SVP Sales Operations & Enablement: Russ Walker of Datasite

Russ Walker 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:

• Russ Walker
• Datasite

Tools Mentioned:

• Salesforce
• Anaplan
• Leadspace
• Litmos
• Zuora
• Vidyard

Key Takeaways

Russ joined Datasite to help build and scale their onboarding and sales enablement programs

As the company grew, Russ’s role then grew into leading the global sales ops and sales enablement team. This meant that sales operations and sales enablement came under one roof, giving a more cohesive overview of all aspects of operations and enablement across the business.  

Adaptions Datasite have made to counter these challenging times

Russ explains that most of the sales operations and sales enablement team are now working remotely. They have introduced a number of measures to ensure sales morale and productivity remain high, such as virtual “happy” and coffee hours.

As soon as COVID-19 hit, Datasite put together a tool kit to suggest which tools to use, such as Vidyard to enable reps to send videos to current clients just stay in touch and Microsoft Team to ensure internal communication. They gathered the best practices and tips from the sellers that are used to working from home and shared these insights with sellers that have less experience working remotely.

How involved are Russ’s team when it comes to sales forecasting? 

Datasite’s sales forecasting is unique, as Datasite is a SaaS platform that facilitates mergers and acquisitions. Their price range varies depending on how much content is uploaded to the virtual data room. They have projections around the number of units they aim to sell as well as an average for the project volume and what it’s going to look like. Majority of their forecasting is around the number of units they plan to sell. For the sales and sales operations, teams units are ‘king’, as long as they are getting customer interactions and projects being uploaded onto Datasite’s platform than from there you can provide revenue estimates.

Russ’s #1 sales metric…

Having leading indicators, for example, measuring both meetings and demos booked would a key metric to track and measure this is to make sure that your sales reps are getting the message out there and increasing brand awareness.

A key lagging metric to track is the number of units sold, so how many transactions are they selling on a consistent basis whether it be weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.

Russ sales ops inspiration:

• Phil Rowlinson – VP, Global Head of Sales Operations at Datasite

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