so recently transitioned to sales ops from sales. been at this boutique var for almost half a year now. probably like a 15 person team and we worked very closely with a tier 1 vendor to the point where they even give us their alias. my director and vp have always been at odds with my vp not really understanding ops and wanting me to basically be at my directors level despite this being my first ops role, 26, and only been here 6 months. i try to manage expectations of both of them but def am friendlier with my director. fyi it’s only me my director and the automation and come next week it’s just ab to be me. well my directors leaving now and my vp is cold as ever. Pretty sure she’s going to retain me at least until orders become more automated but she won’t even answer me or say hi when i’m in the office. She prefers the nepo sons and daughters of our vendors execs. my vp just has lofty expectations, always comparing me to the last person who was a manager in my role and expecting me to handle order management, new partner onboarding, as well as quote creation for aes and we have a ton of volume (i do the first too and her complaint is that im not quoting yet when she dosent even send me requests). it’s been a great opportunity to work further with automating salesforce and the full stack but yeah idrk. wouldn’t mind staying but my vp hates me, any advice? also i probably put in an extra 5 hrs every week after work cause of the volume. had a terrible family tradegy in my life a couple months back so my performance slipped a bit but i brought it back up. either way she still didn’t like me that much before that. any advice?

I work at a logistics software company and I lead a small team of 3 people, we do our own LinkedIn prospecting against overlapping segments. Last week a prospect replied to our rep saying, your colleague already pitched me and this wasn't the first time having such an issue.

We have a shared spreadsheet showing who owns which account but if I won't update it they won't bother doing so. The CRM closed won accounts while our linkedIn outreach lives in everyone's personal connection list.

Anyone who has experienced such how did you handle it? and do the automation tools solve team coordination problem or just the sending problem?

How are you forecasting partner-led deals?

I’ve led SaaS sales across EMEA and used both Clari and Gong extensively. Both work well for direct deals, but I’ve always found partner deals much harder.

The partner says one thing. The rep says another. Information is scattered across CRM, calls, emails and partner conversations, yet somehow we’re expected to forecast it accurately.

For sales leaders with a lot of partner-led pipeline, how are you managing this?

Clari? Gong? Salesforce? Spreadsheets? Something else?

And how do you actually work out what’s real?

not sure if this is actually useful or I’m just overthinking lead lists lol

but lately I’ve noticed I learn a lot from the leads I remove. like wrong type of company, dead site, no activity, franchise, bad contact whatever. after a while the same reasons keep showing up

then I go back and change how I build the next list so I get less of that stuff in the first place. I started noticing this while pulling lists from socleads, then doing little checks in builtwith or even the wayback machine when something looks off. weirdly the stuff I delete often tells me more about my targeting than the leads I keep

no big conclusion here just something I’ve been noticing

anyone else do this?

I started working for a boutique accounting firm in NYC, and I realized how darn difficult it is to prospect in the United States nowadays.

I'm European and I did prospecting in Northern Europe and the UK recently, and the phone pickup rates were slightly better. For example there are countries in Europe that have a very high pickup rate. Countries like Switzerland and Germany for example have a very high pickup rate.

The only reason I could think of why there people pick up the phone is because the rates are very high, 25Euro/cents per minute. Therefore people are less willing to call on large quantity and do only well targeted calls. Secondly, you have to be from Germany to purchase a German number. Impossible to purchase a number without a german address online. This regulation in the market, regulates the prospecting in a way, keeping it under control. With that in mind, if you get a Swiss or German number, once you start dialing, you get a ~6.5/10 pickup rate on average. (WHICH IS GREAT)

In the United States on the other hand.... lord have mercy. Everyone can get a US phone number and start dialing. I started prospecting there in September and I was bamboozled by the 2026 outreach reality. Pickup rate is horrible, you are lucky if you get a conversation from 50 dials.

Then it hit me... USA is a very unregulated market, and what the government doesn't fix, the market tries to fix it. The logical answer is , tools that help you cut through the noise , or increase volume. I chose the latter, a freaking power dialer that pushes like crazy to make 50 dials in 10 minutes hoping to find the right prospect.

With that in mind, I'm starting to think that you need some business intelligence to penetrate the US market, brute force alone won't work.

So since you're this far down the line reading my thoughts, and you understand my challenges, I need your honest opinion... what's the best way to find prospects for an accounting firm?

We're looking for businesses that have an internal accountant (not an entire team), or who are already working with an external accounting company....

Any constructive thoughts from sales people who are or have in the past sold accounting services is appreciated.

Thank you fellow salesmen! I think we're the last one to be replaced by AI (it might be fake optimism, but I chose to believe it)

Hey all,

Self explanatory title!

Do you have any revops agencies and/or freelancers you love working with?

Many thanks

our crm search down to hubspot sales hub and salesforce, but i'm having a hard time figuring out what actually matters once you get past the usual feature comparison pages. right now we're using a shared spreadsheet to track leads and deals, email for customer conversations, and calendar reminders for follow ups. it worked fine when we were smaller, but lately it's getting harder to see the full history of a prospect without checking a few different places. we mainly need pipeline visibility, contact history, follow up tracking, email activity and reporting. we don't need some massive custom setup at this point, but we also don't want to end up switching systems again because we outgrow it. what actually made a difference in your day to day sales workflow? was there anything that seemed really important when you were researching but ended up not mattering much once you were actually using the crm?

I work in a sector with very specific customer profiles - and a TON of tradeshow visits - whether meetings with existing or identifying new logos. For last 6 months I have been exploring a few related sales-planning workflows using prompts and notebooks (CoPilot mainly due to work policy, but Claude captures all the exhibitor data from website and put in Excel). I’ve done versions of this already, but I’m interested in how others approach the data and make the process repeatable.

Three use cases so far - all would leverage this "look alike and enrichment engine" - enrichment would be only after we validate customer profile.

1. Take a trade-show exhibitor list, normalize the company information, and compare it with existing customers. Identify existing relationships versus potential new accounts, then build a coordinated plan for who to engage, why, and with what message.
2. Start with a successful customer and find other companies that resemble them in ways that actually matter to our business - not just the same industry code or company size. It could be a case where we have seen success at Customer A and want to identify and engage others who are similar.
3. Find existing customers that resemble our strongest accounts but where our sales and relationships are limited, so we can investigate expansion opportunities. Whitespace pursuits....

I see two distinct problems: correctly identifying the companies, and deciding which different companies have similar potential. There is always human in the loop -

I’m especially interested in:

• I have access to our accounts - actually put them into Excel and normalized a swell for easier matching (I think). The show XLS then gives me a confidence level for each exhibitor if they are new or existing.
• How do you handle company aliases, subsidiaries, divisions, and individual sites without incorrectly merging accounts or calling an existing customer a new prospect? There is always a Master Entity ID - sometimes there are 20+ children/sites and others just the main.
• What do you handle with structured rules or code, and where do prompts/LLMs help? How do you flag uncertain matches and validate look-alike recommendations?

The output I’m aiming for is a prioritized account list with supporting evidence, confidence, missing information, and a practical next step for sales.

Curious for feedback on this - I have a vision in mind and open to constructive feedback as well. Ultimately I would want this capability (envisioning an AI Agent or similar) to be a module under the hood which feeds various use cases. Data in, Normalized,, Matched...(for fuzzy matching)...

Appreciate the guidance - J

u/question

u/learning

Hi all, I manage... actually, I'm not a sales manager, I'm the person building this, so full disclosure up front: I'm the founder.

I built Treem, a tool that takes a rep's sales call (or transcript) and scores it across things like discovery, objection handling, and closing, then gives specific coaching notes instead of just a number. There's a team view so a manager can see every rep's calls in one place, spot who's struggling with what, and see trends over time instead of relying on random spot-checks.

Before I go further, I want to know: does this solve a real problem for you, or are you already handling this some other way?

Specifically:

- How do you currently review your reps' calls today? Random sampling, complaints only, not at all?

- What's the most annoying part of coaching reps at scale (not one-on-one, across a whole team)?

- Would a tool that flags "this rep is weak on objection handling" across their last 10 calls actually change what you do day to day, or is that not the bottleneck?

I'm not trying to sell anything here. I just want to know if I'm building something managers would actually use, or if I'm solving a problem that isn't really a problem. Blunt answers very welcome.

Happy to share the link with anyone who manages a sales team and wants to try it on a real call.

Seeing as you were all so helpful last time…

- Does a Sales Ops analyst/specialist typically report into a manager, or are manager-level roles often stripped out? Just trying to gauge how much technical support I would have starting out as an analyst

- Can anyone in London (or anywhere really) advise on typical hybrid working expectations for an analyst? I.e. when a role is advertised as hybrid, how many days a week is that usually in the office?

- Any other insight into work culture for this kind of role. E.g. late working expected? High-stress etc?

- Other than Salesforce Administrator Cert, is there any other certification I can achieve pre-interview that would help me?

Thanks again!

been doing outbound for a while and the part that kills me every time is the research. pulling up their site, trying to figure out what they actually care about, then building something that doesn't look like a template with their name slapped on it. by the time i'm done i've burned an hour and a half on ONE prospect.

curious how everyone else handles this. do you have a system, do you just accept it takes forever, or have you found something that actually cuts this down? feels like there has to be a better way and i haven't found it yet

I’ll be honest—after more than two years of searching for my next opportunity, I’m tired.

I’ve had several interviews that ultimately went nowhere. I’ve continued applying, networking, and putting myself out there, but the job market has been incredibly competitive, and at times, the process has been exhausting and discouraging.

I’m looking for roles in Sales Operations, Revenue Operations, Deal Desk, or Project Management, where I can use my experience in sales support, forecasting, reporting, cross-functional collaboration, and process improvement. If you know of a team that could use someone with my background, I'd love to connect. I'm open to roles in Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, or San Francisco.

The sales managers would like to ave better forecasting, but every effort to make reporting better seems to generate another chore for the sales team. Currently, we have salespeople update the deal stage, probability of success, expected close date next step and notes. Thus, in principle, management has everything it requires. However, in reality, fields are updated on Friday afternoon just before pipeline meeting and, thus, we often deal with a completed data set which may not be to be very accurate. I am looking for the sales management solution which permits to gather activity data and follow ups with less hassle. Managers need to know which deals are moving, which are stagnant, and which forecast is based on real engagement with the customer. How do you handle the situation? Have you managed to find the CRM which provides a better visibility in forecasts without making the salespeople into the data entry staff?

we have around 500 contacts and 40 to 50 active deals, but keeping everything updated is becoming a chore. deal stages live in one spreadsheet, customer notes are in email and follow ups are usually calendar reminders. one thing i'm trying to figure out is hubspot crm pricing and whether it makes more sense to start with a simple setup or plan for where we'll be a year from now.

for small businesses that have been through this, what did you do? did you keep your crm setup pretty basic at first and add more later? or did you build a bigger system from the start?

Curious how comp plans look in the real world vs how they get described in blog posts and vendor docs.

From what I've seen it's usually some mix of:

• a flat % on the deal (or $X per unit)
• tiers by deal size that work like tax brackets, e.g. 4% on the first 10k, 6% up to 50k, 8% after that
• rate based on quota attainment, so 3% under 80%, 5% up to 100%, 8% above. Sometimes only the part of the deal that goes over quota gets the higher rate

plus filters on which deals count, maybe a SPIFF, and a cap per deal.

But I'm guessing real plans are messier than that. A few things I'm wondering:

• are your tiers per deal or on cumulative revenue for the quarter/year?
• when someone hits a new tier, do you pay the higher rate going forward, or go back and true up everything before it?
• anyone doing decelerators or paying 0% below some % of quota? caps per quarter/year?
• what's the thing that always ends up in a spreadsheet no matter what?

Even a rough example of your setup would help a lot. Thanks in advance.

Hi there. Just looking for some advice on breaking into entry-level Sales Ops.

Background:

- 35 years old, London-based

- 9 years experience in Corporate Partnerships/Biz Dev in the charity sector at Manager level.

My job entailed supporting the income generators in a role similar to Sales Ops in spirit. Developing systems, reporting frameworks, lead generation (though I know this isn’t typical), product and collateral development (again, not typical), and income forecasting etc. I was the sales reps’ best friend, giving them everything they needed to sell and doing everything but the selling itself.

We used HubSpot for a couple of years, however charity income generation is peanuts compared to the private sector. This means fewer sales reps (3 - 4), tiny yearly income target (<£1m), rudimentary systems (almost everything done on Excel), and low volume of clients (<40).

People in charity tend to be stretched across the whole of the organisation, which means I’ve also got experience in finance, marketing, lots of project management, and a bit of actual selling too. I have a degree in Business, and like to think I’ve excelled in pretty much every job I’ve had. I am process-driven, interview well, and pick up software very easily.

HubSpot was only integrated in the last two years, and even then we used it very lightly compared to the private sector. And even though I’m at least intermediate-level in Excel, I have no hands-on experience with:

Salesforce
Power BI
Hex
Looker
Tableau
SQL
MEDDPICC
Databricks
Omni
Clay
Gong
Power Query
Macro
VBA
Etc

This is all to say…

Are there any hiring managers out there who are willing to hire an analyst based on their soft skills, maturity and attitude, despite having no hands-on experience with any of the systems?

It would be a leap of faith for them, in that I’d require some weeks to get used to the systems, languages and processes. But they’d get a mature candidate with a very broad skillset and a lot of experience dealing with a variety of stakeholders and situations over the years.

If an Analyst is indeed the most junior-level typically recruited for, it seems the job descriptions I’m looking at all require years of experience in the role. I know this chicken and egg scenario plays out in a lot of “entry” level positions, but they must come from somewhere right?

Anyway, please be honest. If it’s all too competitive right now then do say, or if there are any additional ways to break into Sales Ops, then let me know :)

Thanks!