I’m leading a sales team inside a matrixed company.
My job is simple to describe and hard to execute: Hit Plan.
If I can do that while also contributing more broadly, great. But I learned early in my sales career that, at the end of the day, no one cares about anything I’ve contributed if I haven’t first delivered the number.
This becomes more challenging in a matrixed environment because many of the critical inputs required to hit plan sit outside of my authority.
Some examples:
- Service attach rates are 4-5x ARR, but I have no authority over services pricing
- Completely independent US subsidiaries want to work with our team, but a RoE structure managed by a RevOps team that reports into Finance assigns all deals to global HQ
- A deal needs bespoke marketing support, but their leader has her own priorities so allocating time/resources to support that deal is difficult
In each of these cases (just a few examples), an executive leader with authority over all of revenue could easily make decisions that prioritize growth.
But, we are not structured that way.
Instead, we have:
- Regional Sales Leaders that report into the CEO
- Global Customer Success team that reports into the CSO
- Global Revenue Operations team that reports into the CFO
- Global Professional Services organization that is run completely independent from sales and customer success
- Global marketing organization that runs completely independent from sales, professional services, and the customer organization
As a sales leader tasked with driving double-digit growth year over year, this structure creates big internal hurdles.
Rather than growth, it optimizes for risk management, alignment, shared ownership, and internal fairness.
Growth, however, requires speed, accountability, decisive bets, and clear authority.
But here’s the thing, it isn’t changing.
And my job is still to hit plan.
So I started thinking about this a different way:
How do I operate like a CRO inside this organization, even without the title or formal authority?
Two operating principles emerged:
1/ Slow down making big declarations, but do not slow down the strategic thinking
My old approach was “here’s the decision – let’s go.”
I replaced this with an approach where I:
- Do one-on-one meetings first to socialize concepts
- Frame options, not conclusions
- Intentionally let others feel part of the reasoning
- Close decisively once alignment has formed quietly
The decision still happens.
But it doesn’t feel as abrupt.
And the interesting thing is that this approach also forced me to be even more thoughtful about the initiatives I wanted to pursue.
Because it would take longer to form that quiet alignment, I needed to be more deliberate about what I was pursuing.
2/ I let go of being explicitly given the title and authority
In this matrixed org the authority is, by definition, diffused. The title matters less.
My litmus test became how often people deferred to my judgment. That became the real signal of authority.
Once I did that, my energy was going into what really mattered.
Here’s a concrete example of how this played out in practice.
One Tangible Example:
Situation
Our RevOps / Finance team drafted a new comp plan for AEs. And included clauses that would be punitive to AEs who closed a low number of really large deals (as opposed to consistently closing average size deals throughout the year).
My issue was they appeared to be trying to use the comp plan to performance manage the AE team. Something I think should sit squarely with me. And I didn’t like the optics of de-incentivizing large deals.
“Old” Perspective
The “old perspective” would have railed about how we don’t have a global commercial leader who would have caught this sooner. And that it’s ridiculous that we don’t have sales leaders participating in the design. This would have resulted in me delcaring how “dumb” this was, and providing the solution.
“New” Perspective
I thought all those things :), but approached it differently.
I sent an email to the committee asking “what problem are we trying to solve for with this clause?”
The answers were actually varied across different stakeholders. This alone started to get people to question why we added it.
I sent another committee-wide email sharing my perspective on what people had said. Then, set up individual meetings with key stakeholders to discuss.
Without offering a solution, I made my two main points really clear:
1/ I do not want to use the comp plan to try to performance manage the team
2/ I do not want us to disincentivize AEs doing large deals
The Result
When we all met as a group, our CEO actually led with some of what he and I discussed.
It’s not that he credited me, but rather he used some of the arguments. And everyone mostly agreed.
In the end, we removed the punitive clauses from the comp plan.
The issue wasn’t intelligence or intent. It was how decisions were being reached.
By slowing down the declaration – but not the thinking – I was able to influence outcomes without formal authority.
More importantly, I stopped expending energy fighting a structure that wasn’t going to change, and redirected it toward actually driving results.