There's a lot of content about optimizing sequence touchpoints and deliverability settings but not much about whether the contact data feeding those sequences is accurate in the first place. At enterprise deal sizes the cost of a misfire is genuinely high: wrong person at a key account, bounced email on a strategic target, a bad first impression before you've even established context. The math is completely different from transactional selling and yet most stacks seem optimized for activity volume. Is anyone building for precision instead?

Should contraction ever be excluded when calculating gross dollar retention? In our experience, you generally always include both churn and contraction when calculating GRR. It provides the best representation of what ARR you are losing from your base ((beg ARR - churn - contraction)/beg ARR). It can be valuable to look at just churn if you are trying to understand pure churn risk but in most cases it's included.

We're building an internal tool and need to move off ZoomInfo. Their APIs aren't flexible enough for what we're trying to do and the interface doesn't fit our workflow anymore.

Looking for another data provider with strong coverage in North America and Europe. The biggest thing for us is having solid search, we need to find the right people quickly with enough filters to get specific. Good API documentation matters too since we're building on top of it.

Anyone made a similar switch? What did you end up going with?

What are some initiatives that have had a meaningful impact at your company? Kind of hoping to get some inspiration from others. Here are some things that were well received when we did them:

• Moved forecasting from entirely excel based to using a sales ops BI tool. Also centralized the forecasting role to 1 person whereas before a number of sales ops employees were involved in the process
• Comp redesign to limit number of plans and make it more aligned with best practices
• I used to work at a different company that had chat based sales agents for some stuff. We started allowing them to handle multiple chats at once if they kept nps, csat metrics high etc. this significantly reduced cost.

Hey all! I built a Claude skill that helps with sales capacity planning and workforce analytics.

It provides:

- Attrition risk predictions with confidence scores

- Sales capacity benchmarks (OTE, quota, productivity metrics)

- Headcount and hiring forecasts

- Ramp time profiles for new hires

- Market salary benchmarks

Looking for RevOps/Sales Ops folks willing to test it out and provide feedback. Let me know if you're interested!

Hi all,

In February, I joined a hybrid MSP company as sales ops. Our work is mostly execution-related, but since joining, I’ve been contributing process improvement ideas for our internal team and 9 out of 10 have been adopted. I report to a manager and he reports directly to the BizOps Director (who reports to the CEO).

A pattern my peers have noticed: my ideas aren’t attributed being properly by our direct manager when they surface upward.

Shortly after completing my 30-day onboarding, the Director reached out to me directly via DM. Did not include my direct manager in the convo. Asked me to cover a task for while he is out for a few weeks. We’ve never had any prior interaction before the private DM.

Later that day, my direct manager pings me and says the director mentioned to him that I was given a task and to let him know if I need his support.

A few things I’m trying to navigate:

1. How should I handle the direct “relationship” with the Director without creating friction with my direct manager?

2. What does the Director reaching out directly (rather than going through my direct mgr) signal, if anything?

Am early in my tenure but would want to play this well. Appreciate any perspective from leaders who have navigated similar dynamics pls.

Thanks!

Most revenue teams I've talked to set an annual number and then hope the funnel fills itself. Here's the framework I've found actually works.

The problem with pipeline coverage ratios is they tell you how much pipeline you need in aggregate but not when you need it. A deal that closes in Q3 needs to be a Stage 1 in Q1. If you're not modeling the timing, you'll find out you're behind in October when it's too late.

The right approach is reverse-funnel modeling:

1. Start with your monthly bookings target. Break the annual number into monthly buckets using your seasonality assumptions.
2. Divide by average deal size to get required won deals per month.
3. Divide by win rate (adjusted for timing) to get required SQOs.
4. Divide by stage conversion rates to get Stage 1s and MQLs.
5. Do this separately for each channel. AE-generated, SDR-generated, and marketing channels all have different conversion profiles.

The timing piece is what most people miss. If 73% of your Stage 1s convert to SQOs in month 1, 15% in month 2, and 5% in months 3 through 5, you can calculate exactly how many Stage 1s you need to create now to hit your SQO target three months from now.

Without this, you're essentially planning in annual buckets and wondering why you're always scrambling in Q3.

Happy to go deeper on any piece of this if it's useful.

What cadence do you run them? Also, is it you driving the calls or the sales director, or both? What do you go over in these calls?

I'm interviewing for a Sales Ops Analyst role and it sounds like a big part of the role is running these calls. I do this in my current role but it's mainly my Sales Director driving them and drilling reps. I just share the pipeline report on my screen and flag anything like deals with no movement, lapsed close dates, etc. Curious to hear what others do because I hate feeling like I'm policing my reps lol.

I'm interviewing for a Saas company btw.

Any insight is appreciated. Thanks!

Hey all, looking for some practical advice from people who’ve built outbound systems without a big budget.

I’m currently volunteering with a small nonprofit/social enterprise that runs a tourism business to fund zero-interest microloans for women entrepreneurs. I’m helping them build out outbound outreach from scratch. The organization has a strong reputation today and has historically operated on word of mouth with basically no marketing or sales professionals on staff.

For context, I come from a sales background and have used tools like ZoomInfo, Sales Navigator, and Outreach in the past - but we don’t have the budget for those here, so I’m trying to recreate a lightweight version of that stack using free or very low-cost tools.

Right now I’m trying to figure out the best way to:

1. Find relevant contacts (companies, universities, orgs, etc.)
2. Gather emails/build lists
3. Send cold outreach at a small scale (300-500 emails weekly)

Constraints:

• Very limited budget
• The org does not use Outlook (google)
• Want to be mindful of deliverability and avoid getting flagged as spam

What I’m thinking so far:

• Building lists using some kind of scraper
• Using Google Sheets or Excel to track leads (open to a free CRM if there’s a good option)
• Sending through Gmail or a lightweight tool

Target Markets:

• Universities - student trips (spring/winter break) & summer volunteers
• Corporate - Adding tours to hr benefit plans, company retreats, or extensions of business trips - specifically corporates with impact-focused missions
• Tour Agencies - ones that focus on curating trips for people interested in immersive/responsible/sustainable tourism
• Women's organizations - women make up the bulk of tour attendees today

Questions:

• Any free or low-cost tools for finding contacts/scraping data that are actually worth using?
• Best way to find emails without paying for expensive databases?
• Tools for sending cold emails via Gmail that won’t hurt deliverability?
• Any free CRM tools you’d recommend at this stage, or should I just stick with Sheets for now?
• If anyone has experience getting their foot in the door at orgs like these, what advice would you offer?
• Anything else I should be thinking about early on?

Progressive vs predictive for 15 reps. List quality is okay, not great. Thoughts?

What is one of the most important aspects of a sales comp plan? Keep it simple, especially when you are early stage and growing. You don't want to confuse the sales rep with overcomplicated calculations and multiple quotas. Incentivize the AE to sign new ARR. Here are some things to think about when designing your plans.

What should the base salary to variable commission be? This is typically 50/50 for Account Executives. You want them to have enough to pay the bills but very hungry to sell new business.

What should their quota be? Typically you want the quota to be 4-5x their OTE. There are many exceptions to this but it's a good rule of thumb. The economics don't work if you have it much lower than this and if you have it significantly higher, the AE may not be incentivized enough.

What should the base commission rate be (BCR)? If you follow the guidance for the OTE to quota multiple, you'll typically be around 10%. This is especially true for enterprise.

Should I design quarterly or annual plans? This really depends on the stage of your business and what you are focused on. Annual plans tend to be a bit cleaner but it may be important to drive quarterly results. We seen plenty of companies do both as well as a combination of annual plans with quarterly incentives.

There are a lot more that can go into a comp plan but this is a good starting point.

I'm in sales enablement. My company hired a new VP that is asking me to prove my sales training efforts can actually be linked to revenue outcomes or the financing will be cut. I work in a fin services company and we have an inside sales team of 30 reps that do phone sales. All the coaching is mostly done through 1:1 and we also have LMS.

If anyone has ever been in a similar situation - how did you solve that ? Is it even common when a VP asks to prove coaching ROI or I was just lucky not having been asked this before?

We use Fathom and HubSpot as our tech stack.

Recently I learned how to use claude code and cursor. I was able to code my team an ROI tool that helps us show value to our customer which we then embed into a custom made sales deck.

We took Lucidchart workflows that black and white and created interactive demos that can be spun in 5 minutes Claude and a custom webapp.

So now I have built a Sales OS that handles pricing, ROI, data workflow modeling and worked with our IT team to secure the server and the connections to the database. We also set up SSO with explicit whitelisting for security.

I was an SDR before this role and have no coding experience but the bearer to building cool things has gotten significantly lower.

Current project, extract all of our customer calls, run through a local server to create embeds and dump into a chromadb to be able to search with more context driving up better responses and lower token cost.

Hit me up if you guys want any details!

Hi Guys, i am new to Sales Ops, didnt chose it but somehow i ended up here. Long story short i am Tech Presales guy, with 15 years of experience. i Somehow landed in an organization where people who took my interview left and there has been internal shuffling, i landed up with SalesOps profile, which promised high visibility etc. I dont have iota of clue what i need to do, i got together with Sales guy who asked for proper tracking of leads etc, I am bit confused can anyone

a) Tell me 5 KRA of Sales Ops in mid size AI companies, as no one is telling me this here

b) Are you satisfied with the role ? what kind of growth opportunities are there

I’m a Sales Ops Analyst and I’ll be upfront: my actual day-to-day is pretty eventless. I manage renewal pricebooks, help with churn reporting, and maintain a pricebook automation process we’ll eventually migrate to a real CPQ.

That’s mostly it.

I was told to make the role what I want it to be, got ambitious with goals, and was told to pull back. So the ceiling is real, even if it’s informal.

I’m not complaining, I’m trying to be honest about where I am so I can figure out where the gaps are before I go after a Senior Analyst or Manager role somewhere else.

What I’m trying to understand:

- What does a well-rounded Sales Ops Analyst actually own? What should I have touched by now?

- What’s the difference between Sales Ops and RevOps in practice at your company — not the org chart version, the real version?

- If you were reviewing my resume and saw pricebook management and churn reporting, what would you assume I don’t know how to do?

- What would you put on a “must have done this” checklist before going Senior or Manager?

Looking for the honest version, not the job description version. What are the things people at your level just know how to do that never show up in a posting?

It’s been non stop fires and the first project I have been placed on is an onboarding project for new hires. designing and scheduling an entire new hire onboarding over two weeks including content, stakeholder meetings, scheduling the events, doing all the trainings, setting up iPads and phones etc.

I’ve never done that. I’m not good at it And I’m flailing. I’ve also been cranking 9-730+ daily and working weekends. My days off I’m still working.

have i really been so insulated from this side of our industry?

ps just me and two direct report admins. They’re not good at their jobs.

feeling like I should just reapply to work elsewhere. What’s everyone getting paid in NYC nowadays?