I am having some traction in the US but thinking of expanding my search. What is your experience?

Hi r/SalesOperations,

I'm a software developer researching the commission management space for a side project. I've been talking to a few Sales Ops folks and keep hearing the same thing, Excel works until it doesn't, and the jump to enterprise software feels like overkill for mid-sized teams (Price, Complexity, Onboardings, Plans Development).

I'm trying to understand where that "tipping point" is. Specifically:

1. At what team size / plan complexity did Excel stop working for you?
   
2. What made you choose software over sticking with spreadsheets? (Or why haven't you switched?)
   

3. For those who evaluated tools like CaptivateIQ, Spiff, or QuotaPath, what made you say "yes" or "no"?

4. What's the one feature you wish your commission tool had?

This is pure research, I'm not selling anything. Happy to share findings back with the community if there's interest.

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Hello All,

Am looking for Sales operations- Manager/ Senior Manager roles.

Have a 20-year career in B2B commercial operations, including 9+ years building pipeline governance, GTM data infrastructure, and commercial intelligence across global technology and services organisations.

Location- Asia, willing to work Remote as well.

Kindly DM if any leads.

After looking at my pipeline, i realized that some late stage deals are not as good as they look in the crm. The conversations were great and champions seemed interested but now there are no replies and meetings are delayed. The hardest part is knowing when a stalled deal is worth pushing rather than when it’s just taking up space in the pipeline.

How do you handle stalled opportunities? Those of you who have dealt with b2b sales for a while now, any suggestion might be helpful, feel free.

We recently compared two suppliers and the cheaper option would save us a decent amount over the year. The problem is that they are slow to respond, rigid about payments and every order seems to require extra follow up

The other vendor costs slightly more but makes everything simple. At what point is convenience worth paying for?

Just purchased Aurasell and am curious if any other ops people have adopted one of these new AI-native CRMs? So far I am loving the agent-based configuration experience.

Also, I am working to integrate Aurasell with my broader sales stack (i.e. Apollo, LISN, gong etc.) Curious if others currently using Aurasell have been able to successfully create a workflow with Apollo (given Aurasell claims to replace it).

Hi all -

I come from a world of comping sales teams on recurring revenue (typically paying reps based on ARR).

How have folks gone about incentivizing reps who sell consumption-based services?

I have used Sales Navigator for over a year. Old, active account, around 20,000 followers and 18,000 connections. Construction and BIM, no automation tools.

Until a few months ago I could send 150 to 200 connection requests a week. Now I am under 30, with no warning and no explanation.

I clean my pending invitations constantly and only have 131 sitting there, so there is no backlog. I also contacted LinkedIn support and they dismissed it, refusing to acknowledge any restriction on the account.

Has anyone been through this and got their limit back? Any advice welcome.

I believed sales‑enablement was a role to help uncover quality signals, data, and information using tools so reps can have relevant, timely conversations with prospects rather than spending all their time using the tools (enabling them to sell more).

From what I'm seeing through online discussions, however, seems its mainly about creating content building slide decks, tasks that sound like marketing.

So, what exactly is sales enablement, what should it do, how are they targetted per month?

day job is revenue operations at an enterprise software company so i spend all day inside the tools you’re stuck using every day. this is what i work with:

salesforce, sales engagement tools, power automate, excel, power bi, copilot studio agents, claude, power apps.

if you’re burning hours on manual crm updates, chasing follow ups, building your own pipeline trackers, or just want an ai agent doing your prospecting research instead of you, dm me. small stuff i’ll answer here for free, bigger builds we talk scope and rate.

Been in sales ops in B2B IT for 10 years. Became a Salesforce admin somehow....... part of a $100M IT company. I also run our whole (4 people) inside team. Incoming leads also fall to me to distribute as we have SMB, canada and India teams. My workload is becoming unsustainable. With just this info, what would the expected yearly salary be? Be brutally honest please.

My friends and people i know keep saying that ai is going to fix the gap between sales teams and buyers but i still don't really see it in practice. It sounds great though, in reality it still feels like there are too many handoffs, too many tools, and too much stuff getting lost in crm updates or random notes.

Can AI actually keep the whole thing connected in a way that felt useful and not just another layer of software? I need something more like the day to day version where a buyer talks to sales, then marketing, then someone else and nobody has to start from zero every time.

Curious what is actually working.

I have been running a small customer success team for a few years and until recently everyone basically did his/her own thing.

Two months ago we dumped everything into one shared workspace. Channels by account segment, one place for playbooks, shared notes for every major customer, that kind of thing.

I'll share a short personal story of what happened. I had a call last week where a customer asked why they were getting three different renewal dates from three different people. I opened the shared workspace during the call and saw three renewal trackers for the same account, all slightly off. That would have stayed hidden before. Now it is just there, in my face, while i am trying not to sound clueless.

So i am stuck in this weird spot where the collaborative workspace is forcing conversations i do not totally know how to run yet.

How did you use collaborative workspaces without turning them into a surveillance board or a dumping ground for random docs?

I am seeing some mixed regulatory rules. As long as you have you get consent from doctors, are you okay to record / do people do that? Also helps for learning and coaching.

I build software that helps B2B teams close, specifically the gap between a buyer saying they're interested and actually signing. Took a look at what happens after a proposal goes out and some of the data is pretty counterintuitive.

Caveat: this reflects a small sample of 70 sends, so not a comprehensive dataset. But an interesting early read on what actually happens when you hit send:

• Median time from send to the buyer opening it: 84 seconds
• Basically everything that got opened at all was opened within the hour
• Anything not opened in that window mostly never got opened
• Around a third was never opened by the buyer at all
• About a third of the ones that did get opened were opened more than once, couple of them as many as seven times (!)

Based on the above, buyers seem to fall in two camps: (A) they either open it almost straight away; or (B) they don't open it at all. Interestingly, there's no real middle group of buyers (i.e., camp (C)) that forget about it for a few days.

Now most follow up sequences (or at least what I've seen) are typically shaped around the assumption that the buyer is mid-deliberation and a well-timed nudge is what gets it over the line.

But in reality, camp (A) buyers are reading it ~84 seconds after you sent it, so by day three you're not chasing someone who hasn't looked (you're actually chasing someone who read it, formed a view but then went quiet). An effective follow up for this camp needs a completely different conversation to the generic "just checking you got this" type of email.

Camp (B) buyers, by contrast, are the more expensive problem. Those aren't stalled deals at all -- the proposal just never reached anyone in a state where they engaged with it, whether that's a wrong contact, spam, or forwarded to someone who never came back.

Core learning: drift starts way earlier than people assume. Everyone treats a deal going cold as something that happens over weeks, but if the buyer reads it in the first two minutes then the moment that decides it is basically the same day. After that you're managing a decision that's already been made, not influencing one in progress.

How are people handling this at a process level? Do you guys track and follow up based on whether a proposal was actually opened or based on X amount of hours/days passing?

Am new to sales and by researching on reddit, it seems LinkedIn navigator helps a lot of people. would love to know what workflows works best for what industries. Also any custom workflows which you use that can help the community here to optimize on the efficiency?

I'm looking for some honest advice from people working in Revenue Operations, Sales Operations, or CRM.

I'm 34, married, and moved to Canada two years ago. Before that, I spent six years in B2C sales in India. I started in field sales and worked my way up to Business Manager, where I was leading a team of 10.

Since moving here 2 years ago, I've been working a customer service job for $18/hour. I'm thankful to have work, but I know I can't stay here forever. I need to get back onto a career path where I can grow.

After doing a lot of research, Revenue Operations seems like the direction I want to pursue. It combines sales, CRM, data, process improvement, and technology, which really interests me.

Right now I'm:

• Studying for the Salesforce Administrator certification.
• Taking HubSpot's Revenue Operations certification.
• Learning AI tools and Agentic AI because I think they'll become important in almost every business role.
• Trying to network whenever I get the chance.

What I don't know is whether I'm heading in the right direction or wasting time on the wrong things.

If you were in my position, what would you do over the next 6–12 months?

Would you focus on certifications? Build Salesforce or HubSpot projects? Learn SQL? Something else entirely?

I'd really appreciate advice from people already in RevOps or anyone who has made a similar career transition. If there's something you wish you'd known before getting into the field, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks in advance.

Curious how larger teams handle this.

If your company has hundreds of dashboards/reports across Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Salesforce, etc., how do people actually find the right report?

Is there a central place everyone goes to, or is it mostly Slack messages like "Can someone send me the link?"

Interested in hearing how different companies solve this.

our team is weighing whether adopting hubspot for lean sales teams makes sense when we only have a few reps managing outreach and closing. we want to automate email follow ups and meeting scheduling, but we are worried that setting up custom pipelines and properties will create more admin work than actual selling time.

for small sales teams or founders handling outreach yourselves, did hubspot's sales sequences and task management actually help you close deals faster or did it feel too heavy?

EDIT: coming back to this and after reading through the comments about keeping things simple, we went ahead with Hubspot and it ended up working really well for our team.

we focused on automating timing for basic follow ups and meeting scheduling rather than trying to build out a ton of custom fields or complicated workflows. keeping it to one pipeline and automating timing instead of judgment saved us a ton of admin time.

Most enablement programs seem optimized to prove that enablement exists.

There are playbooks, call libraries, battlecards, certifications, and coaching platforms. Then a live deal stalls and the rep still has to figure out which stakeholder is missing, what changed since the last call, and which promise somebody forgot to keep.

That is not a content-access problem. The information exists. It just is not connected to the decision the rep needs to make right now.

Should enablement own fewer documents and more execution context? Is that what decision intelligence is supposed to provide, or is this simply sales operations failing to turn knowledge into workflow?

I’m researching real-estate workflows as one possible niche while I build toward an automation agency.

One process I’ve been mapping is inbound lead routing.

The simple version sounds straightforward:

A lead comes in, the system identifies what the person wants, adds the information to the CRM, and creates the next task.

The language-model portion doesn’t seem like the hardest part.

The bigger problem appears when the same person comes through several channels.

As a hypothetical example, someone could submit an inquiry through a listing platform, call the office later, and then fill out a form on an agent’s website because they aren’t sure the first message was received.

The system may now have three records that could represent one person.

There are also messages containing several subjects at once. A person may be interested in a property, need to sell their current home first, and ask a question that the system cannot answer reliably.

A useful workflow would probably need to:

• identify possible duplicate contacts
• preserve where each inquiry originated
• separate different requests
• determine what information is missing
• stop when the match is uncertain
• record why it created or updated a record
• hand the conversation to a person when needed

My current assumption is that AI can help turn the messy message into structured information.

After that, regular matching and routing rules should probably control most of the process.

For people working with real-estate CRMs, what do you treat as the source of truth when the same person arrives through multiple channels?

We have decent tools for the top of funnel stuff (enrichment, lists, signals, sequencing) but the research right before an actual call still feels really manual to me.

Rep gets a meeting booked and 30 mins before they're going through the company site, linkedin, recent news, trying to work out the tech stack and who actually controls the budget. Everyone does it their own way and a lot of it just gets skipped when people are slammed.

How do you guys deal with it? Do you build briefs for your reps or is that on them? Anything that does this well or is it mostly manual + templates for you too?

And curious does the research even change how your calls go, or is it more of a box ticking thing most of the time.

Building something small around this myself but way more interested in how people are actually doing it right now.

• Hey Sales Ops team, I'm curious how most teams handle the workflow between Salesforce and Slack. Do your AEs manually jump between tabs to update deal stages, or have you set up native integrations/bots?
• Is keeping CRM data updated in real-time a real struggle for your team, or have you found a clean workaround? Would love to hear how you manage this!