Keeping It Simple for Sales Reps With Sandy Robinson, Vice President of Revenue Operations at Nymbus

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt and Alex Freeman are joined by Sandy Robinson, Vice President of Revenue Operations at NYMBUS. They discuss Sandy’s journey into sales and rev ops, how to enhance sales rep’s functional and performance efficiency, and how to keep it simple for sales reps. 

• Sandy’s LinkedIn
• NYMBUS website

Sandy’s journey into sales and rev ops 

Sandy started her sales journey in 1997 as an Area Sales Manager at DISH Network (EchoStar Corporation). In 2004, she joined PennySaverUSA as a Senior Sales Manager, where she led a sales team of fourteen people. 

Sandy had her breakthrough into sales operations in 2010 when she joined Kemper Corporation as the Regional Sales Director and soon got promoted to Director of Sales Operations. This role provided her the exposure to versatile sales operations roles including sales and P&L delivery, market strategy, sales managers/agents training, etc. 

Since 2010, Sandy has worked in key sales operations roles, including as Vice President of Sales Operations at Web.com, and Senior Director of Sales Operations at Supplyframe. After tremendous achievements and sales operations transformation at Web.com and Supplyframe, Sandy joined NYMBUS in 2021 as Vice President of Revenue Operations.

“Revenue operations work as a nucleus that drives sales milestones, sales reps/teams, operations and customer experience towards revenues.”

Rev ops team at NYMBUS

The NYMBUS rev ops team consists of twenty-five members, including business development representatives (BDRs), engineers, sales leads, and reps. 

How to increase sales rep’s functional and performance efficiency? 

Sales ops leaders should bring the entire team together through regular meet-ups and have them share their success and learning stories with each other. Furthermore, integrating automated tools in the operations that help sales reps distinguish between qualified leads such as MQL (marketing qualified lead) and SAL (sales accepted lead) can help them create a targeted strategy, hit their targets, and increase their functional efficacy.  

Sandy advises sales and rev ops leads to try out Seismic (a sales enablement tool) to reduce the manual effort of the team. 

There are a few simple steps to ensure improvement in the sales reps team performance;

• Keep the team on board throughout the process
• Give them the autonomy to make decisions
• The team leader reviews their decisions periodically

Keep it simple for sales reps 

The success of sales reps lies in a simple and straightforward sales operations process. At NYMBUS, the sales planning, process, and operations is a simple three-step formula: 

• Plan the process/targets 
• Forecast the outcomes
• Put it in the system

Once the process is on the move, analyze, modify, integrate user feedback, reiterate, and automate.  Avoid the usage of filling out tiresome forms and long lists of checkboxes. Instead, just analyze and narrow down the key aspects for target tracking. 

How to become a successful sales and rev ops lead? 

Sales and rev ops leaders must learn to think from a buyers’ as well as sales rep’s perspective. This can only happen if the leads have experience working as a sales rep, accounts, and customer support manager. Understanding the working methodology of sales reps helps the leads to analyze data sets and reports, draft sales quotas, and strategize the buyer experience.

“Amidst the emerging market dynamics, sales leaders should take aggregated a rather linear forecasting approach.” Sales reps work on many variables, and if the sales leaders tend to rely on a linear planning and forecasting approach, the results can be compromised. 

Recommended episodes

• The Six Pillars of Revenue Operations with Rhys Williams, VP Revenue Operations at Convercent
• How To Scale Startup Sales Teams with Patrick Thorp of Sales For Startups
• Supporting 1,000 Sales Reps with Shiv Walia, Global Sales Operations Manager at Mindbody

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