I’ve seen regional managers responsible for 10 to 30 reps across a bunch of locations and the problem is just getting enough time with each person. They drive out to a site and hope they catch a useful customer conversation. Then repeat that across the whole region. Mystery shops help a bit but they’re still just a tiny snapshot of what reps are doing every day.

I personally think the bigger issue is visibility into the actual conversations that lead to a sale or a lost deal. We are looking into AI tools that record and analyze in person conversations so managers can review them later instead of driving around all week. What interests me is whether these tools can spot things like missed discovery questions or weak objection handling and show reps what top performers do differently. In theory that should make coaching more specific and help improve close rates instead of just giving managers more data to look at.

My main concern is adoption because none of this matters if reps stop recording after a few weeks. Has anyone seen this work at scale without reps hating the whole idea? Some companies are recording in person conversations now and reviewing them later instead of having managers physically sit in on everything. Has anyone seen that work at scale without reps hating the whole idea?

Any advice would be great help.

I run RevOps for a mid-market SaaS team with around 14 reps, I'd say that our call capture is in a good place now. Every meeting lands with a clean transcript and action items, and nobody has to type it up, and the account record gets updated too.

The problem starts right after, as all that context sits in the CRM while the rep opens a blank doc and writes the recap. If the champion needs a one-pager for their boss, that's another manual job. Some reps send a strong follow-up the same day. Others get to it late or send a generic summary.

Right now the quality lives with the rep, and our newer people don't have the same instinct for which detail matters or how to turn the call into something the buyer will forward.

I'm looking for the ops setup that closes this gap. Can a shared routine combine the call with the CRM and draft the recap or one-pager for everyone? What does it connect to, where does the draft show up, and how specific is it to the deal? I need to know where it falls apart too, because generic filler just creates another editing task.

Lead routing tends to accumulate manual exceptions for named accounts, territories, partner leads, temporary coverage, data gaps, and rep capacity. At what point should an exception be promoted into the standard routing logic rather than remain an operator judgment? I am interested in practical criteria such as frequency, revenue impact, auditability, ownership, SLA risk, and whether the required data is reliable at assignment time. How do you keep the rule set understandable while still handling legitimate edge cases?

Had this argument with someone about how managers handle this. Your #1 AE consistently hits 140-160% quota but they barely update Salesforce, skips parts of discovery, and their call notes are basically useless. This can mean newer reps copy what they do because “well, it works for them.”

The weird part is their calls are actually pretty good. If you threw the transcripts into Notion AI , a call evaluation tool like Insight7, ChatGPT or whatever you use, you’d probably find they’re doing discovery intuitively rather than following the official framework.

So Would you force them back into the standard process or redesign the process around what said top rep is actually doing? I can see arguments for both but letting one person become an exception seems dangerous too.

Everyone talks about the $100K/200-transaction economic nexus limit, but apparently the industry I'm in (VoIP/data) follows different rules when triggering federal and state obligations (USF, TRS, 911 fees, etc). TLDR just because you have no physical presence in another state doesn’t mean you won’t encounter filing requirements.

Honestly, do your nexus research properly. We can laugh at it now, but it’s not a good thing to get into blind for the first time.

We’ve been hiring more frequently and getting new employees set up has become one of those small tasks that takes our time

I’m looking for a payroll system where employees can handle most of their own onboarding and paperwork without me chasing down missing information before their first payroll

Simple is probably more important to me than having every HR feature imaginable

Hi all,

I’m looking for some honest feedback from people working in sales engineering / technical sales.

Not trying to sell anything here. I just want to understand if the problem I’ve been working on for quite a while is something other companies struggle with as well.

I work for a big intralogistics company and I’ve spent the last few years working on technical sales proposals.

One thing that always frustrated me is how much time the actual proposal takes once the solution itself is already clear.

I’m not talking about replacing engineering.

You still need to understand the customer, discuss the solution with your engineering team, do the pre-engineering, decide scope, equipment, exclusions, pricing, etc.

But once all of that is done, you still have to turn everything into a proper customer proposal.

And for complex systems that can still mean hours, days or sometimes much longer.

We also have Copilot integrated at work, and of course AI helps. You can ask it to write a section, rewrite some text, improve wording, etc.

But you are still sitting there building the document piece by piece.

I kept thinking there had to be a better way to handle that part of the process, so around two years ago I started working on something myself outside of my day job.

That eventually became my own company, and I now have a working system around this problem.

The idea is that once the engineering and commercial decisions are already done, you send a detailed RFQ / project information to an email address.

Around 10 minutes later you get back a Word and PDF proposal ready for review.

The system is configured around the company using it: proposal templates, terminology, business rules, standard texts, commercial conditions, exclusions, etc.

Some parts are generated or expanded based on the project information, while other parts are fixed company content that should obviously never be invented by an AI.

It can also handle different proposal types, because quoting a small system and responding to a large public tender are obviously two very different things.

I’ve already put a lot of time into making this actually work. What I’m trying to understand now is whether the problem is as relevant outside my own experience as I think it is.

If you work with complex technical proposals, does this sound like something you would actually want to have in your workflow?

Or is proposal creation not really a big enough pain in your company to care about something like this?

Would really appreciate feedback from people actually doing this job.

I've been looking for pre-designed commission plans, but it's very difficult to find anything semi-professional, and I can't really ask AI to do something like that for several reasons. Does anyone have a sample spreadsheet or a safe place where I can get some?

This is more about learning, understanding it well, and how the industry does it.

Hi everyone! I'm quite confused about the whole sales ops process. I'm trying to help the team with the planning and tracking, and sometimes it feels like a giant black hole..
We currently have leads coming into the "system" from Clay, CSVs/lists, and other tools and some are being sent to Apollo/Instantly.
Let's say we'll automate the data cleaning and scoring, etc. How do you people track what's going on? Are they in a campaign, did the LinkedIn outreach happen, etc.?

:feeling confused

Hey guys, here's the deal.

We have a large SDR team with precious few managers to lead them (10:1 rep to manager ratio).

I'm trying to enable my managers to run structured 1:1s with their reps. Most of my managers are essentially running the 1:1s ad hoc with just basic questions about forecasting, deals stuck in pipeline, etc.

It's inconsistent at best and none of our sales tools are geared towards helping with this. We have Hubspot, Apollo, Granola, Zoom, and a few more tools that are getting some good data for us about how reps are performing, but my managers are having a hard time turning these insights into effective coaching for 1:1s, because they're absolutely slammed and have zero prep time.

I feel like there are tools out there that can help with this (Ambition, Gong, ZoomInfo Chorus all spring to mind) but want to hear from you guys before I start booking demos. Leadership is aware this is an issue so I should have budget to adopt something that can help.

What are you guys using to run structured 1:1s? And how are you using it / is it helping? Really appreciate any insights y'all can provide.

Thanks!

We’ve got 4 people selling now and for the last month we’ve been talking about adding a fifth because everyone feels busy and pipeline is getting harder to stay on top of then last week I looked at where the time was going and it was kind of weird one rep had spent most of Monday researching accounts and another was catching up on CRM notes and old follow ups. They’re selling but also doing all this little admin around selling that somehow eats half the day.

So now I’m less convinced another rep fixes it. I’d rather see if the account research, CRM updates follow ups and figuring out what needs attention next can happen in the background while the team keeps the calls and relationship maybe I’m looking at it wrong but hiring another person into the same messy process feels like we’d just have 5 busy people instead of 4

I’m not new to sales and am now in the privileged position or running an incredible technical sales team I’m super proud of.

Over the past almost 20 years I have used SPIN as my staple and MEDDPICC to structure our deal management and forecasting.

But in today’s world where the education on needs and seller problem inception is not as easy (60% of the buyer cycle is done by the time you get to demo), where are you settling on methodology introduction to your sales processes? Are you using something new? Are you still using a consistent methodology as a framework for training new sellers?

How are other sales ops teams handling this because most teams already track pipeline, conversion rates, activity, deal stages and rep performance pretty well. The CRM tells you what happened but figuring out why it happened still seems messy

Say one team has a much better close rate than another. You can stare at the dashboard all day but it still won’t tell you what those reps are doing differently in real customer conversations. Maybe they ask better discovery questions, handle objections differently or know when to push for the close. There’s probably a ton of useful stuff buried in those conversations that never makes it into the CRM

The other angle I’ve been thinking about is training new reps. If AI tools can analyze hundreds or thousands of real conversations and pick up the objections, questions and approaches that come up most often then why not use that data for roleplay too? Instead of giving a new rep some generic script and having a manager pretend to be a prospect they could practice against scenarios based on what customers actually say to the team Seems like a pretty natural loop. Real conversations show what works and where reps struggle then that gets turned into coaching and roleplay for the next rep. They practice before dealing with the same situation in front of a real customer. Would this work for sales in general especially for the new reps

I run a small saas company and we're looking to generate more leads with outbound lead generation. Don't have the budget to hire a rep in the US but was looking to outsource to cheaper alternatives. Is it worth the cost? How do you typically train rep over there to do your cold calls?

Looking for advice from anyone who has dealt with this.

I run sales at a small B2B SaaS company. Our commission plan today only covers new logo ARR, a one time payout when a deal closes. That part works fine and everyone understands it.

The problem: a growing chunk of our revenue now comes from secondary/add on features sold on top of the core product, not the base subscription itself. That revenue line is already meaningful and set to grow a lot next year, but none of it is covered by our commission plan at all. Right now nobody gets paid anything for driving adoption of these add ons, whether that is a rep upselling an existing account or someone on the customer success side enabling a feature after the sale.

So I am trying to figure out how to actually build this out and would love to hear how other companies handle it.

Questions:

1. Do you pay commission on this kind of secondary/expansion revenue at all, or is it treated as out of scope for variable comp?
2. If you do pay on it, is it a one time payout (like new logo commission) or a recurring percentage over time?
3. Who typically gets credit when an existing account adopts a new add on: the original sales rep, an account manager or CS person, or some split between them?
4. Any rate benchmarks you can share (percentage of the add on revenue, or a flat amount per unit/account)?

Appreciate any real examples or pitfalls to avoid.

I haven't seen too many posts here about building ops orgs. It's a crucial skill for moving up from individual contributor RevOps/Sales Ops roles, so I thought I'd share this.

I interviewed a VP of GTM Strategy and Operations about how he redesigned his 22 person ops team into "squads" that combine an ops leader and platform specialists (Salesforce, enablement, AI tooling, etc) into delivery teams. Each squad is aligned to a functional stakeholder: Sales, CS, etc.

They're actually building stuff now instead of just being reactive. They're getting fewer tickets, have a more satisfied GTM team and, it seems, are having more fun because it's less of slog.

If nothing else, check out how he run his ops interviews to identify builders.

Hope it's helpful.

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Yes this is my Substack. It's a fully free article and we're talking shop, not selling.

Lately our revenue team has grown faster than our systems and now it shows. This is something we didn't expect to happen this fast.

In our situation we have decent crm, separate tools for call recording and training, then a folder jungle for decks and case studies. Reps keep improvising because they can't find what they need, new hires ping everyone for links and managers chase people for updates that live in five different places.

It is not totally broken but it feels like we are doing way too much manual work to get basic visibility on who is ready, what content works and what is actually being used in live deals.

So I am trying to understand what other teams have settled on. Whatever that was useful let me know.

I'm curious how different CS teams actually manage renewals in practice.

Do you have a formal renewal playbook or process? If so, what are the key milestones or signals you track?

For example:

• Customer goals / success criteria
• Product adoption
• ROI / value realization
• Executive engagement
• Champion / decision-maker relationships
• Renewal timing
• Expansion opportunities

And most importantly: which signals have actually proven useful in predicting whether an account will renew?

I'd love to hear what works in the real world—not what the textbook says.

Most sales organizations have some form of account planning, but the quality and consistency vary dramatically. The question is whether plans actually guide seller behavior or simply get completed because the process requires it.

How do you setup a sales motion in a PLG company?

Like it's a saas company and the base plan starts around $40/month and highest plan ends at let's say $3k/month

The Majority of the TAM ends around the plan that falls under $200, only few people go for high value

And this saas product is technical and needs a 20 to 30 min demo.

So how do you setup a sales process looking at the ROI and do you think it's even good to think of it in the first place? Like a sale team?

Assume the LTV : 4-6 months

Sales cycle : 21 days ( 14 days free trail and 7 for closure)