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Tessa Wright
I spent 12 years in revenue operations before anyone called it "RevOps." When I started at Zendesk in 2014 as a sales ops analyst, my job title was "Sales Operations Coordinator," which is corporate for "the person who fixes Salesforce when it breaks and nobody knows why."
Over six years at Zendesk, I went from fixing broken workflows to designing the entire revenue architecture. I built the territory model that supported the EMEA expansion. I designed the comp plans that took the mid-market team from 62% quota attainment to 89%. I was the person in the room when the CFO and CRO disagreed about what "pipeline coverage" actually meant, and I was the person who built the spreadsheet that settled the argument.
I left Zendesk for Gong in 2020, where I ran revenue operations for three years. Gong was the first place where I saw data actually change seller behavior at scale. We didn't just measure pipeline — we measured the conversations inside it. Talk-to-listen ratios, competitive mention frequency, pricing objection patterns. I built models that predicted deal outcomes better than the reps' own forecasts, which made me popular with the CFO and unpopular with about a third of the sales floor.
The thing I've learned across both companies is that go-to-market strategy is only as good as the ops layer underneath it. You can have the best positioning, the best product, the best sales talent — and still miss your number because your territory model is wrong, your comp plan incentivizes the wrong behavior, or your pipeline math assumes conversion rates from two years ago.
Most growth and GTM writing focuses on the strategy: the positioning, the narrative, the big bets. I write about the execution layer: the spreadsheets, the Salesforce configs, the comp plan edge cases, the forecasting models. It's less glamorous and more important.
I'm based in Denver. I have two teenage daughters, a golden retriever, and a conviction that most pipeline reviews are a waste of everyone's time.
Experience
- VP Revenue Operations, Gong
- Sr. Director Sales Ops, Zendesk
- MBA, Kellogg School of Management