Sales and Rev Ops leaders have long been the unsung heroes of revenue generation – until now.
We realized that Ops needed a voice, especially in the European market. That’s why we’ve created this Inside Modern Sales Operations series.
You’ll find each article packed with; Real, unfiltered advice from one Rev and Sales Operations leader that’s influencing the B2B SaaS industry worldwide.
Today we’re featuring Michael Pickering, Revenue Operations Manager at ChannelSight. Let’s get started.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I have 15 years of experience working primarily with Saas start-ups. I began my career as a salesperson; So, I am aware of the stresses salespeople have to endure and the mindset they need.
These insights factor into my role in operations and how any change will impact their day-to-day. Their minds are always with their customers’ needs. Therefore, it’s our job to work with sales to make their workflow as seamless and painless as possible.
How do you contribute to your sales team’s success?
We collaborate with all areas of the business here at ChannelSight, acting as the link to the team with the most customer interaction.
As a result, we’re usually the ones who have to put the checks and balances in place to make sure all essential information is captured.
We have to be the police of sales and keep in mind that the processes we implement have an impact on how our sales reps work.
What’s your sales operations best practice?
The most beneficial advice I think I could pass on would be to automate, automate & integrate. To show real, measurable value in my department,; I’m always looking for processes to automate. whether that be; Reporting, sales forecasting, data that has to be gathered or inputted, task completion, etc.
If you can give minutes or seconds back to someone’s day, they’ll love you forever for it. Most tools will allow you to achieve this through workflows or scripting; or the ability to integrate with other tools for script-building.
If you can give minutes or seconds back to someone’s day, they’ll love you forever for it.
The last part is integration. If different departments are having to work in multiple tools to share information, then you have a real bottleneck in your process.
You end up with duplication of work and issues with enablement; as if infrequent users of a tool are continually reaching out to teammates to show them how to use it for straightforward tasks. The focus should always be to keep people working in the tools they are comfortable with.
My preference is to keep the CRM as the one source of truth. All finance systems, support, marketing tools should flow to it. Then, if any other department needs additional information for whatever reason, it’s just a matter of creating a new field and sending the data.
Keep the CRM as the one source of truth.
There are so many great integration tools out there that are easy to use. You’ll be amazed by how many members of your organisation are wasting time trying to find information that can you can deliver to them by spending 5 mins building a simple API call.
Interested in more rev ops insights? Get all 14 actionable sales operations tips in your free copy of the full guide.
Want to check out the rest of the Inside Modern Sales Operations series? Read more articles.
