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Increasing the amount of new opportunities created: David Zwerin of TripActions
David Zwerin jumped onto Sales Operations Demystified to share his knowledge and experience in Sales Operations and ways to increase the amount of new opportunities created. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.
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Key Takeaways
“Sales Ops found me…”
When asked about why he moved from sales into sales ops, David shares: “Sales Ops found me”.
When working in sales, someone in his team asked David if he wanted to be in the “boiler room” and move into operations, and as sales strategy had always fascinated David since business school, he took the leap.
TripActions Ops: Sales Rep ratio has decreased as they scale
Initially, TripActions had just two sales ops resources to support 125 sales reps… a ratio of 1:62.5, this is much higher than the average of 1:15-1:20 that we normally see with guests of the show. Though over time, as their sales force has scaled… this ratio has reverted to the average.
David made a very interesting point… each new TripActions sales ops resource added to the team must justify their salary in revenue increase through serving the sales team. Ultimately we want to reduce the amount of ops resources per productive sales rep to decrease the cost of sales.
Going “more remote”
In these challenging times, David’s team has shifted to even more remote work than they currently are used to. That said, David still finds it much easier to work in person. To accommodate this, the team is spending more time in Asana to ensure all projects are tracked effectively.
“Management Enablement” – the next, hot sales trend
David’s team recently carried out an initiative to improve the productivity of reps in their more transactional, “commercial” customer segment. This ensured that the managers of these reps had access to the right data at the right time about their performance through Atrium HQ. This enabled managers to give more and better quality feedback leading to a significant increase in the amount of new opportunities created.
This is an important metric for TripActions as they don’t see a large amount of “land and expand” revenue.
David’s #1 sales metric
David chose “customer retention” as the one sales metric he would choose to measure for the rest of his career. It’s a more holistic metric that looks at the businesses’ ability to both sell and solve the problem of the customer (customers are more likely to retain if their problems are solved).
TripActions pay commission to reps only after the client has successfully launched the product, to increase the likelihood that that customer will be satisfied with the deal… and also that their problems will be solved, leading to lower customer churn (in theory!).
Todd’s two biggest sales ops inspirations:
- Jim Drill – Advisor – Board Member – Investor
- Peter Kazanjy – Cofounder Atrium HQ
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