VP, Sales Operations: Meghan Gill of MongoDB

Meghan Gill jumped onto Sales Operation Demystified to share her journey into the sales operation and the best practices followed at MongoDB. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

You can learn more about:

• Meghan Gill
• MongoDB

Tools Mentioned:

• Salesforce
• Chorus
• Hightspot
• MindTickle

Key Takeaways

A decade at MongoDB

Meghan joined MongoDB during its infancy stage as its eighth-employee, back in 2009.  Initially, she joined the marketing department and remained part of that specific operation for almost seven years, until an opportunity to run the sales operations team at MongoDB came up in 2017. 

As a part of MongoDB for more than ten years, Meghan has seen the company evolve from a small firm of 10 employees to a publicly-traded organization of over 2,000 workers. She is currently the VP of Sales Operations at MongoDB, where she is supporting around 300 enterprise sellers and over 70 inside sales reps. 

How the sales operations team at MongoDB changed after Meghan took charge?

The sales ops team at MongoDB was pretty small when Meghan took on the leadership role. In fact, she says that they only had one analyst and two people managing Salesforce.

But over the past few years, the team has increased in size significantly while the integration of tools and a data-driven process has helped increase reps productivity. 

How Meghan has enhanced reps productivity

Meghan says that investing in territory management at MongoDB has significantly impacted the productivity of sales reps. She further explains that MongoDB’s database software is open source and then monetised with a cloud model, allowing anyone to try it out for free – thus they always have developers tinkering away with their software system. 

Sales reps then reach out to active users from target companies to engage in a sales conversation that may be warmer than if they were to conduct cold outreach.

How MongoDB is reacting to COVID-19

The biggest challenge MongoDB is facing with COVID-19 is to train and enable reps in a remote environment. The company also had to adapt their onboarding program to an online format, and increasingly leverage sales enablement tools to ensure the learning experience was effective during remote work. 

Top sales metrics – qualified pipeline and productivity per rep

Meghan believes in two sales metrics for achieving sales effectiveness. First, would be a qualified pipeline that Meghan calls her leading indicator where her reps go through different phases before reaching a successful sale. You need to have a pretty good definition to the pipeline to make it a useful metric to look at, says Meghan.

Second, would be measuring productivity per rep, which Meghan calls her lagging indicator. Productivity per rep metric helps identify the efficiency of the sales force.  

Meghan’s biggest influence

• John McMahon – Board member of MongoDB and a prominent name in the  software industry

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