Sales and Sales Ops : The Art and the Artist

Let’s go back in time.

The persona of Sales is that glamorized person who is dialing in every day and closing deals because of his charisma, relationship building, negotiations skills, etc. He needs nobody but himself.

But today, with the advent of the Internet people know so much about the product themselves, they don’t need to speak to sales to make a decision, or at least discover the product that can solve their problem.

In Software, where the sales cycle is much more complex, sales are not a function of Individual performance. Because, when you are competing in a crowded market with disruption happening every day, you cannot depend only on your interpersonal skills. For this reason, Sales has evolved to become a team sport.

When we started building the Sales function at Hevo, we knew about the importance of Sales Ops but were not sure how to implement it for our ICP and especially selling to Global Audiences from India. Our initial hires were not set up to win. We started to look at various elements of the process.

Here are a few problems statements we identified:

1. How can we change our onboarding process to create a deep product and market understanding?
2. Can we create a detailed SOP for the Sales reps for a more consistent process?
3. Can we plan better with territory planning and sales coverage?
4. How can we use technology to enable the Sales team to understand the customer better and act faster?
5. How do we collect data and analyze data?
6. Can we simplify the contractual and legal process in our Sales Cycle?

Now let’s look deeper into what we did and how we did it.

A. Onboarding: Building a Scalable System to enable everybody to win

Sales Ops. owned the Onboarding and Training program. We understood it’s our job as a company to enable anyone coming into Sales to know about the industry we are operating in and not just the product we are selling.

The 3-week onboarding is enabled to learn about the Industry Landscape, Culture at Hevo, detailed product training, training on Hubspot, and even technical training on various aspects. All this was done in collaboration with Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering. It’s like a well-oiled machine with various parts working in tandem to give a similar experience to everyone going through the Onboarding Process.

To reinforce the learning, each step is associated with Assignments and Presentations, which are reviewed by team members from across the company. This made sure that we built a culture of accountability and learning early on in the process.

For example, Each Sales rep has to go through mandatory SQL training. Although you don’t need extensive knowledge of SQL to sell the product but is important to understand all the aspects of the product.

Talk to anyone on the team, and you’ll realize the onboarding process has a big part to play in their success at Hevo.

Measuring Success during Onboarding

The onboarding process is taken seriously at Hevo. For each new Individual, an Individual tracker is created and progress is tracked each day till the onboarding program is completed. We deployed a collaborative approach by assigning a buddy to each new Individual so that there is deeper interaction at the individual level which enhances the learning experience for the newly added member of the sales team.

Imagining this process without cross-functional collaboration would be impossible. This is where Sales Ops. play a very important role to bring everything together.

B. Integrating Technology and Automation into the process

Looking at technology as an enabler more than a game change has allowed us to invest in just the right mix of technologies.

1. Hubspot as a CRM, and Sales Automation

The idea behind using a tool like Hubspot early in our journey was to enable a single platform to capture information, manage the leads, and run engagement with Customers in a single platform.

Due to heavy traffic through Inbound, Hubspot has been useful in increasing the effectiveness of our engagement with customers. It’s also important to understand that having the right information in a single platform helps us to build agility and reduce any interdependencies on the Integration of various tools.

For example: As soon as the leads are assigned to the owners, they have all the information readily available to make an informed decision and take the next step. They know the use-case, and based on the type of users( High Intent, or Low intent), they can add them to the sequence in the Hubspot only. There is no need to ask any team for any information. This helps the Sales team to become autonomous. However, Sales Ops. enables everything to come together.

2. Setting up Metabase for Analytics

While Hubspot is good at Sales Engagement, we wanted to use a niche platform for a faster and easier way to learn from all the Data generated through Sales Engagement.

For example, We run ISM Exceptions reports which fetch data from Hubspot and tell us the process exceptions for each Individual ISM. It gives us fast answers to questions such as which are the customers we’ve not tried to establish connect with through a call. Or for that matter which users we’ve not contacted in more than 4 days.

Metabase gives us quick insights to discover the problem and it also gives insight to each sales rep about their own metrics through which they can fine-tune their approach to selling.

3. Integrating Full Story to understand the user journey

Another key example of using technology to only help us in the process was leveraging Full Story to analyze the user journey of each prospect. Because we wanted to understand the challenges technical users are facing during the initial set-up and what led to their bad experience.

This helped our Sales team to understand and send out the right communication to help them through their journey.

The key to all this has been dedicated team effort from Sales Ops focusing on a dedicated team looking into Integration, and continuous improvements have helped us keep the system running smoothly.

C. Documenting Detailed SOPs

Onboarding made sure that the Sales rep. understood the industry landscape, had deep product understanding, understood user journey, and got well versed with Hubspot.

The next step of the puzzle was to establish best practices and guidelines for the sales team to engage with the customers through calls, email, etc. It was also important to highlight in as much detail as possible to leverage functionalities of the CRM like sequences, deals, properties, etc. to make their reach-out efficient.

This helped us solve the following challenges effectively:

1. Removed inconsistencies in the Sales Touchpoints.
2. No confusion on what actions to take in Hubspot based on user engagement.
3. Definitions and guidelines on updating relevant fields in Hubspot. This made sure we have all the data to run reporting and analytics.
4. Basic hygiene and outline on how to engage with customers on call.

The SOP was created purposely in a step-by-step detailed manner so that we don’t encounter any inconsistencies from a process standpoint when we scale. We’ve seen this working in the last 3–4 months from the time our sales team expanded from 6 to 15 members.

To conclude, Sales ops. is what makes the Selling efficient at Hevo, and many other companies. A conscious effort to invest in Sales ops. process and resources have helped us sell and scale our team efficiently.

Did this blog get you excited? Please shoot us an email at sales.talent@hevodata.com to chat more about the Sales methods at Hevo.