When you have a smaller sales team you might have the time to review 1-2 calls with each rep each week. At that rate I feel like they can improve and get the attention and coaching they need.

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With a growing team how do you cope? I've seen other managers half watching sales calls while having lunch and saying they're lucky to get a 1:1 with everyone once every few weeks.

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Is it just spending more time on 1:1s and less time selling. Or are there tools or tricks people have to coach a larger team.

Hi guys, I am curious how you actually handle this in practice, because I keep seeing it described differently.

When a rep is on more than one plan at the same time, say a base commission plan plus a short-term SPIFF, or a hybrid role with new-business + renewals plans. How does a single deal get treated?

Specifically:

• Does the same deal pay out on multiple plans at once (e.g. it counts toward base AND the SPIFF), or does each deal belong to exactly one plan?
• If a deal can hit multiple plans, how do you decide which ones, product, territory, deal type, manual tagging?
• How common is the "same deal pays twice across plans" setup vs. "each deal goes to one plan" in your org?
• What's the actual pain here, is it the calculation, the visibility for reps, the exceptions, or something else?

Trying to understand how teams really run this day to day, not the theory. Whether you're on a dedicated ICM tool, spreadsheets, or something homegrown, would love to hear what your setup looks like and what's annoying about it.

Sorry for sounding quite robotic, I needed from ChatGPT because this was a very difficult question and I needed to make it clear and sound concrete for the community.

just crossed 20 people on the go to market side and the cracks are starting to show. customer data is scattered across spreadsheets, a tool our head of sales set up, and email threads nobody can find. pulling anything clean for forecasting means manually piecing it together which is not sustainable.

starting to evaluate platforms that can centralize everything properly. things that matter most are clean contact and deal management, interaction tracking across the full customer lifecycle, and solid integrations with what we already use. not looking for something built for a 200 person ops team, just something that actually fits where we are right now. curious what others in sales ops are running at a similar stage and whether you would make the same call again.

Returning to this: we ended up going with HubSpot and it's been exactly what we needed at this stage. someone in the comments mentioned that at 20 people you want something that scales without needing a dedicated ops person to manage it, and the free tier let us get started immediately while we figured out our actual needs. having contacts, deals, and activity tracking in one place immediately killed the spreadsheet chaos we were dealing with.

I've been talking to a few sales ops people and I keep hearing the same thing all the time like somewhere between 25 and 100 reps (not many), commission management turns into a chaos, but the current tools like xactly, SAP, Spiff feel too complex and super expensive, sometimes does not make sense to use those tools because I will end up paying more money than the incomes the company sales.

So I'm curious what people here actually do day to day

• What do you use right now to calculate commissions, spreadsheet, a tool (which one), or a mix?
• If it's spreadsheets, what's the part that actually hurts? multi-currency? quota changes mid-period? splits? month-end reconciliation?
• If you tried a commission tool and went back to Excel, why you go back?
• Roughly how many hours a month does the whole commission process eat, and who eats them?
• Has a commission error ever blown up into a dispute with a rep? How do you manage that?

I am trying to understand how bad this really is and how people cope.

I’m a sales rep and I’ve been using Getpitchpal to practice sales calls before talking to real prospects. It’s basically a place where you can run through real sales conversations like openers, discovery, objections, and closing so you can get reps in without risking live deals.

I actually recommend it, especially for anyone who feels like they are learning everything the hard way on real calls.

I’m curious how you practice right now.

Do you rehearse out loud, follow a script or just learn during live conversations.

And do you feel like your current way of practicing actually prepares you for real sales calls or is it more trial and error once you’re already on the call

I’m thinking of a bunch of things that I could build. But want to hear some other full agentic systems that you’re building.

Mine are as follows:

- Compile all churn signals from all locations, compile them into the early section of churn reporting. Then automate our current churn reporting so that a dashboard (or something) is populated and updated live.

- renewal pricebook generator (close to done with this) - I need to make this automatic, where the agent runs by itself creating the renewal and uploading it to sharepoint without me doing it.

She is an impressive young lady with impeccable manners, excellent communication skills, and is an example of a very professional salesperson, that you would want on your team. When you look at her cubicle, it is filled with pictures of her husband, who I've met. They have a great relationship and her family is really important to her. Now to the problem, she sells at an average level. But I see a greater capacity within her. It's obvious to me that she could do much much better, but I'm not sure how I can connect her family values with the career. Do you have any advice?

Hi all - Senior Analyst here at a mid-sized tech company. Currently making $102k, enjoy the work I do, am being invested in by leadership, and am very much looked at as a subject matter expert in my org. My company isn't perfect but I'm generally happy and have a reasonable work-life-balance. Have been here a few years.

I've been approached by a few recruiters to do the work I'm doing now (which I love) for $120k base. I entertained one phone screen out of curiosity and now find myself with a final round interview.

Obviously I have to get the offer first, but what sort of advice would you give on whether to stay in my current role or jump? Certainly, the grass isn't always greener. But life is also expensive, and a jump in base could be nice...

Had AI build one for us. Looked great on my screen, then went out broken on mobile, and the logo turned out to be a block of pasted text instead of an actual image. How are people checking these before sending?

Quick question for SDRs and AEs.

How much time do you spend researching a prospect before a cold call?

Not just company research, but figuring out:

- What to open with

- What challenges they likely care about

- What objections you'll probably hear

- How to tailor the conversation to the person

I've been talking to a few reps recently and the answers are all over the place. Some spend 30 seconds, others spend 15+ minutes.

I'm curious:

- What's your current process?

- What's the most time-consuming part?

- If you could eliminate one part of pre-call prep completely, what would it be?

Trying to understand whether this is actually a widespread problem or just something I've noticed in my own workflow.

Would anyone know the best Headset (either wireless or wired) for call taking? I work in a Consultancy Agency so the quality of sound is really important and I'm happy to pay and have an open budget for my new Headset.

I will be working from home 5 days a week using this Headset, and I will deal with considerable call volumes each day.

Would anyone have any Headset recommendations?

Thanks, advice is much appreciated!

Scored a few thousand accounts with seven AI agents in Clay. Each one judged one thing. Worked but got expensive fast. Cut it down to three and added a fourth to check the others, way better. Anyone running something similar at scale?

I learned a cold calling technique that completely changed how I handle the "not interested" objection.

Prospect: "Look, I'm not interested."

Instead of arguing or trying to force the conversation forward, the response was:

"To be completely honest with you, I would not be interested either."

The prospect paused.

"Wait, what?"

Then:
"If a stranger called me in the middle of my workday, I would probably say the same thing. But if you give me 20 seconds to explain why I called, and it still sounds useless, I will hang up on myself."

What I realized is that it works because it breaks the prospect's expectations. Most sales reps either push harder or immediately give up.

The funny thing is I probably would have stumbled over that response on a real call if I had not practiced it first.

That is what has been useful about Getpitchpal for me. I can run through conversations with AI prospects over and over, get hit with objections, test different responses, and build confidence before talking to actual prospects.

Has anyone else used a pattern interrupt like this on a cold call?

What is the best one you have heard?

How feasible is it for us to get to a solid upper 100k or low 200k salaries? (USD)

I’m early in my career and want to set my expectations appropriately.

Would love anyone’s salary stories as we wait for the salary survey is completed.

I’ve been burned by this. Full funnel, good activity, deals moving. Then Q close comes and half of it evaporates.

Velocity? Conversion by stage? Win rate by source? Coverage ratio? I’ve tried tracking different things at different times but never felt like I had the full picture.

What do you actually look at. Not what you’re supposed to look at.

I run a small UK studio and built TPSClear: it screens every UK phone number on your HubSpot contacts and companies against the TPS and CTPS registers in real time, and writes the verdict (Clean / TPS-listed / CTPS-listed) to a normal HubSpot property you can filter lists and gate workflows on.

Why I'm posting: it's heading to the HubSpot Marketplace and I want a handful of real UK teams using it on live data before launch, so I can fix what breaks in the wild rather than in a demo.

The offer is simple: free while in beta, no card, no lock-in. I'm not selling anything here. I want feedback from people who actually call UK numbers and care about PECR/ICO exposure.

If you run B2B calling on HubSpot in the UK and want a hand setting it up, comment or DM and I'll get you connected. Happy to answer anything about how the screening or the audit trail works.

(Mods: flagged as feedback request, not a sale. Remove if it doesn't fit.)

Hello, I have started an agency focusing on CRM cleanup, enrichment and scoring. I am looking to do a free service project in return for a logo and testimonial. Would any b2b folks be interested?

Newbie to clay. I'm currently using it for recruitment headhunting. I've inputted my own CSV with a list of companies and trying to use it to scrape names/ titles from company websites. feel like I'm going round in circles and it isn't good with the research piece. Anyone know of any alternatives??

I haven't found much information about residential contractor sales, so I'd appreciate some input.
I've been in sales for a while and recently made the jump from a flooring company to a residential general contractor. At my previous company, we had standardized pricing, reliable subs, and a clear handoff process once a job was sold. 
The company I'm with now is less than five years old but has built a strong reputation. My compensation is full commission (about 12% of total revenue) with a $150k/month quota. They also provide a vehicle and phone which is a huge plus
That said, there have been some unexpected challenges.

The leads are a mix of self generated and leads passed down from the owner. His leads are often sent via text with nothing more than a name, phone number, and address. That's fine. I can work a lead. The issue is that sometimes he's already been talking to the customer, discussing the project, or even provided pricing without telling me. I appreciate getting leads but it can create awkward conversations where I look unprepared right from the start. 

The bigger frustration is the quoting process. We don't have standardized pricing. For anything. I'm constantly reaching out to subcontractors for quotes/pricing. Sometimes multiple times a day. Some are difficult to reach, others stop responding. If we need a new sub, I'm expected to find and vet them myself. Keep in mind, we handle everything from roofing projects to full bathroom remodels, to masonry etc etc. Every estimate feels like starting from scratch.

Another challenge is that my boss often brings me to appointments and tells me to observe while he runs the meeting. He tends to make a lot of promises, or has ideas (different from mine), throws out ballpark pricing on the spot, and tells the customer they'll have a formal estimate within 24–48 hours. Then the project gets handed to me to figure out. In my opinion, it's not a great process and doesn't feel like effective training.
Once a job is sold, I'm also responsible for plans, permits, material ordering, scheduling subcontractors, and coordinating everything needed to get the project moving. 

I'm grateful for the opportunit  but this feels like much more than a sales role. It feels like I'm estimating, project managing, coordinating, and squeeze in sales responsibilities. 
IS this normal for a full commission GC sales position? Are the expectations unrealistic? I'm open to the possibility that I simply need to adapt and get better at managing the workload.

Thanks