The Secret To Increasing Salesforce Usage with Peter Charshafian, Senior Sales Excellence Manager at GlobalWebIndex

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt and Alex Freeman are joined by Peter Charshafian, Senior Sales Excellence Manager at GlobalWebIndex. They discuss how Sales Ops roles are being thought of as “Sales Excellence” roles, how data helps build a baseline level of trust across entire organizations, and how to build standardized dashboards.

• Peter’s Linkedin
• GlobalWebIndex Website

Peter’s transition into Sales Ops 

Peter’s transition from an SDR role into Sales Ops began when someone in marketing, who was maintaining Salesforce at one of his previous organizations, quit. The flexible nature of work in a startup helped founders recognize his analytical strengths from his SDR role, so he got assigned to work on Salesforce. He quickly fell in love with Salesforce and eventually transitioned into Salesforce administration.

Sales Excellence vs Sales Ops 

Sales Ops is really about going beyond Salesforce and unifying it with tools such as HubSpot and Marketo. The goal of the Sales Ops team is to drive efficiency across the organization and internal roles like sales trainers, sales managers, solutions engineers, and others.

Renaming the title of Sales Ops Manager to Sales Excellence Manager helps drive more internal recognition and authority toward the person in that role.

Sales tech stack at GlobalWebIndex 

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – prospecting tool
• Zoominfo for Contact Management
• SalesLoft for Cadences
• CS for Product Solutions
• MixPanel

Salesforce helps make sense of data, provide insights, and drive efficiencies across all tiers and teams within GWI. 

The main focus for GWI’s Sales Ops team in 2021

In 2021 the GWI Sales Ops teams have focused on refining how they use Salesforce to send out contracts and track sales commissions. The work involves building integrations with external tools that fulfill those supplementary functions.

Importance of correct sales commissions calculation

Calculating sales commissions is about rewarding the people for the hard work that they’re doing and knowing that they can trust you. The most important thing is creating those relationships with those sales reps and not feeling like you’re a robot working the tools for your sales reps. A huge part of RevOps and Salesforce is that without significant user adoption within the first one to three weeks, you might lose your audience quickly. 

Sales forecasting process in GWI 

GWI Sales and Sales Ops teams focus on creating standard dashboards for weighted and unweighted forecasts so that everyone in the company sees the same data. These standard dashboards are easier to maintain and can be customized by the managers using them. In the past three quarters, the GWI Sales and Sales Ops teams have been able to get within 5% of their forecast.

Building trust in data across the organization

Understand what metrics your business teams use to analyze data. Plan for quick wins because fixes are long-term and these quick wins will help improve trust with the data. 

Understand the context behind errors you are asked to fix. This will help illuminate the full scope of work, find the root cause of errors, present a better case to your business teams, and prevent those errors from coming up again.  

Unified reporting with standardized dashboards 

The dashboards should allow all users to speak the same language, even if those dashboards don’t meet all of their needs equally. Standardized dashboards should provide easy access to important information to everyone.

Recommended episodes

• Riding the Salesforce Wave with Megan James, Director of Sales Operations Lead at Knock
• Using Data to Empower Sales Reps with Max Stirling, Sales Operations Manager at Adarma Security
• Sales Operations Analyst: Jeanette Appiah of Merkle

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