How ClickUp Built The Foundations For Its 18-People Salesforce Team

A critical part of Leadership is showing the value of your team's work. i.e. How is additional spending on the Salesforce team the best use of money?

It's a HARD job for those leading teams viewed as a 'cost center'.

Rev Ops and Biz Tech Leaders can't expect Executives to "get it".

It's obvious to you that the business should invest in Internal Tools, but an effective leader needs to be the champion of their own team.

This is especially true for anybody leading teams responsible for Salesforce, Hubspot, Intercom, or any other piece of internal technology not typically viewed as a revenue generator.

Any time you see large-scale transformational change within a company - be it a startup or enterprise - an Executive Sponsor was championing the change.

Here's how the journey went at ClickUp

Here's a quick look at the journey in progress at one of the fastest-growing SaaS startups of the last few years, ClickUp.

In December 2021, a new Head of Business Technology joined.

When Aurobind Ravichandran took over, the team included (7):

• 3 Salesforce Business Analysts

• 1 Salesforce CPQ Administrator

• 2 Salesforce Developers

• Revenue Systems Manager

Fast forward to today, and it's a team of (18):

• 3 Salesforce Administrators

• 2 Salesforce Developers

• 1 Salesforce Business Analyst

  †Open Headcount for a 2nd

• 1 Salesforce Architect

• 4 Product Owners

• Head of Business Technology (Aurobind)

• Head of GTM Systems

• Manager, GTM Systems

• Director, Corporate Applications (Finance, Legal, HR)

• Director, People Technology

  +2 People Tech Administrators

The addition of a Salesforce Architect, the entire Product Owner layer, and huge additions to Business Systems Leadership happened in about 6 months.

From the outside looking in, the organization is a bit top heavy. And I think that is a fair assessment in the current state.

However, the Head of Business Technology's job is to ensure that internal infrastructure, GTM tooling, and the resources to support it are a step ahead of the business needs. This looks more like foundational team building.

ClickUp is an organization going through fairly significant change.

👉 Roughly one-third of the Sales team started in the last 12 months, and the vast majority started in the previous 24 months.

👉 It's a company transitioning from Product Led Growth (PLG) to Enterprise Sales, a pivot we see across many SaaS organizations these days.

And laying the GTM Systems foundation for that next phase of the company's evolution is essential. But it can be a very challenging business case to make, particularly for an organization that doesn't have Rev Ops and Sales Enablement in their DNA.

The pieces seem to be in place here, but it will be fascinating to see how this org takes shape and expands in the 12 months ahead…