Sales Ops in a Remote World with Zane McCarthy, Sales Operations Lead at Fieldwire

This week, we are talking to Zane McCarthy, currently serving as Sales Operations Lead at Fieldwire. With a return to in-person office work on the horizon, many ops and sales leaders wonder what a mixed or fully remote sales ops team will look like.

• Zane’s Linkedin
• Fieldwire’s website

Sales vs Ops 

At Fieldwire, Zane works in Sales Ops in conjunction with sales reps, business ops, and marketing ops teams. The advantage of such collaborative working is being able to execute your ideas across the funnel and have tighter integration between Sales, Marketing, & Business teams.

Fieldwire’s sales tech stack

Fieldwire uses Salesforce with integrations for cadencing, click-to-call dialling, and other supporting tools. 

Adapting to a remote sales approach

The creation and regular updating of documentation becomes all the more important when working remotely with clients and your team. 

Human connection in a remote team

Getting to know your remote team members on a personal level helps improve motivation and morale. Switching between video and audio calls also helps that team operate smoothly in a remote environment.  

The return to normal

Zane considers sales forecasting and pipeline review “in-person events”. However, certain people can be incredibly productive with remote sales ops. It’d be wise to find a customized mix between the two modes of working in the future. 

Old data points may not be as reliable as they once were. Leaders will rely on the reps’ personal communication with the clients and their gut feeling about the deal in this remote atmosphere. 

Highest value sales KPI’s

A robust qualified pipeline helps the team identify what worked and make accurately predictable forecasts. Even in a pandemic period, this metric helps test conversion hypotheses and promotes measurable growth.

Do organizations need a salesforce admin?

Smaller organizations might not need someone to operate in a Salesforce administration role, but they do need a person with robust Salesforce skills to navigate the system. As the organization grows and includes several sales reps with Salesforce licenses, it becomes imperative to separate the Salesforce administration responsibilities into a new role. Salesforce Trailhead allows the Ops team to learn the backend and create an abstraction so the sales reps could don’t have to worry about the admin side of things. 

Zane’s biggest inspiration 

Zane credits Dave Morel as his biggest inspiration. He would like to have lunch with Matt Bertuzzi whose book “Lightning Sales Ops” inspired him to excel in sales ops with a healthy attitude.

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