The Secrets of Sales Operations Heroes

Secrets of Sales Ops Heroes Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power David Huang, Parature Cathy Otocka, Salary.com Carol Sullivan, LucidEra

Today’s Agenda

Introduction

Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power

David Huang

Director, Sales Operations

Cathy Otocka

Director, Sales Operations and On-Demand App Delivery

Carol Sullivan

Director, Sales and Marketing Operations

Panel Discussion

Polling Question

In my company, the role of Sales Operations reports into:

VP of Sales

CFO / Finance

VP of Marketing

CEO

We don’t have dedicated Sales Operations

Other

Today’s Agenda

Introduction

David Huang

Cathy Otocka

Carol Sullivan

Panel Discussion

David Huang, Director of Sales Operations

Sales Operations at Parature

Implement process

On-boarding

Territories

Performance Reporting

Contract Approval

Manage Sales Engineering

A Day in the Life…

Contract issues

Activity reporting

Ensuring leads & ops being followed up on

Once approved, contracts go to finance for invoicing and revenue rec

Any client invoice or renewal discrepancies

Market analysis, ensuring leads are followed up on

Ensuring reps are participating in campaigns

Data analysis and customer-base analysis

Getting any number needed to report to Board/investors

The Importance of Sales Analytics

VP of Sales

Looking at the numbers from all angles:

Sales cycle, ASP, demos, breakdowns of where sales come from

VP of Marketing

Historically the most analytical:

Lead source, demos, opportunities, resulting in what wins – marketing & Excel

Salesforce used for Lead and Opportunity tracking

Lots of transactional dashboards and reports

Why LucidEra?

Before LucidEra we reported everything out of Salesforce and Excel

Basically created “a mini-data warehouse”

The ability to take configurable pipeline snapshots was key

Results

We no longer have to worry about data warehousing

We can grab data on specific dates whenever we want now

It’s much easier to create calculated reports (e.g., averages, sums, subtotals for groups, etc.)

The Bottom Line

At Parature all decisions are made from numbers

We don’t shoot from the hip!

Secrets to Sales Ops success

Understand your company and what’s expected

Understand how sales numbers are intertwined and know what effects what

Ensure you have access to critical sales data at your fingertips

Today’s Agenda

Introduction

David Huang

Cathy Otocka

Carol Sullivan

Panel Discussion

Cathy Otocka, Managing Director Sales Ops

Sales Operations at Salary.com

Commissions and incentives

AE on-boarding

Pipeline Management

Territory Management

Maintenance /development of all SaaS apps

Data quality

Selling process from lead to contract

Develop and maintain key metrics for sales

A Day in the Life…

Territory disputes

Discounting issues

Contract issues

Commissions

Everything…

Investigate & Resolve Align & Refine Get Answers Avoid Surprises

Finance

Marketing

Sales

We own all the company data so we answer LOTS of questions…. about everything!

Finance / CFO interaction comes mostly at qtr/yr end when we need data for earnings calls/ sec filings

Why LucidEra?

We had built a lot of Excel spreadsheets and tried to come up with answers

The amount of data got to be too large

Doing any meaningful trending was really time consuming… often not worth the effort…really hard to do “what if “ analysis

Results

LucidEra really opened our eyes to pipeline development

We now can very easily look at all key metrics over time

Goal: Recognize laggards in performance in areas other than strict quota achievement so we can address performance gaps before the AE is really in trouble:

Avg contract value by time period/by product/by rep (we look at this in a million different ways)

Rep statistics – deal size, deal count, product mix, deal age, close ratio.

Secret’s to Sales Ops Success

The role is different from company to company

Executive management support is critical

Make sure you have good data and solid processes

Without this the analytics really mean nothing

Having access to the right metrics/answers makes you look really smart

People are very grateful (and often still surprised ) when I can answer nearly any question that I am asked

The goal: With solid metrics you can anticipate business changes before they get the best of you!

Today’s Agenda

Introduction

David Huang

Cathy Otocka

Carol Sullivan

Panel Discussion

Carol Sullivan, Director of Sales & Mktg Ops Copyright © 2008 LucidEra – All rights reserved You’re struggling with low CRM adoption & poor data quality Traditional Sales Ops Challenges… Your weekends are spent doing “stare and compare” reporting in Excel You can’t analyze trends or do comparisons on transactional data

Flexible Reporting and Analysis is Key Copyright © 2008 LucidEra – All rights reserved - Denis Pombriant, Beagle Research LucidEra has taken the complexity out of analytics so that more people and companies can take advantage of analytical insights. ” “

My Sales Operations Advice: Simplify!