What traditional sales processes are you disrupting to unify revenue teams?
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In terms of sales collaboration, optimizing the SDR to AE handoff process and the AE to onboarding specialist handoff process is essential. Clearly defined guidelines for these handoffs increase coordination and collaboration. For example, ensuring SDRs meet specific criteria before moving opportunities to sales helps avoid conflicts and improves the process. Similarly, detailed documentation for onboarding specialists ensures a smooth transition. Unifying all three teams—sales, customer success, and marketing—requires alignment of systems, data, and teams. A single source of truth for reporting metrics and dashboards from the same data source enhances unification and makes it easier.
Maybe not a new perspective, but bringing everyone into the sales cycles, especially for big deals, is crucial. Marketing with ABM, SDRs prospecting new departments, account managers, and account executives working together breaks down walls and focuses everyone on the biggest accounts. For more transactional deals, we focus on the closed-won to kick-off stage. Using tools like Gong to revisit and analyze past calls helps us identify ideal use cases and ensures a smooth transition internally, enhancing the customer experience. This approach has led to more upsell opportunities for us.
We have been exploring conversation intelligence for some time now, particularly with Gong, which offers tremendous capabilities. Everyone likely understands what Gong provides, but in terms of disrupting the sales process, it allows us to observe sellers firsthand and see how they interact with customers. This enables us to extract valuable intelligence that can be used to manage the organization better from a capability standpoint. I am very excited about this.
To build on that, I have broken this down into big deals and small deals. In the small deals space, we typically use conversation intelligence. The real value in something like Gong, from what I have seen, is when you can connect the customer success team with your sales team, SDRs, and even inside sales and commercial sellers. In the enterprise space, it can be more fragmented, and people aren't always willing to use Gong, especially in government sectors. However, the richness lies in connecting systems across different functions and gathering all that information in one place. This way, any reporting or automation leverages the customer journey data from beginning to end. Before revenue operations, each function had siloed data, and you could only report on marketing, sales, or customer success separately, trying to patch them together afterward. I absolutely agree with Ed.<br><br>On the big deals side, from a sales process standpoint, it involves a collection of people coming together to sell to a big customer. Customer success teams provide NPS scores, satisfaction levels, ticket histories, and QBR outcomes, which all feed into the sales cycle. Previously, this information was siloed and didn't reach the sales team quickly enough to make necessary adjustments. Now, marketing campaigns flow through the entire customer life cycle. If we identify five major plays aligned with our strategy, every team needs to understand and align their strategies to these plays. This way, when a customer success rep identifies a cross-sell opportunity, the relevant teams can act on it.<br>
To leverage intelligence & insights rather than process. Cutting out old habits is tough.
Capturing account & prospect insights to a common platform for all divisions to leverage and plan out. Sounds simple but you will be surprised how teams miss out this smallest of action.