Senior Director Of Operations: Marc Cote of Dosh

Marc Cote jumped onto Sales Operations Demystified to share his knowledge and experience in Sales Operations. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

You can learn more about:

• Marc Cote
• Dosh

Tools

• Salesforce
• Vimeo

Key Takeaways

Marc’s entry in sales operations

Marc left business school to get into business strategy. He worked for a few years as a consultant at Boston Consulting & Advisory group in NYC, but soon he left consultancy to become a team member in the sales department of smaller companies and start-ups. During this employment, he met some of the early search providers and did some selling for LookSmart who ran paid search for Microsoft. After that, he worked for Overture which was later acquired by Yahoo, he the became their sales leader in New York. At Yahoo, he met another sales leader: Mark Ellis who was looking for a chief of staff and was also looking at creating a sales operations function.

This started Marc off in the world of sales operations… 

Sales resources and operations at Dosh  

Marc explained that Dosh is a consumer finance app operating in the US, that partners with companies like Walmart & Costco. There are 72 employees in total and Marc runs revenue operations including consumer and merchant operations with a team of 20 people. Marc, with a developer, is entirely responsible for the sales operations at Dosh. He learned that hiring a salesforce developer is better than hiring an admin as developers “get more stuff done”. 

Two ways to influence sales rep productivity

Marc believes that one should never ask something from a salesperson without giving something in return, for example, he implemented a simple activity tracking system for the reps when he wanted more visibility of what they were doing.

The other approach he uses to influence reps behaviour is an interesting one… he “sneaks things in gradually”. For example, Marc would simply add in extra fields for reps to input in Salesforce without notifying them.

Dosh’s sales forecasting process

Marc explained that the forecasting process run weekly. A blend of information from the finance team and business intelligence is compiled about actual revenue and then the team discusses pipelines that is due to be closed by the end of the quarter. And by the 6th week into a quarter, he starts forecasting the following quarter.

#1 sales metric – simple measuring revenue

Marc states that measuring revenue is obviously the top sales metric to measure. After that, Marc would look at pipeline velocity and coverage is this is the best indicator of future revenue.

Marc’s biggest influence:

Marc is most influenced by the first salesperson he hired… Dan Walsh.  Dan Walsh he taught him how to keep the balance between operating and consulting whilst leading a sales team:

• Dan Walsh – Global Head of Business Strategy & Operations at Spotify

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