Leading A Sales Operation Team with Guy Weigert, VP Sales Solutions of SimilarWeb

Guy Weigert jumped onto Sales Ops Demystified to share his knowledge and experience in managing a sales operations team. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

You can learn more about:

• Guy Weigert
• SimillarWeb

Tools Mentioned:

• Salesforce
• Linkedin Sales Navigator
• SimillarWeb Sales Solution
• Salesloft

Key Takeaways

Why Guy moved from the sales side to the sales & business size

Guy previously had experience in finance roles within the logistics industry, he then moved over to help start the sales operations team at the ad tech business Criteo. In this role, he was getting closer to the customer and enjoyed learning more about the customer and how to shape a product around helping them.

He then combined his passion for helping customers with his passion for help salespeople in his new role as the VP of SimilarWeb’s Sales Solution. Guy manages a team of six people and has access to a team of twenty sales reps that are bringing this product to market.

How is Guy working with his reps?

Guy, is running the following initiatives with a view to increasing the productivity of his sales reps:

• Monthly team meetings with all product team and reps to keep everyone up to date with sales and product progress
• Bimonthly pipeline review meetings with different sales team segments: SMB vs Enterprise to work with reps on their deals
• Instant messaging support for reps to answer questions and provide insights
• Working one on one with reps on their sales decks and email cadences to ensure this as potent as possible

“Sales ops resources need exposure to the sales process”

Guy states that to be effective in sales operations, you need to have some exposure to the sales process in order to give credible recommendations to reps. This doesn’t have to be ongoing, but at some point in the first ninety days, you should either run sales demos or shadow your reps throughout the process.

Without this, it’s hard for you to advise or add value to your reps: they simply won’t listen to you.

Guy’s favorite sales metric…

Guy chose: “Number Of Opportunities Created” as the only sales metric that he would measure if he could only measure one. This is because it very simply gives you a quick idea of the health of your pipeline and individual sales reps.

Moving from a buyer to the seller

I have seen a few companies doing this… they employ the buyers of their solution from a business that they have sold their product/service too. Why does this work? You are bringing someone into your team that has an intimate knowledge of the pain points of your market (as they used to have these pains). And therefore, you can use this knowledge/empathy to improve your sales process.

That said, this has to be done carefully as you don’t want to upset your customer!

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