Selling to a VP of operations

A VP of operations doesn't buy technology. They buy fewer bad days. Every note you send should be about the bad days.

Get that right and operations leaders become some of the best buyers a services firm can have. They feel pain directly, they own budget for fixing it, and they don't care about buzzwords.

What they own

The VP of operations runs the machine that delivers the product or service. Fulfillment, supply chain, customer operations, field service, back office. It depends on the company, but the pattern is the same. When something breaks between an order and a happy customer, it's their problem.

They own large teams, often the biggest headcount in the business. They own processes that have grown over years and are held together by spreadsheets and tribal knowledge. And they own a lot of systems they didn't pick.

What they're measured on

Cost per unit of output. On-time delivery. Throughput. Error rates. Customer complaints. Overtime. Turnover on the floor or in the call center.

In a cost program, they're the first leader asked to find savings. In a growth push, they're the one asked to scale without breaking anything. Either way, they live with a number they're behind on.

What they ignore

Transformation language. Anything that sounds like a strategy deck. Pitches about AI with no clear link to a process they run.

And they ignore vendors who don't understand how work actually flows. If your note shows you don't know the difference between a pick rate and a fill rate, you're done.

Which signals matter

Business pressure is the strongest. Earnings releases and filings that mention margin pressure, supply chain disruption, a cost program or a restructuring all land on the VP of operations. Read the 10-Q for language about efficiency and you'll often find their mandate in plain sight. Margin pressure is a buying signal covers how to read it.

Next is a new leader. A VP of operations in their first 90 days is mapping what's broken and building a list. Get on that list early.

Hiring for the problem is strong too. Roles for process improvement leads, operations analysts or automation engineers show where they're putting money.

And watch for tech stack changes. A warehouse system or field service platform named in job posts tells you a migration is coming, and with it a lot of process work.

An example opener

Say a regional logistics company names a new VP of operations. The latest quarterly filing mentions rising labor costs in its distribution centers. And it's hiring two operations analysts and an automation engineer.

Saw you took over operations this spring, and the last quarterly report calls out labor costs in the distribution centers. With the analyst and automation roles open, my guess is the team is trying to find where manual handling eats the most hours, without a clean view of the data to show it. Is that close, or is the bigger issue somewhere else?

It names the pressure. It ties it to their first months. It guesses at a misery that sounds like their day. And it asks a question they can answer in a line.

Who else is on the committee

The VP of operations often holds budget for process and people work. But anything involving systems needs IT, and anything big needs finance.

So reach the technical lead who owns the systems the operations team uses. And find the champion, often a director or senior manager who runs one site or one function and feels the problem most. Write to each with the same research and a different angle.

How to win the meeting

Ask about the floor, not the strategy. Where does work pile up? Which process breaks every week? What does the team do manually that it shouldn't?

Then propose something small and measurable. Operations leaders trust results they can see in a month. A diagnostic of one process, or a fix for one bottleneck, earns the right to do the bigger work.

They'll remember who made their bad days fewer. That's the relationship worth building.