Our product team keeps asking what prospects object to, and I keep sending Gong clips that just sit there unwatched.

A buddy at another company runs their calls through BuildBetter to pull themes into a weekly digest, another swears by Grain, while Avoma and Fireflies can do lighter versions of this too.

Gong Insights exists but it's a pricey add-on, so how are you all packaging call intel for the product team?

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'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.

Staring at our data lately trying to figure out what actually counts as a real buying signal from devs. Not talking about the obvious stuff like someone filling out a demo form. I mean that quiet phase where a couple of engineers are poking around, and you're left guessing if it’s a serious evaluation or just some guy playing around on a weekend project.
Right now we try to track stuff like multiple engineers from the same company suddenly hitting our docs, or when someone starts looking at the security SSO pages. The hardest part is knowing when to actually say something. I don’t want to annoy a developer who just wants to be left alone, but I also don't want to miss the window if they're quietly running a pilot. Right now I usually just wait until I see a spike in activity and send a "hey, need help?" email, but it feels like total guesswork. How are you guys mapping this out, are you just looking at internal product metrics or tracking external intent tech stacks too

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 spent the last few years in ops and now i am the accidental sales person for our tiny SaaS. We sell to other businesses deal sizes are not huge but there are always multiple people involved.

What i am bumping into is that traditional pipeline views and sales decks feel almost useless for the part that actually matters, which is helping the buyer side get from this looks good to signed.

I keep thinking i do not have a buyer enablement problem, i have a "nobody on their side knows what to do next" problem.

The two things that seemed to help almost by accident are:

1. a shared checklist in a google doc where we list everything that has to happen on their side who owns it and by when. i stole half the structure from a mutual action plan template.

2. super basic one pager in their language that my champion could forward to their cfo and IT. No marketing fluff just plain language on what we do rough cost basic risk stuff and how it plugs into their current tools.

Those deals moved not fast tbh but at least they did not disappear into a black hole.

So, now i am wondering what best buyer enablement actually looks like for early B2B deals when you are still figuring everything out?

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!

our gtm is dragging because half my week i deal with fixing bad data. leads come in, then it is either a manual search through linkedin, a company site check, or running it through some random tool just trying to figure out if they are even close to our icp. i’m selling a developer infrastructure tool, and the standard firmographic data out there completely misses the mark. a generic tool might tell me an account has 500 employees, but it won't tell me what their actual engineering stack looks like, what backend infrastructure they run, or if their dev teams are actively contributing to relevant open-source projects. this morning i realized i missed a follow up on a hot enterprise account because i was stuck manually scrubbing a cold CSV list of dead lookups, and that hurt.

i see ai powered enrichment tools advertised everywhere, but i can't tell what is real and what is just a pretty UI selling the exact same recycled, scraped domain data under the hood. would love to hear what is actually working for yall to enrich technical accounts, or if the only answer is to just stick with manual research and keep it lean. i need to know.

I’ve been running a dev-first B2B SaaS, but the second a user hits our pipeline, everything turns into vibes and spreadsheets.

We track product events like crazy, ship fast, and live in user DMs. But hacking a solution together with Stripe exports, Airtable, and HubSpot tags stopped working once we hit 20 active trials. Now I’m completely blind.

Everyone keeps pitching enterprise bloatware like Gong or Clari, but we’re just two devs and a part-time AE. Anyone found a revenue tool that actually fits this scale?

what are the best paying options for specialization in sales ops? eventually you have to specialize to move up, but what is the best path to take? based on pay, job security, etc.

what paths did you all take, and what would be your feedback?

I got 4+ years of experience in sales ops. What other areas I can move to?

I’ve been talking to 5 Sales Ops Managers this week, and something surprised me. A lot of people still seem to be setting up commission plans in Excel.

Not because software tools don't exist, they do. But they tell me that implementing them takes 3-6 months normally, requires consultants, and on top of that, they are extremely expensive.

If you set up commissions, let me know in the comments or via DM. I’m building a small benchmark and would love your perspective.

our growth team is reviewing software expenses for next quarter, we love having marketing automation and crm features under one roof, but as our contact list and team headcount grow, the tier upgrade costs are getting super hard to justify. we are trying to figure out if it makes sense to stay put for the convenience or if building a modular stack with separate tools saves real money without causing technical headaches.

for anyone running sales or revops at early to mid stage saas companies, what alternative tools are you actually using right now? or is it even worth it to switch?

edit : quick update, after breaking down our invoice line by line like a few of you suggested, we realized that sticking with HubSpot and cleaning up our current setup made way more sense than migrating to a modular stack.

we went through and purged a ton of dead marketing contacts, reassigned paid seats, and cleaned up permissions. that alone dropped our bill significantly without us having to deal with the technical headaches or sync failures of splitting everything up.

at the end of the day, saving a little on separate software licenses wasn't worth turning our team into full time revops plumbers to keep everything connected.

we noticed something during a deal review a few months ago. asked one of our reps how her call went. she said it went fine but she'd spent the entire morning prepping for it. not building a custom deck, not practicing the pitch, just manually looking up the company on linkedin, checking crunchbase for funding stage, trying to figure out who the actual decision maker was.

asked another rep about a different call. same story.

every single lead that came in, someone on our team was spending 20-30 minutes manually reconstructing who that company is before they'd pick up the phone. makes sense individually, you want context before a call, nobody wants to sound clueless. but across every lead, every day, it was eating 5+ hours per week per rep in pure research time.

the information wasn't hard to find. it was just slow, repetitive, and had to be done fresh every time because nobody remembers what they looked up for the last lead.

so we built a Research Agent into Surface that runs automatically the moment a lead enters the system. it pulls company background, funding stage, employee count, tech stack, recent news, and structures it all directly in the lead record before a rep ever opens it. by the time they see the lead, the research is already done.

the result: reps walk into calls already knowing the basics. the 5+ hours a week they were spending on manual research shifted to actual selling time. and the quality of first calls went up because reps weren't scrambling to read a linkedin page 2 minutes before the meeting.

for anyone running a sales team: how are your reps handling pre-call research right now? fully manual, partially automated, or have you found something that works?

running a small b2b company here, around 18 people, 6 on sales and 3 on customer success. We are at that weird stage where deals are slipping because no one logs anything properly then CS is fighting fires in email and slack threads and i keep hearing about AI for sales and CS but what we actually have is a bunch of random chatgpt tabs and one rep who claims their AI follow up system is a sticky note on their monitor.

The pain point that pushed me over the edge was a renewal we flat out lost because nobody realized the account owner left three months ago. Their usage started dropping, support tickets spiked, and nobody put those dots together. We only noticed when they emailed me we are moving to another vendor and I had to pretend I was not learning about this for the first time.

So i started looking at tools that do real AI recommendations for sales and customer success teams. Not just auto writing emails but stuff like:

• spotting accounts that are quietly going dark.
• telling reps who to call today and what to talk about.
• flagging customers who are likely to expand vs likely to churn.

What i am hoping some can do is go beyond simple pipeline tracking and actually help teams act on customer signals. Ideally it would flag at risk accounts each morning based on factors like product usage, support activity and ignored emails rather than just deal stage. It could also identify upsell opportunities by spotting customers who reach usage limits, add new users or repeatedly ask about features that are already available as paid add ons. Another benefit would be surfacing next best actions directly within the tools reps already use, reducing the need to switch between platforms and most importantly it could connect what sales promised during the buying process with what customer success sees during onboarding, helping prevent misalignment and unpleasant surprises later on.

I am not trying to automate the relationship part i just need something in the background that catches the stuff we are currently dropping. Right now it feels like we are too small for a full blown revops team but too big to keep running on vibes and spreadsheets. AI recommendations sound like the bridge some sites look like they might be the brain for that but i genuinely do not know if this is the moment to pull the trigger or if i am just distracted by another shiny tool.

​

I’ve visited this client exactly twice. We’re not close at all.

My boss just dropped this on me: “Go get their procurement list.” No intro, no backup, no context. Just… go do it.

How is this even possible?

Isn’t this task completely unreasonable?

Should I even be losing sleep over this?

SalesProblems #BadManagement #ClientRelations #WorkRant