Senior Vendor Manager - SMB Sales

Job description

About the Team The SMB Sales team is focused on scaling efficient, high-quality sales execution across a range of commercial motions, including Inbound, Outbound, API Sales, Channel, and SDR. We partner closely with Sales Leadership, Revenue Operations, Finance, Enablement, Program Management, and external vendor partners to build scalable operating models that support growth while maintaining a high bar for performance and customer experience. About the Role As a Senior Vendor Manager, SMB Sales, you will own performance across our outsourced SMB Sales vendor network. This is not a traditional vendor management role. We’re looking for a performance-focused operator who can drive large-scale sales execution through vendor partners, rather than someone primarily focused on vendor relationship management. You will own regional and site-level performance across Tier 1 partners, with responsibility for sales performance, quality, forecasting, governance, operational readiness, and vendor leadership accountability across multiple sales motions. You’ll work at the intersection of Sales Leadership, Revenue Operations, Finance, Enablement, Program Management, and external vendor executives. You will help ensure the machine performs: surfacing issues early, creating accountability, and driving the operating rigor needed to deliver consistently strong outcomes at scale. In this role, you will: - Own regional and site-level performance across revenue, pipeline, conversion, productivity, quality, and other key sales metrics. - Inspect sales funnel health and diagnose whether performance gaps are driven by quality, execution, routing, enablement, staffing, or process issues. - Surface underperformance early, diagnose the underlying drivers, and drive urgency around corrective action. - Build clear corrective action plans with vendor leadership, establish measurable outcomes, and ensure strong follow-through. - Lead Weekly Business Reviews, Monthly Business Reviews, and Quarterly Business Reviews with vendor partners, ensuring governance forums drive decisions, not just reporting. - Build and maintain scorecards that make sales performance, quality, operational health, and risk visible. - Hold vendor leadership accountable for frontline management quality, coaching effectiveness, staffing discipline, and execution rigor. - Own regional adoption of global playbooks, QA frameworks, and operating standards, using quality trends, call reviews, calibration outputs, and conversion analysis to identify opportunities for improvement. - Identify recurring operational failure modes and partner cross-functionally to solve systemic issues while maintaining a high bar for customer experience. - Own forecast quality, pipeline discipline, and risk inspection across assigned regions, building a consistent inspection cadence across motions and partners and pressure-testing vendor forecasts against activity, pipeline, and expected outcomes. - Translate complex operational and performance signals into clear business narratives and recommendations for senior leadership. - Monitor new-hire ramp, certification outcomes, productivity curves, and overall vendor readiness before launching new motions, regions, or major process changes. - Partner with Enablement, Revenue Operations, and Program Management to close readiness gaps and manage capacity against forecasted demand and business priorities. - Help redefine vendor operations for an AI-native sales environment, using automation, AI-enabled workflows, and scalable operating systems to improve seller productivity, forecasting accuracy, quality inspection, execution speed, decision-making, and performance visibility. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 8+ years of experience in vendor management, sales operations, scaled sales execution, vendor leadership, or commercial operations. - Have direct experience managing outsourced sales or revenue-generating vendor operations. - Have experience working in software, SaaS, cloud, or other high-velocity commercial environments. - Have strong experience working with Tier 1 vendor partners. - Have proven experience owning sales performance across multiple teams, sites, regions, or vendors. - Have a strong understanding of sales funnel metrics, forecasting, conversion, productivity, quality, and operational governance. - Have experience building and running WBRs, QBRs, performance scorecards, and corrective action plans. - Bring strong executive presence and the ability to influence senior internal and external stakeholders. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. 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