Sales Ops as Internal Consultants with Martin Levesque, Former Director of Sales Operations at FairWarning®

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt is joined by Martin Levesque, Former Director of Sales Operations at FairWarning®. They discuss why Sales Ops as an internal consultancy team is a good idea, how sales ops teams can be better consultants to internal teams, and why industrial knowledge is important to sales processes.

• Martin’s Linkedin
• FairWarning’s website

Martin’s journey into Sales Ops 

Martin started by studying workflow automation and document management, which evolved into implementing automation tools for business processes. He eventually started leading a team and building a consultancy inside of the company called DocuPhase. Here, his role in training system analysis introduced him to various revenue streams and tools. 

Why Sales Ops as an internal consultancy team is a good idea

The tech team first needs to be equipped with consulting, business analysis, and process analysis skills. The goal is to see the effects of a decision on all business processes (upstream & downstream) under the company’s umbrella. It dramatically improves the company’s ability to be “self-aware” and helps plan its growth with high accuracy.  

How Sales Ops can consult internal teams better

There’s a high degree of dependence on institutional knowledge to achieve any core executive function. This knowledge is ripe for standardization, knowledge transfer, and the operational application of systems. Sales ops can help find exceptions and rules in processes that can be further standardized. It can also help unify the voices of critics and champions so that they can present a well-rounded picture to the executive team. However, these should be genuine critics and not just complainers. 

Capturing knowledge into your processes and automating them 

At FairWarning®, Martin’s team worked to evaluate the systems and processes in place to help standardize the institutional knowledge that came from the Founder. Their goal was to figure out the existing knowledge, group it together, and standardize it through automation. This was so that they don’t have to revisit it every time in the sales cycle to get something done. 

Role of Sales Ops in the mission statement of FairWarning®

The sales ops team became a background process that brought on several incremental improvements for FairWarning®to achieve its core mission statement. This was done by using data to identify their strengths and weaknesses (i.e. be self-aware), which was reflected in their segmentation strategy. They also helped improve aspects of customer success by uncovering the factors responsible for their high attrition.

Finding reasons for sudden pipeline dips

When the pipeline dips, obvious negative factors such as pricing and timing start affecting the pipeline. However, you can extract better insights from individual rep notes for leads that dropped through the funnel. This will help you strengthen your forecasting process and take steps to mitigate any potential losses. 

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