New Website, New Me
I’ve gone and rebuilt my website. I wanted to share some templates and how-to guides I’ve been working on. And wouldn’t you know it, a doc upload became a new website. Don’t you hate when that happens? When I say I rebui…
Exploring Revenue Operations: Trends Shaping the Future of Business Growth
In the modern business landscape, revenue operations (RevOps) has emerged as a strategic function that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth and enhance customer experiences. As companies seek to optimize their revenue gen
Getting Started with Sales Compensation
Sales compensation planning is an important component of any sales strategy. It refers to the process of designing and implementing a sales incentive plan that motivates salespeople to achieve their targets and grow the business. Sales compensation plans can t
Implementing a New CRM
Implementing a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can be a game-changer for businesses looking to improve customer engagement and sales. However, the process of implementing a new CRM can be daunting, and it requires careful planning and executi
What I Accidentally Learned About Forecasting Last Year
I like to spend at least one full day a month learning. Sometimes learning is very intentional – a new book, listening to webcasts or attending conferences. Sometimes, you learn new things where you least expect, as happened to me at the end of 2019. The first
Bloobirds Sales Operations Playbook
Greetings all! I’ve been featured in Bloobirds ‘The Sales Operations Playbook‘ 14 actionable tips you can apply right away! Download the full playbook here. Let me know what you think. What other tips do you have?
Driving SalesTech, Rather Than Letting SalesTech Drive You
Earlier this year I was fortunate to be invited to speak at SaaSGrowth Summit. This was a fabulous event run by James Ski (of Sales Confidence) and Lauren Cartigny. Links to the fabulous other speakers are here You can watch my 7min talk on Youtube here: Any c
Sales Effectiveness: Forecast Accuracy & Territory Design
According to a recent webinar from the Sales Management Association, some key areas where firms lack effectiveness around sales include: forecasts that help management anticipate results (including forecast accuracy) optimally designed territories tools that q
Must Have Sales Dashboard Elements
I wrote a post about quarter four last year and what items to look out for to ensure your forecast is as accurate and perhaps include in a sales dashboard as it can be found here. This blog is a more holistic look at how to setup sales dashboards to get ahead
Considering a Career in Sales Operations
In the last couple of years a number of different people, with different backgrounds, have asked what a career in sales operations is like and how to get into it. I wanted to collect some thoughts around how someone might move into sales operations and what sk
Making the Most of Summer
Summer Priorities Vacation/holiday patterns in EMEA mean that Northern Europe is off in July with southern Europe disappearing in August. In North America business is similarly slow with people keen to leave at a reasonable time to enjoy the nice weather. Fore
What I’ve Learned Launching a Website
This post isn’t on sales operations. However, I wanted to share a number of things I’ve learned in the last year creating a website. These are all the basics you need to know about launching a website/blog, even for dummies! Host I’ve been super happy with Go
Millennials and AI
Undoubtedly, two of the biggest trends changing the sales landscape at the moment are millennials and AI. I wrote a blog about millennials not too long ago. Much has been written about the negatives of the changing generational dynamic but I think it represent
Sales Acceleration Technology: CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
This blog is the last in a series which started with Avoiding Failure In Your Sales Acceleration Project and whilst past blogs focused on Incentive Compensation and Call Technology, this blog will focus specifically on CPQ (configure, price, quote) functionali
Sales Acceleration Technology: Call Technology
Following on my blog about Avoiding Failure in Sales Acceleration projects I wanted to cover some examples of common sales accelerations technology. I wrote a blog about Incentive compensation a few weeks ago. This blog will talk specifically about call techno
Sales Acceleration Technology: Incentive Compensation
My last blog was around avoiding failure in your sales acceleration project which built on the ideas from another blog around business readiness. This blog focuses on incentive compensation. This blog was inspired by a few failed projects I’ve either seen or l
Sales Acceleration Technology: Avoiding Failure
Recently I wrote a blog around business readiness, which I feel is at the root of why most business change projects fail. Why? At the end of it, all change comes down to people and poor people management through a transition will almost always spell failure. T
Reflections on Empathy
This week is the second in a two part blog series. Last week I introduced Belinda Parmar and her Empathy Business. This week I wanted to share some reflections on empathy. To be successful, I feel it is very important to make time to be learning new skills (th
The Empathy Business
Last week at London’s Calling I saw a fantastic speaker, Belinda Parmar OBE. Belinda is founder of Lady Geek and now has a new venture, the Empathy Business. Parmar has stated that her personal mission is “to end the stereotyping and patronising of women withi
Make Sales Easy – Tips to Maximise Productivity
The primary objective of sales operations should always be to make the life of sales EASY. Sometimes sales operations can get so bogged down in data and process they can lose sight of this. It needs to be easy for sales reps (who should be out in the field) an
Improve Business Readiness, Before its Too Late
Near the beginning of my career, whilst a consultant at Accenture, I worked as part of a business readiness team for a large multi-million $ project and I have never forgot the lessons I learned. What is business readiness, you ask? Business readiness can simp
Putting the Incent in Incentive Compensation
Its January. Many businesses are scrambling to issue incentive compensation plans that will both motivate and challenge their sales organisations. As you look to motivate your sales reps, don’t forget what you are designing should INCENT them to sell more, not
Drive Productivity Through Digital Content Management
There are a number of different technologies to improve sales productivity. Ensuring the right documentation at the right time is in sales people’s hand is an incredibly important sales enablement activity. A few stats to ponder: IDC estimates 40% of marketing
Using AI to Accelerate Sales
Last week I attended a great event put on by NewVoice Media. The most interesting speaker was Martin Hill-Wilson from Brainfood Consulting. He was an exceptionally engaging speaker and his talk was on a very hot topic, artificial intelligence (AI). Inspired by
Sales Development Organisation
This post is the third in a series of about Sales Development Reps (SDRs). Blog 1: Sales Development Rep Call Success Blog 2: Sales Development Rep Technology Blog 3: Sales Development Staffing, Organisation and Goal Setting This blog is the last in a series a
Work Faster not Harder: Help for Sales Development Reps
This post is the second in a series of about Sales Development Reps (SDRs). Blog 1: Sales Development Rep Call Success Blog 2: Sales Development Rep Technology Blog 3: Sales Development Staffing, Organisation and Goal Setting One of the common characteristics
Here’s My Number, So Call Me Maybe
The good news – there’s a lead! Now what? Most likely this new lead is with your sales development team so I wanted to focus on how to improve the performance of this important function to ensure as many leads are getting to your pipeline as possible. This pos
A Word About Nasty Women
This post was inspired by the recent political events in the 2016 US election. It would be hard to say otherwise. However, I’m hoping the message here is for everyone (men and women), not too controversial, and lastly, makes you think. The way women are treate
How to Win Friends and Influence People (aka How to Not Be an Asshole)
Nearly all jobs could benefit from honing skills about how to influence people. Most of us have taken a personality profile, or perhaps a training course along with it. There’s DISC, Myers Briggs, Insights, Colour Code, etc. We often leave these training class
Getting Lucky… All Its Cracked Up to Be?
A couple years ago I was working with sales manager with a bumpy and somewhat unreliable pipeline. We were discussing how to make his team’s forecast a bit more consistent. Mid-meeting he coolly replied ‘I’d rather have a lucky sales rep then a consistent one’
What is Sales Operations?
The role of sales operations continues to grow and evolve. So what is sales operations? Back in the 1970s at Xerox, J. Patrick Kelly established a sales operations group to take on sales planning, compensation, forecasting and territory design. Kelly described
Be a Customer Trailblazer (SFDC DreamForce Keynote 2016)
170,000 people in San Francisco and 15 million people worldwide tuned into hear Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, give his keynote ‘Be a Customer Trailblazer’ at Dreamforce last week. If you haven’t watched yet, the full video of the SFDC Dreamforce Keynote
Quarter Four… Get in the Game!
October is here. And for many companies whose fiscal year follows the calendar year it means its… QUARTER FOUR. The ultimate quarter. The last chance to make goals. The final push. Many sports have four quarters – American football, basketball, field hockey, n
Always Be… Learning?
Most people in the sales world are pretty familiar with the Glengarry Glen Ross quote ‘Always be Closing’. It really is a great clip. Recently I asked some readers of this blog about problems facing sales organisations. If you haven’t yet answered, see how you
Account Based Marketing
I recently had a lunch where the topic of targeted account marketing (TAM) came up. This is also known as account based marketing (ABM) and has become a key focus area for sales and marketing ops teams in recent years. According to Sirius Decisions, and its St
Leverage Millennials to Transform Your Sales Org
I’ve read a number of interesting articles lately on the topic of millennials in the sales and marketing world. Some Reading Earlier this year I read a great article from Xactly’s Jordan Scott on the topic of motivation. Recently I read SiriusDecisions’ Alan
What’s in a Name?
Most companies have a web of acronyms and company-specific terminology, a special ‘in club’ of sorts. When used correctly this special language can help cultivate a unique company culture. However, when it comes to approaching the market and integrating new hi
Incentivising Sales Operations
When people ask sales operations questions on most topics I usually temper my answer with comments such as ‘but it depends on your organisation’ and ‘there’s not always a best answer for everyone’. However, there are a few topics areas where I really do think
Swiping Right and Taking Chances in Business
Young children are not afraid to fail. Watch any small toddler learning to walk – they crash, they fall, and often it looks pretty painful. However, the pace at which they improve is mind boggling as they are always pushing the envelope and pretty soon they ar
Evernote
A friend told me about Evernote the other week. She was penning a grocery list for the festival we were headed to over the weekend and explained this way, we could add things to the same list. My initial reaction was ‘pretty cool’, so I downloaded and we made
Setting up a New Sales Ops Function
Ten years ago not many business professionals had heard the term ‘sales operations’ and if so, it was a function reserved for large multinational corporations. With B2B sales becoming an increasingly complex and longer process, sales operations has proven to b
Uncertainty
The recent Brexit debate has had a lot to say about uncertainty so I thought I would share some thoughts on what the topic of uncertainly can mean for businesses and how to mitigate that. Uncertainty Uncertainty is the scourge of business. We expect public co
It All Starts with a Plan
The beginning of Q1 is a busy time for those in the sales operations world. The usual cadence includes finalising year end figures, updating systems with org chart changes and new account assignments, issuing new quotas and commissions plans, putting final det