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

Welcome 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.

When I took over SalesOps, it was right before we went public. We were around 100 million in revenue, probably 60 or 70 reps. 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 600 or 700 reps. 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. And 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.

And what did the people with those, let's go through each one of those. What did the field ops people do that, 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. The 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 dashboards to track reporting. 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.

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 or

Yeah, I mean, it's funny because my my husband's always was always joking with me. You're always planning. You're always planning. And that was like, you know, a big a big shift, I would say, as we