs to get done. That means I also find myself running procurement for our tech stack, or helping with Salesforce admin tasks, or helping a teammate do an analysis on our win rates, or building out reports for a QBR deck. It gives more insight into the bigger picture of the company, so I can better understand what other teams are doing, and how it impacts our growth.

Where do you see the biggest areas of improvement and opportunity? 

Improvement to me means taking the opportunity to learn something new, and then applying it to what I’m doing to make that either better or more efficient. There are always opportunities for improvement, whether that’s in finding a better way to track my data, or building a report in CaptivateIQ that helps me present payouts in an easier way (I finally did this in 2024!), or learning a new function or formula in Google Sheets or CaptivateIQ to help calculate payouts.

Looking to the upcoming fiscal year, I already have some ideas for how I’d like to implement these learnings.

What best practices do you think are most important to highlight for others moving into RevOps?

Document, document, document! Document your processes so they can be repeated, document changes, adjustments, or exceptions so you can refer back to them, and document approvals so there’s no doubt.

One specific example: our team has group worksheets where we build quota models for the year, and we can all work there together. However, this year we moved our sales team to pod structure, so I decided I needed my own sheet to track all changes live – that could be my source of truth for quota or staffing changes, etc., and it would all roll up into the overall quota assignment numbers for the CRO, as well as the pod quotas.

Any time a rep comes or goes, that impacts the quota of the pod, as well as the quota of their manager. I didn’t want to lose data by  removing a team member who had left, and I needed their prorated quotas to roll up into the overall assigned quota numbers. I also needed to be able to see what changed if say an SE (Sales Engineer) moved from one pod to another – all of this impacts everyone else, and this can be a struggle if you’re not on top of it.

I have one sheet for the entire team with their individual assigned quotas, and then another where I use some formulas to pull in the pod and light vertical quotas based on the assignments on the first tab. It can get messy for sure, but I do my best to keep it clean and have structured it in a way that it does stay accurate. This gives me an easy tool to then update quotas and assignments accordingly in CaptivateIQ or Salesforce. 

What have been your biggest roadblocks across process, plan implementation, or rep communication?

I think keeping up with our data hygiene has been a big undertaking with this new structure. We certainly have help from our team members which we are grateful for, however anytime a team member comes or goes, or we do a small re-structure we have to re-assess that everyone is assigned to the correct opps/accounts. We recently pulled everything active within Salesforce to check and make sure the correct SE was assigned and then did a data upload to correct anything that was wrong. It can be a lot of work, but it’s worth it to ensure our team is set up for success. 

I know our audience would love to learn more about how your organization moved your sales team to a pod structure – can you tell us a little bit about why and how that was implemented?

We wanted to drive teamwork through structure. In our territory planning for this fiscal year, we knew we needed to make some changes. Before the start of our fiscal year, our operations team along with the leader of each sales team came to our San Francisco office and sat in a room for two days and hashed out our entire plan. 

We had gone through a lot of staffing changes last year, and we knew we’d be bringing on some new team members early in the year. We also were creating a new role for our former SDRs - they were going to become ISRs. We wanted to make sure this team was supported in this transition and had the opportunity to learn from seasoned sales members. 

Each pod is built around specific industries - this is because often sales strategy works similarly within the same industry. For example, finding what works for one bank might also work for another bank. This is especially for our ISRs who have been able to understand market factors, build repeatable plays, and utilize them across their industry with similar customers. 

We wanted to build off our known team members’ strengths. So each pod is built from experience within the industry, experience with the install base of the pod, and experience working with one another. The purpose of the pods was  to uplift our team and build off of their strengths. 

One part of implementing this new structure that may seem unusual to some, is that we decided to enable the entire GTM team on each sales team’s bonus plan structures. If they are going to be working as a team to close out deals, we believed it was important for them to also understand how their colleagues were going to be compensated as well. This way they are all responsible for not only their own, but also their team members' success. 

What results have you seen since making that change?

The team is more rigorous about data hygiene - we assign each pod member to every account and opportunity, and as new opportunities come up over the course of the year, we’ve seen them watching out for each other to ensure their other pod members are listed correctly. For example, the ISR or AE regularly requests that their SE be assigned so they  can start a POC to help them succeed. 

As mentioned above, the ISRs have been able to learn from seasoned sellers, and they’ve been given the chance to work alongside our Sr Account Executives to learn how to manage larger deals, pick up on industry specific strategy and meet their quota goals. 

The teamwork and collaboration is key - we started out the year having a 2 day enablement session to go through how we wanted this year to run. We ended the two day session by having each pod meet to come up with their own goals, get to know each other if they didn’t already, and also do a fun exercise to come up with a team name, mascot and saying. They went all out and created slide decks with songs, poems, mascots, funny team names which led to a lot of laughs. We’ve seen this same collaboration keep them strong throughout the year. 

How are you measuring results - both quantitatively and qualitatively - to inform future decision making here?

We track attainment not just by individual, but by pod and industry. So we might have more than one pod working the same industry and we want to know how that industry is doing, so we call it a light vertical and track their attainment as well. We’re tracking their progress from lead to closed deal and if we see one pod or light vertical might need more assistance, or there isn’t enough going on in another pod we make some movements across pods to ensure everyone can succeed. 

Certain teams within the GTM structure are paid based on their pod’s attainment to incentivize collaboration, and give credit to the supporting team members who may not necessarily have their name on the opportunity. 

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If you’re interested in participating in one of the Multiplier Q&A features, or have burning questions to ask today’s compensation and sales planning leaders, let us know at multiplier@captivateiq.com.