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SVP Sales Strategy and Sales Operations: Jeremey Donovan of SalesLoft

Jeremey Donovan 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.

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Key Takeaways

Jeremy’s journey into sales operations…

Jeremy started his career as a semiconductor engineer, he moved progressively through the world of technology, then product and then marketing. He has only recently moved into sales strategy, operations and also spent a brief time in a CRO role.   

Jeremy has made these shifts in his career because he loves to apply his analytical and engineering experience to his work. This passion drew him to marketing 15+ years ago, he could see that marketing was changing from creative side to hyper-analytical side. He then saw this transformational shift within sales, and therefore jumped over into sales operations. Jeremy also adds that there are still analytical problems within sales to solve within sales such as forecasting, territory assignment and account scoring.

How has Jeremy increased rep productivity? 

Jeremy ties account scoring in with territory assignment. Without this, sales reps have to shift through vast amounts of data such as industry, company size, tech stack, opportunity history, etc. to find signal amongst the noise. 

SalesLoft created an algorithm that uses the firmographic intent activity to give an account score, this means that the reps don’t have to spend time shifting through vast amounts of data to find that information. This means that reps spend less time prioritising their actions and more time selling.

Jeremy’s #1 sales metric to end all metrics: the number of opportunities created per activity

It’s an effectiveness metric: the number of opportunities created per activity. This is basically measuring how effective a sales rep is. Having effectiveness and productivity metrics in place will allow you to manage your reps more efficiently as these leading indicators give time to provide tips and strategies to help them increase sales and opportunities before the end of the quarter.

The key to having a successful and impactful sales organization is to constantly “sniff” to see who the top 10% are in any metric, understand the behaviours that these reps are exhibiting that the other 90% are not… and then teaching what the 10% are doing right.

Jeremy has seen an increase in sales rep activity in the past couple of months… why?

Jeremy has seen an increase in email and call activity from his sales reps in the past couple of months, he believes this is due to the reduction travel due to COVID-19. This has blurred the lines between work and home life, that said, Jeremy hasn’t seen this change sales rep productivity. 

SalesLoft have layered data science on top of their forecasting, this means that they have multiple statistical models predicting their outcome for the end of that quarter. Therefore they haven’t needed to change their model, but this forecasting method has been predicting very different answers in real-time.

Who has had the most influence in Jeremy’s career? 

There has been no-one person that has influenced Jeremy throughout his career. However, he is constantly learning and he learns a lot from the interviews he conducts on his podcast: Hey Salespeople.

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