Benefits of Sales Operations: Jay Khiroya of Doctify

Tom: Welcome everybody and welcome Jay.

Jay: Thank you.

Tom: I'll give you a little introduction in a minute. Before that, some updates in admin, Henry is back. Thank you for coming back. Henry has had a couple of weeks away. You've been very busy.

Henry: Very busy.

Tom: Doing sales operations.

Henry: Yes, doing sales.

[laughter]

Yes, very busy.

Tom: Everyone, thank you for tuning in whether you're listening on our iTunes or whether you are watching on our site or on YouTube. We're joined by someone who made an appearance at the Sales Ops meetup a couple of months ago or months ago. Everyone I spoke to about you is speaking that was like, "Jay is great. Jay is really good." We were like, "We have to get Jay on the podcast." And then I think you might have reached out to Jay or maybe I did [crosstalk]

Henry: I think you did.

Tom: I did.

Henry: I think I was the one raving about Jay and things I heard.

Tom: Because Jay has an extensive background in sales operations, all the way from IBM, which is massive, to smaller starts, right?

Jay: Yes.

Tom: That's what we're going to be going into. If anybody have any questions, you can comment below on the YouTube video and we'll get back to you at a later date. Cool, so should we kick things off?

Henry: Yes, sure.

Tom: Sweet. Question number one is more about your journey and if we could talk about the bigger companies and the smaller companies that'd be really good.

Jay: Yes, sure. Firstly, thank you for having me. I got into sales ops by luck. I did a four-year university course in London with a one-year gap.

Tom: In what?

Jay: In business and computing, Essex University in London. I then started applying to corporate companies. In 2017, people weren't really thinking about startup companies or smaller tech companies then in the UK anyway. Everybody was always applying to big banks or big IT companies. I applied to a few tech companies and I landed a job at IBM. You didn't really at that time apply for a specific role, you said if you wanted to go into product or development or if you just went on the business side. They said sales ops analyst and I have no idea what that was.

[laughter]

Worked off my first day and just got the fun into it. What they do is they have a rotation scheme. I was then getting handed off the role by somebody that had just finished their placement year as a sales ops analyst. It was really getting the idea of what sales ops is from that person that handed off to me, and then the business executives that are supporting for that one year. It was very much by chance of understanding what sales ops was.

Henry: It sounds extremely structured.

Jay: It's very structured. I don't know what it's like now, but in terms of their whole placement rotation program, very structured but also the sales ops element, it's a separate function in IBM, it's huge. They've got centers across the world with sales ops and business ops.

Tom: How many people do you think they have in sales ops, globally? Hundreds or thousands?

Jay: Thousands, probably thousands. Thousands when I talk about shared services such as combination of sales ops, sales [unintelligible 00:03:32] and probably business operations support as well, which I'll come on to what that means.

Henry: It's a company that made and sold the first computer. They're an old business, very large business. 100,000 people?

Jay: 300,000 people when I was there. It's probably bigger now.

Henry: It's incredible.

Tom: That's when you started learning the trade?

Jay: Yes.

Tom: Then what happened after that?

Jay: During my one year, all of it was looking at data, it was week-to-week movements, looking at pipeline stages and forecasting. That was pretty much what the role was about, but it was in different territories, so understanding how it works in different territories in the UK and how you split them up and doing deployment plans of, do we have enough people in each area? It was quite good around the strategy piece.

Went back to uni, and because I enjoyed what I was doing at IBM, I went back. When you go back from a graduate scheme, there's no typically a sales ops role. It's with a lot about consulting, so putting you into projects that they've signed up. I did that for a year and a half, which was business analytics and optimization. It was an element of sales operations but I didn't know it at that time. Really going into different projects, working with external clients around the data, how do you analyze it, and then just trying to streamline some processes.

I did that for a year and a half and then I went back into sales and business operations. I'll go into what business operations at IBM meant at that time, I don't know if it's changed.

How I got back into that was actually the business executive that I was supporting during my placement year actually said, "Jay, I have just become a business executive for IBM Africa. We're a doing a startup organization there for IBM. I need you to come out and build me a sales and business operation [crosstalk]." He messaged me, I was like, "Where are you?" He's like, "I'm in Nairobi in Kenya." I was like, "Do you need me fly out?" He's like, "Can you fly out tomorrow and meet me?"

Henry: That's almost complete luck that it just happened to be that business executive and he just knew you.

Jay: Yes, it was a bit of luck at the beginning that I got to support somebody's skills-

Henry: Then it was pure skill and knowledge [crosstalk]

Jay: -and keeping the loyalty, keeping in touch and showing my work was good.

Tom: In these big organizations, people will move up and they'll bring other people with them, right?

Jay: Yes.

Tom: They only bring you with them if they like you and you're good. Maybe it's fortunate that you met a guy, but it wasn't fortunate that he liked you and wanted you to come to Africa, right?

Jay: Correct, and I think that's slowly happening in tech-world right now as well, is if you associate yourself with somebody that is smart or realizes that you need them, then if they do move then they may pinch you as well.

Henry: Yes, it's true [crosstalk].

Jay: It was the relationship that I had with that business exec. I flew out the next day, I met the team. I was like, "What is going on? This is not what I expect from IBM." There was no functions, nobody. Their sales is crazy, there was no marketing function, no finance function, no HR function, everything was outsourced into different countries. It was hectic. I joined.

What sales and business operations means in IBM is the sales ops is real sales ops. What we talk about is pipeline, forecasting, your commission, plans, running your performance improvement plans with overall performance rate and plan frameworks of individual, looking at sales strategy, sales enablement and the processes and the tools that you have within just the sales function.

Business ops is slightly different where you end up supporting the executive or the VP of that department or that business, and you start looking at all the functions within it: sales op, so sales, marketing, finance. In IBM they call it delivery whereas in this world we probably call it customer success and account management, and to want to glue them all together.

It was, "Jay, we're in three countries right now in Africa, we need to get to 17 countries in two years, how do we do that?" How do you build operational expense where we can scale? If we want to go to dive in another country tomorrow how do we do it and how do you set that up? It was cleaning out all the junk, it was creating sales processes, sales structures, sales stages, what they meant.

The difficulty over there was what they did is, they had a very small team but they were all executives from IBM and from very mature markets. You have my business exec that came from the UK into a startup world. He had a huge army of a team doing everything for him, but he was then put into an organization where it was you do everything. Then the same with the sales reps. They were classified as sales executives, but they were really big executives in Portugal or the US for IBM and they had armies of teams. They were really clueless, so it was actually educating them of what needs to be done.

Building processes, going go-to market strategy of what market should we go into, with what product? Because IBM have so many. Which product should we go into, understand which industry we can go into. We had obviously the luxury of being able to go into any market we want to with any product. The pricing, how do you do that? It was how do you combine all these departments together from a business perspective. I was looking at P&L and cost but also on the sales side.

Did that, managed to do it for 15 countries in two years where we built management systems and processes and kept it to a point where we were auditable, we had risk assessments in place, the processes in place as well. That then took me to our headquarters in Dubai. The work that I did there was recognized by our Middle East Africa headquarters. They said, "Jay, we want you to do it for five regions now?" That was okay. [crosstalk] .

What you've got to realize there and what they didn't realize is that if you put a process or a management system in place in one country, you can't lift and shift it straight into another country. You've got to try and keep the base there as much as you can, but you've got to realize that you're going to have to tweak things or add things in place in different countries.

Henry: Why is that, different cultures?

Jay: I'd say it's-- if you're talking about forecasting and managing pipeline and a do attitude towards that, is every different. Yes, the culture, I'd say in Africa, it was very laid back, it was very much, "Yes, I'll do it now." They don't do it for another month, and how do you deal with that? Whereas somebody in

[unintelligible 00:10:01], for instance, if they say, "We'll sign tomorrow." They actually do end up signing tomorrow. You need to take all these things into perspective, but also, if you're in Nigeria, for instance, we need extra business approvals before we send our contract, for instance. You've got to incorporate all these things together. Did that. What I loved was the fact that I was rolling up my sleeves, getting things done, putting things in place, and being able to scale it. I left Dubai after two years.

Henry: It was like working in a startup, but in a massive organization?

Jay: Yes. We were treated as a startup. Like if you failed in terms of your profit, you're busted, you're done. Yes, you've got this worldwide corporation and probably a lot of money, but you've got to earn that profit and loss account. If you are losing money, if you're signing crap deals, we don't care about the growth, we care about the bottom line number. It was challenging, how'd you cut costs. It was very different to what people would expect how an IBM experience would be in those markets.

Tom: Why did you leave IBM?

Jay: Been there for seven years, I really enjoy the very much hands-on approach of folding my sleeves and putting things in place that weren't there or gluing things together. At that time in 2016, what we had called emerging markets, which were these startup markets, actually started becoming a little bit more structured. I was like it's probably my time to leave, I've done my four years outside, I've learned so much from people around me, like VPs and general managers, CFOs. I've been in the business for years and years and years.

I left so and I decided I'm going to go to the tech world and enjoy the risky bit. What I struggled with actually was I had a combination of sales and business operations. You can call that commercial and revenue operations now in our world. What I struggled with actually was people or business in the UK didn't really know what sales ops was at that time, or they were coming around to it, although a lot more the mature business, and they thought that they just need sales ops to keep running the business.

I was looking for one of the new BizOps roles, people weren't really understanding that yet. I shifted to sales ops just to get my foot in the door and the experience, which is what I definitely needed. Joined a startup that had been around for like seven years where post series B were doing really well but had never had sales ops before. The reason why they wanted me was purely because they had some broken processes, their managing sales was quite well to be fair, but they just didn't have things that made things automated or weren't able to track or forecast where they were going to end.

Henry: There's just gaps in their knowledge they didn't know how to solve.

Jay: Yes, that's what it was. They actually handled Salesforce pretty well. Their duplication wasn't as bad as any other place that I've been to so far, to be honest, they managed it really well that the numbers in Salesforce were fairly accurate in terms of that versus what we're billing. It was fairly mature but they just wanted to take it to the next level. I joined them. Since then, I've joined different startups at different points and slowly focused on sales ops, but now I think more and more it's broadening like they're like, "What it sales ops?" Now it's going down a little revenue ops, which is great because--

Henry: We hear that quite often.

Jay: Which is what I think sales ops is, it's about gluing departments together as well.

Tom: I'm seeing trends, two trends; trend number one, Castillo also says she got into sales ops by accident. That's interesting, so maybe that's a trend. Other trend is--

Henry: You don't go and study it, do you?

[crosstalk]

Jay: People didn't know about it.

Tom: Maybe they should.

Henry: Maybe they should be.

Tom: Maybe we should start an online course. Anyway, moving on, you've had like 10 years experience now, right?

Jay: Yes.

Tom: From that experience, what do you think makes an awesome sales operations person?

Jay: I think you've got to have a very open mind. What I mean by that is yes you use your experience, but you always go into a business with a very clear open mind for the first month or so just taking everything, and then start understanding the bits that they are doing, but maybe not so well. One, the bits they're doing and really well and you haven't thought about that before, they're the bits where they are trying to do things but not as well as you think it can be. Then the other bit's around the big gray areas that they are not doing. Understanding that before you jump in and start putting all these things in place, I think that's one.

I think two is being able to speak to salespeople and understanding their frustrations and dealing with them. I think for a sales ops person, whatever you're going to try and do, if you don't get buy-in from the people that are affected by it, you'll fail. You will fail and the business will fail, and they'll think that they've probably hired the wrong person, because sales ops is all about putting things in place that are going to make the sales more efficient, effective, productive, and then how the business can scale with it. If you haven't got that buy-in from the people that are going to be actually running what you're actually implementing, then it's always going to fail.

Henry: Also, you've got-- to be a sales ops, you have to be able to interpret. Managers don't always want to see another dashboard, everyone's going to dashboard it out. They want insights and they want knowledge from you. They want interpretation of what they're seeing, because lots of sales directors, they don't look at graphs, they don't like them, they just want to see the raw numbers and what is it you can tell them that's interesting that can push the needle on.

Jay: Yes. I think to justify that, you've got it, yes, exactly, understand the VP of sales or the sales manager or whoever you're supporting on daily basis, understand what they like. Don't go in and create a dashboard with graphs because they may not like graphs, they may want conversion rates and data in a table, which is perfectly fine, then you do that. Or if they like graphs and graphics, then do that because otherwise you're wasting your energy on something that somebody's not going to be like or appreciate.

Tom: On that point, do you think that it's actually useful to have sales experience in sales operations? Here's my favorite question.

Jay: I strongly feel that somebody in sales ops needs to understand what it's like being in sales. By that I mean working close to your salespeople. I don't have sales experience, but when I talk to people, they think, "Jay, have you been a sales person before? You'd be great at it." The reason why is because I've worked so close to salespeople: salespeople, VP of sales, CROs, to understand.

Henry: It's a very diplomatic of saying--

Jay: I don't think it's necessary. I strongly feel that from the salespeople that I've worked with before, if they moved into a sales ops role, then I think they'll be very narrow-minded, and I think that comes back to the question I answered earlier, is you've got to be very open-minded. Whereas I think a sales person will say, "Actually, I needed to do six clicks without a call, I'm going to fix that." When really the bigger problem could be around your sales processes of your sales to actually defining them.

If they are able to take them away, take themselves away from that emotion and say, "Actually, I'm going to do sales ops properly," then great, but I think a more successful person at sales ops would probably be somebody that works close to salespeople people and gets to understand them and then able to do that.

Henry: It's similar to making a great salesperson, a sales manager, because if you promote someone into that role, their role now is looking at numbers-

Tom: It's different.

Henry: -crunching Excel data, and it's a fundamentally different role to being a salesperson. You've also taken a good sales person away from their role, they're not selling anymore, and they might be woefully under-prepared. That's the way I think about it.

Tom: I think it's after number seven, after number eight. I think we have almost a 50/50 split between people that have and haven't been in sales. That's why I'love that question, because the people that obviously have a sales background, like you Henry, are going to be like, "Yes, of course."

Henry: I wear many hats. Super interesting, you're at Doctify at the moment. What is your technology stack look like?

Jay: I'd like to keep it very lean, we're very early on.

Tom: There's how many people in their sales ops?

Jay: We've got 29 people overall in the business. We've got 11 in the sales team in terms of an SDR and sales split, it's sales reps and then SDR, and then we've got a head of sales and account management on top. That's their size right now, but I think, this is what I alluded to before in the sales ops meat, was that don't go crazy as much as you want to when it comes to implementing sales ops tech.

Henry: I'm a big believer in that. I think people sometimes, they can concentrate on trying to buy a piece of technology because they think it's the silver bullet, when actually you'll probably cause more issues. They need to go back and look at their fundamentals or understand if they're using their CRM correctly, because things like CRMs are expensive, are you using it to its maximum capacity rather than investing in new technology.

The other day I was giving an example of what's the point of using things like Gong or those voice transcription analysis methods if you're talking to the wrong person in the business at the other other end of the video call. Because I think technology can do amazing things, but if you haven't got the fundamentals right what's the point? I think that's--

Jay: It's exactly that and I think you've got a-- and this is why you've got to work really closely with the people that are going to work with the tools and processes that you're putting in place, because putting in six different tools in the space of six months is not going to help them. Imagine yourself being lumped with six different technology tools, you spend time trying to figure out how to use it and it's change.

It's a huge change from just implementing a screen share tool for instance, it's, "Okay, now I have to start doing screen share, how do I do it? What do I do in Salesforce or your CRM? How do I use this tool? What do I show them?" It's very different and you can't do-- you've got to master that, implement it, make them happy or satisfied and show them that it was value. If you show them that what you're putting in is value to them, then you can go onto the next one.

Henry: How do you show them value?

Jay: You've made their lives much easier. I think for me it's always been if I can decrease the amount of time you spend on admin, or the number of clicks you're doing in your CRM, or making their lives much easier to sign a contract, or making strides, whatever that is, then that's how I show them value.

Tom: So it's really increased commissions? Is that right or no?

Henry: Well, the salespeople will see value in something if they earn more money ultimately. They can do deals quicker and earn more money, they'll see value.

Tom: How lean are we talking, like maybe just that piece of paper [crosstalk]

Jay: At Doctify, right now we have sales loft for our cadencing and outbound, we have our CRM sales op system which is Salesforce. I then use Cloudingo, which we'll come onto later.

Henry: Is that a D2?

Jay: Yes, D2, and that's more from my side which actually helped the sales team and made them more productive and effective. And then after that, at the moment, we have DocuSign to send out contracts for enterprise clients because they like to sign the actual agreement, and then we've or I've just implemented Chargebee which is a SaaS subscription solution where you just send out a subscription link, they agree to the Ts and Cs, they enter their payment details and it's done.

Henry: That's a recurring payments?

Jay: Yes, and it's recurring payments, you don't have to worry about receivables and age debt and having people access your product without paying or anything like that. That's where the revenue ops half comes into it, and that's how you glue the functions together. That's how lean we're talking.

Tom: Pretty lean.

Jay: When I came in we had demos of all sorts, like project management tools, I was like, "You don't need a project management tool for your sales team. You don't need all these other tools." We had like four different screen share tools and I was like, "[crosstalk] screen share, why do you need them?" Because our market's very difficult to do screen shares because it's hospitals and clinics and their WiFi is not always the best in the UK, so we don't need it. You're just frustrating salespeople because they're trying to do a screen share of the tool and other people can't see it and so they don't know what tool to use like we've got four and it's crazy.

Henry: What would you-- is there a point in the future, like next six months, if there is a tool that you want to get in?

Jay: An analytics tool? For me, I do one other tricks in Google sheets. I've automated as much as I can, I've linked it to the Salesforce. I think we're at a stage where we need to be able to scale it. Right now Google sheets is good as-- it is fine, It's good, It gives me all the data that I need with conversion rates and so on, but be able to scale it it's going to take a lot of my time.

Henry: That'll be a Salesforce native package or?

Jay: It will probably be something like--

Tom: Like Kluster?

Jay: Or integrate into Salesforce [crosstalk] morning so like a Kluster.

Tom: Shout out to Rory, episode number three I believe.

Jay: I know Rory really well and we had a discussion today because he knows that my next thing would be analytics. I'm not going to go crazy with everything else, but slowly.

Tom: Cool, so favorite tool right now?

Jay: Cloudingo.

Tom: Tell us more.

Jay: If I was going to set up my own business or I was going to go into an organization when I was employee number two or three or whatever that is, every single business always down the line, face data quality duplication. The amount that organizations spend on money, time, of employees, trying to fix it, actually you spend like for like five minutes to find somebody or a lead, puts in Salesforce, it's great. Then prospects out to them, for instance, well, you may have any prospect out before, so you've just wasted 5 to 10 minutes of a sales rep or an SDR or whoever's doing that.

That's one reason why it's my favorite tech tool, is to sort out your duplication because you're going to save so much money, which is one. The second bit is actually you get to know your target market size, which is huge because, let's say, well, you know that your target market is say 20,000 leads in the UK, for instance. Your Salesforce shows that you've got 18,000, well, actually, out of the 18,000 how many duplicates? How do you start splitting up your territories and give your sales reps the same amount of opportunity, and you can't do that unless you get rid of your duplication issue.

Tom: How does it work? Does it simply just show you how many duplicates you have and you can delete them?

Jay: Yes, they merge. Clouding actually merges and you can create a lot of roles. It's a bit slow, but you create really good roles around merging. So if this person has-- you can do it by name, email address, all these different fields in Salesforce saying, "This is the characteristics and I want you to merge it where this is the primary account and this is the criteria."

Tom: Do they charge based on just a SaaS description or how many records you manage?

Jay: It's done by how many records. It's not like pound the record, but they group you into a set saying, "Okay, it looks like-- we've done a scan of your Salesforce, looks like you've got 20,000 leads or contacts or accounts." It's x amount, and then you can do-- have many mergers and you automate it, and you create blockers so people that try and put it in-- I know Salesforce has D2 manager, but it's not, it doesn't prevent what-

Henry: It's not anything like--

Jay: -it doesn't prevent it, so that's my favorite tech tool.

Tom: Shout out to Cloudingo, maybe we should link to them below the video.

Henry: I think we probably should.

Tom: That actually links very nicely on to the next question, which is how you deal with data quality and how does your role grow further with the CRM/platform owner? I assume that is you--

Jay: Yes, it is me. How do you deal with it? Invest in Cloudingo. It is not expensive, honestly it's going to save you thousands and thousands of pounds as well time frustration in your sales team.

Henry: It's interesting you're talking about prospecting out to the same lead, the same account previously. It actually brings us on to what Ebsta does.

Tom: Yes, we should actually say--

Henry: We never really have talked about it, but this is really fascinating because if you use a tool like Cloudingo to do degrouping, if you're to use a tool like our tool inside Salesforce, you're able to surface all that communication from all those users across all time, so you can actually get a detailed understanding of, "I know that someone has actually spoken to this lead before," and we can surface that information instantly regardless of whether they ever logged in Salesforce. We work really well with tools like Cloudingo and we try and aim at businesses who have data quality issues, which is almost every single business out there. It's quite pertinent.

Jay: I think every business I've been in has data quality issues. That's come down to the fact they haven't thought about it early on. You feel like you can manage it because you've put some rules in place or you have one person in post data, but it gets tricky. It gets very difficult and impacts-- impact so much in your sales team, the frustration that they get, the time that they spend, but also when you start the new go to market strategy, you're going to rely on everything in CRM. If your CRM is showing some duplications, you don't know how much of your market you have right now in terms of how much do I have in CRM, how much am I missing and how do I get it? Then you can start speeding up, so it's got a big impact and that's how I would deal with that.

Henry: Many businesses struggle with the data cleanliness at the top of the funnel, and they sometimes have sales teams who just want to call people, but they spend so much time prospecting on that prospecting stage trying to find someone who isn't already in the system that they can actually be really inefficient, it's getting the right target audience in front of your salespeople in a timely manner with enough information for themselves to do their job, and it's not an easy thing.

Jay: It's not easy. I start early, get it in place. Honestly, the amount that you would spend on your CRM system just add on, whatever it is, 10% or 5% invest into that tool or a tool that does something very similar, and then honestly, you'll be perfectly fine in the future.

Tom: Would you say the biggest challenge in your role, and let's broaden this out to around your operations because I'm probably interested in that, if there's quality or if there's other challenges that you have?

Henry: You can say salespeople, they're the biggest challenge.

Jay: No, I think the biggest challenge is generally is change. I think I had this question asked to me by somebody to say, "Why should we not have you in our business?" I said, "Well, if you don't want change, don't hire me," or not just me generally, but I think the experienced people will always do that. They'll always come in and they'll understand things that are working really well, great, things that are not working well, and things that you're missing out on. Those two elements is where they're going to adapt change. I think the biggest challenge is getting our people on board and getting them to understand why I'm making the change.

I think that comes back to showing the value, right? Getting to say, "Actually, I'm going to implement DocuSign because right now, the steps are printing a contract, taking it to the office or whatever it is. It's coming back, scanning it or losing it, uploading it, making a disk or closed one and great, right? But right now why don't I tell you to click a button, they sign it, it comes back, and it's closed one." It's showing the value of what you're trying to do, and it can be processes, it can be around sale stages, it can be everywhere, forecasting, your pipeline.

I think that the challenge is really change and getting everybody on board with it is probably the biggest challenge, but I think how you overcome is showing the value, but when it comes to all the different functions, and the revenue op side, it's really we need this kind of information in CRM because the on-boarding team leader, "Okay, well, why do you need it? Why don't you just add in more fields or more information?" It's, "Well, the reason why is because every deal that you-- not every deal, but 20% of the deals you sign are actually getting on boarded and churning in two months. The reasons why is because we don't understand the conversation you've had."

Henry: Or the product is being incorrectly sold or things have been promised through the sales process.

Jay: Yes. I think sales is, of course, difficult, but I think for business, the key fundamental is how do you keep them on your platform or using your product for a very long time.

Henry: Yes. We're SaaS businesses, aren't we? We need the recurring revenue.

Jay: Yes.

Henry: We need those customers coming back for more. That's the same for every business, isn't it?

Jay: It is, right?

Henry: You need to build a loyal customer base. It's not a one-time thing.

Jay: Yes. I think the challenge around that is where you try and put processes in place that impact other functions. This is where I think sales ops is you're not always as focused on sales ops when you're doing something within your sales team only, think about deploy the two other key departments: marketing and account management customer success, and how they're impacted or how you maybe add one or two extra things that actually the other two functions can actually use and leverage. I think it's those two things; change and getting a bit on the same page when it comes to growing departments together.

Tom: Based on a single metric that you can judge all salespeople by?

Jay: Percentage against their target. The reason why, I have to think about it. The reason why is if somebody is, let's say 10% of your sales team are hitting 50% of their number, and you have 90% of the people hitting 85% of their number, then you've got to analyze every single area within the 10%. It's probably going to do around sales enablement, understand the conversion rates, where's it dropping off, where is it going wrong or have you allocated the wrong territory to them. Are they getting enough leads from the SDR team or however that is. I think that's a key indicator for you to then start digging and understanding where it's going wrong.

Tom: Okay, nice.

Jay: That's how I've judged all salespeople, but then it comes back to you. We look into it and help them to improve that metric.

Henry: You'd always talk directly to the sales director to say there is a problem area here? This is how we can address it. Would you just go straight to the sales users?

Jay: On that metric, I'll highlight it to the actual sales manager or VP of Sales, but I think you need to come up with a plan together and say, "Hey, I've analyzed that sales enablement piece is not great because the first pitch is going quite wrong because the drop-off is quite long. Me as a sales ops person, I can't tell them what's around up pitching. Why don't you focus on that and I'm going to help them track it, analyze it, and then keep them on top of what's happening and how they're improving."

Henry: It must be great to get those people and pull them up to the same level as everyone else through your A, crunching the numbers, and B, actually going and turning them around. That's really satisfying.

Jay: I think if it happens four or five months running, then obviously there's something a little bit more fundamentally wrong with it, but showing them improvement of, "If you do these three things in the next two weeks, I guarantee your conversion rate is going to go X. Let's do it step by step and it's gradual." We can't just say, "Do all these 10 things differently in the next two weeks." It's just not going to work even if somebody told me to do 10 things differently in two weeks, I'll be--

Henry: It's too many.

Jay: It just wouldn't work, and I'll just get frustrated.

Tom: Okay, cool. The final question we ask everyone on the show is who have you learned sales operations from or who's been a big inspiration for you?

Jay: I would say every VP of Sales and CROs that I've worked with.

Tom: Really?

Jay: Yes. Two specifically, one obviously, the business exec of IBM who gave me the opportunity to say come out and do it and be one of the youngest people to do it in IBM. Which is great, but--

Henry: Can you name that person?

Jay: I don't know. Sanjay Saxena, I don't know if you'll be listening, but--

Tom: We can always tell him.

Jay: Yes. Which was a brilliant opportunity. If I hadn't got that, I have no idea where I would have been at to be fair. The other two being Tom Glason and Pete Cosby, and they're very different people looking at different things, but that's where I've learnt sales ops from. It's understanding the people that you support, what their thinking is, what their vision is, what they like looking at, what they haven't looked at, and you learn from that.

Henry: That's great.

Tom: Nice.

Henry: That's great.

Jay: I think that's how you can be successful.

Tom: Yes, thank you.

Jay: No, thank you.

Tom: That was master class.

Henry: Yes, thank you so much.

Jay: Thank you very much.

Tom: Henry, do you have anything else to add?

Henry: No, nothing from me. I just hope that was interesting for everyone listening. It was super interesting for me.

Tom: If you want to reach out to Jay, can we give your email address? Is that okay?

Jay: Yes, sure.

Tom: It is just [email protected]?

Jay: Yes.

Tom: Cool, [email protected]. If you want to learn anything else from Jay or learn about what Doctify does, you should do reach out to him, or perhaps to [email protected] if you want to learn anything about Ebsta, but Doctify, let's finish off?

Jay: The trustpilot for the healthcare industry.

Tom: Trustpilot for the healthcare industry. Fantastic [unintelligible 00:37:43]. Thank you everybody for watching/listening and you'll see us again or hear us again next week.

Henry: Thanks guys.

Jay: Thanks.

[00:38:00] [END OF AUDIO]