In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt is joined by Max Stirling, Sales Operations Manager at Adarma Security. They discuss how to keep processes simple and efficient, overcoming sales reps bias with data, and building productive relationships with them.
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The results and get the full report at ea.com bb- sales benchmarks a top tip for me is to keep things objective rather than subjective so if you imagine if someone’s got criteria for how they might um assess a lead or assess a deal and they say well I kind
Of take a gut feel on it um I tend to know these things ask them to actually write down what those criteria are is it the size of the company they’re looking at is it the uh length of the call they had with the prospect this is sales Ops
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Used to identify risk in the pipeline and score customer engagement and is sponsored by the global sales operations Association and the UK Revenue operations Network hello and welcome to another very special episode of the sales Ops demystified podcast today we’re joined by Max Sterling who is a sales operations manager at the Dharma Max welcome to the show thanks for inviting me glad to be here Tom so let’s kick off and understand your journey which I
Believe started in the sales and marketing um in the practitioner area and then shifted into operation so how did that transition happen yeah so I mean it actually goes slightly further back than that so obviously my career hasn’t been hely long I’m still quite young um I started off in business
Actually in sort of manufacturing Department of an Electronics firm so I would sit and work on printed circuit boards and adjust lenses and it was there that I got this sort of addiction to continuous Improvement you know if they got me sit down and do a task I’d
Always try and look at ways to make it more efficient make it faster reduce wastage so I really got that into my mind at an early early age and then when I moved into sales and marketing I was also working on processes within those teams and again that drive for
Continuous Improvement meant that I was sort of naturally drawn to sales operations I wanted to improve processes I want to empower people with data so when I was off at a a project to deploy Salesforce to the the organization and kind of be rid of manual spreadsheets I
Really leapt at the opportunity and it was there that I cemented my uh desire to be in sales operations where do you think the drive for continuous Improvement comes from um tricky one I think it was uh probably being frustrated at the status quo so if I can see something that’s
That’s not working quite right or that can be optimized it it actually frustrates me in the very back of my mind so that’s probably the biggest driver makes total sense you you’ve just given us two uh phrases almost at the start of the episode which I think could
Even be the title of the episode so two Little Gems early on so the first is this passion for continuous Improvement and then the second is empowering reps with data awesome awesome start Max so now could you just um bring us up to speed with the current sales or or
Revenue operation um at adarma EG how many reps are you working with and how many people in the op team yeah so um at the moment so I’m sales operations manager at Dharma and within the sales team we have four sales people we’ve got four client directors
Um and I’ve got another sort of analyst working with myself in sales operations so it’s actually it’s quite a small team but we get a lot lot of work done for what we are what is the key to getting a lot of work done as a sales offs
Function for me it’s uh driving simplicity so making sure that everyone within that team has a clear view on what we’re doing and we’re all working off the same sheet so whether that’s processes and Salesforce or rolling up to the same reports that we all produce
As a team or focusing on those key deals that are really important for the business it’s just making sure that um we’re all aligned towards the same goal and do you do that with like a weekly or daily meeting yeah so we use a we use a weekly meeting that goes across
Departments so it’s really important in our line of work to involve the services side of the business so we need to be talking daily with the service delivery teams with resourcing teams um also Finance on occasion so you can’t work in a siloed fashion um when you’ve got when
You’re delivering services to customers because they expect things to done to be done by certain times they expect them to be done to a certain quality and it’s not as if you’re shipping a product out the door and that’s where the collaboration is is really important so those weekly meetings are crucial
Actually between the sales team and the other teams what would you say was the most impactful thing the sales Ops function did in 2020 so in 2020 we restructured the way we reported on on our source of data as an organization so we went from having a
Sort of a legacy model that came from the previous company that we we left and then became a a sole entity as a Dharma and we actually looked at our processes and what we currently report and said okay what do we want our new data model
To be you know whether it was by line of business whether it was by product type and then we reshift all of the data in the organization towards that new model and it made everything so much more simple you know reports worked out of the box um it was more intuitive for the
Salese to enter deals so that was really a key change for us in 2020 and then moving into 2021 do you have a lift of priorities uh that you’re going to tackle yeah absolutely so I mean for me it’s about taking that sort of reporting level that you’ve got at the moment and
Diving into a deeper level of analysis that can help people whether it’s at a senior level a middle man management level even sort of Base users make better decisions so it’s going into business intelligence that added layer of reporting um whether it’s with additional tools or expanding the
Data model that you have at the moment to make sure we can drive that so Alex I think you have a bit of experience here right pulling out information to show internal stakeholders yeah absolutely and um let’s put it as a question so do you you mentioned obviously three levels so
So your end users middle management and sort of senior stakeholders do you have a uh you’re going to go top down bottom up if you got if you thought about a plan for for how to to satisfy reporting requirements like that so it’s early days at the moment um I mean in keeping
With the company values we believe in empowering everyone so if if someone at the senior level can see data there that someone at the end user level unless it’s particularly confidential should be able to see that too uh and that way then everyone’s on the same page as I
Mentioned earlier um so I don’t think we’ve really taken an approach to it yet but I’m definitely Keen to to make it as transparent as possible sounds sounds great I think indeed the the democratizing of insight can make a massive difference and and it’s really empowering to teams as well
Not that the sort of all the core information is Shar sh shared across the business I I just found and maybe again it’ll be different your situation but often that um obviously different stakeholders will have a slightly different slot that they they they want
On the data and I I tend to find that the higher you go the more it helps to to start I top down tends to help because again you get things so that someone’s boss is looking at something and the people below want to kind of
Know what their boss is looking at and it that kind of approach Works without saying I don’t care about the users I’m all about about the people with a shiny title um yeah so that might be something worth worth thinking about um but that’s cool I did also have another question just on
Some of the pieces you you’re saying it didn’t make t sense just to jump in any point but you mentioned Simplicity a couple of times Tom flagged it at the beginning and I wondered um it’s obviously it’s a great concept something that I think a lot of us would
Would want to to be doing in our process but do you have any like top tips around how you manage to keep things simple um particularly given again you might mentioned about data and there’s just so many potential data points that we can have um so have you got any top tips on
Simplicity yeah definitely so one what a top tip for me is to keep things objective rather than subjective so if you imagine if someone’s got criteria for how they might um assess a lead or assess a deal and they say well I kind
Of take a gut feel on it um I tend to know these things ask them to actually write down what those criteria are is it the size of the company they’re looking at is it the uh length of the call they had with the prospect if they can
Actually write down what those criteria are it can be shared within the team and then that can drive the process to say what actually helps us win deals what helps us secure prospects and not only that that criteria can then be used to implement within the CRM so you can go
Into the land of Automation and then you’re saving people’s time too and making it more efficient so that’s how you build the engine um using Simplicity sort of delving right into the criteria that people are using perhaps subconsciously and within their mind but guessing it written and
Down I want to talk about your your ambition within the organization or within the world of sales Ops you you have this passion for making process simple and improving them where do you think that takes you within an organization would that be leading a sales Ops function somewhere whether it
Be a DH orwhere or would you think that will take you elsewhere inside a business I think to be honest I think it will keep me within sales operations um I was naturally drawn to it in the first place and the reason why I’d probably stay in there is because sales Ops has
Got such a a special a unique place in your organization where it’s fixing processes at the base level also reporting at the end levels or the outcome stuff and then it’s also doing all the analysis that’s driving the company towards its goals so you’re working with so many other teams and
Also quite a senior level at points where in other roles you wouldn’t usually have that span of of variety within the work so for me I’m almost doing a different job every single day and and I love it so some days I might spend sort of a week just delving into
Analysis reports and then another week I might be switched on to process and it’s things that we want to fix as a business um and that’s what really keeps the the role interesting for me okay let’s talk about forecasting do we have any tips I assume potentially the forecast would have been messed
Around a little a little bit in 2020 or even in 2021 um first if you could just explain your forecasting process and then explain how we’re kind of trying to get over this in 2021 yeah so forecasting is that not that everyone wants to crack isn’t it
It’s um it’s probably top of the agenda for a lot of sales Ops teams and for us uh forecasting is initially driven by sales so obviously they’re the they’re the ones with the coal face they’re the ones speaking to the client so we take the initial information that we get from
Sales and then that’s ingested into sort of a tool that automatically profiles what that Revenue could look like and as a Services business that’s really important because our Revenue isn’t just a a snapshot it it sort of flows out depending on how the work is done so that tool is really
Important for us in showing how that initial sale translates to a revenue curve throughout the year can you share the name of that tool or did you build it in house so it’s not an inhouse tool um it’s it’s called Kimble and it’s a piece of Professional Services automation
Amazing all all makes total sense so we’re we’re taking the the insights or the feeling um from the Reps and then feeding that into this torch it’s going to help you forecast forward do you clearly some reps may may have biases in the way they report data and I’m not
Saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing um how do you manage that when you’re trying to accurately forecast do you have a profile for each different rep because you know that one rep may be more optimistic than another yeah that’s always going to be the case when you’re working with
Individuals isn’t it um you have some some people in sales which is quite natural to be quite positive about deals you know they they always go in there for hopeful attitude and they want to attack it and then you other have others who are more realistic in order to
Balance it out it really takes a management overview you need someone with kind of an object objective Viewpoint uh and then being able to look at all of those deals and then gauge okay is that one potentially being over forecasted this one being under forecasted when actually delving into
The details you can use a methodology like Medic in order to qualify the deals and say is this probability or stage that you’re forecasting actually reflective of the evidence that you’ve received so that’s one of the you can kind of look at it an evidence-based approach using a sales methodology like
Medic could you could you break that down for the audience so medic is a a sales methodology it’s an acronym that stands for metrics econom buyer decision criteria decision process identify pain and Champion now what all of those are is they’re just qualifiers so it’s about asking the right questions with the the
Prospects in order to qualify a is this a deal for us as a company can we deliver the services that the client needs because that’s the most important thing if we can meet their needs we’ll likely get the sale too the second one is is it a deal that’s that’s worth my
Time are are they just asking questions and trying to get some uh some knowledge from us or are they genuinely interested and have a pain point that needs to be fixed uh and what medic does it breaks it down into the pain the customer is experiencing so why they want your
Services or rather why they need your services and then also how to get to the point of helping them so the decision criteria decision process and which people you’ve got to Lia with so who are your key contacts so your champ is that person who’s uh really going to be
Helped by your services within the the client organization and then your economic buyer refers to the approval process and who’s got to sign it off an encyclopedic knowledge of of sales because I put you on the spot there Max didn’t I and I wasn’t sure if you’re
Going to pull through but you pulled through with the with the acronym but also the def the um the meaning behind the words are very impressed and that it but it does make total sense having a reliable methodology or standard way of assessing a deal regardless of the emotions of the
Salesperson cheers Tom thanks for the feedback final question before we um go on to the the most important question which is about relationships with fils reps um do you have any strategies or tips for building a relationship with rep that will enable you to influence or change their behavior
Yeah definitely I mean the first Bol is they’ve got to trust you so you’ve got to work with them rather than against them so you don’t want to be someone who’s who’s breathing down their neck saying why why is your data always a mess and how are you doing against
Targets and all that sort of stuff because then they’ll actively avoid you they you won’t be someone they want to associate with so first and foremost you want to help them what data do they need in order to drive their sales give them that what tools do they need needs to
Drive their sales make sure they have that with them too and if they’re worried about something or they want to know how they’re performing against their target you can show them and you can also be that person who’s the sort of sole helper within the organization
For sales so you’re the one who can sort their problems internally you can go to resourcing make sure that something gets sorted for them you can L as with Finance to get an invoice resolved you can be their their problem solver their Champion internally so that’s the main
Thing that I found when building a relationship is to be a helper and not a hindrance uh and definitely not someone to to judge their performance totally makes sense um it’s almost like you’re the you’re the fixer you’re you’re going Sol their problems and you’re not going to be the person
Who’s coming annoying them to do stuff and and judging them so that all makes tot sense final question then Max who in the world of sales Ops would you most like to take for lunch H so that’s a trick one I’m not sure if there’s anyone within sales Ops
Who who I’d actually go after I think it would probably be me a famous business person you know I’d really like to sit down with the likes of um Mar and Soro and just see how on Earth did they spin up a business of that size uh and
Actually increasingly it’ probably be uh someone like Ben Francis at gym shark you know someone my age who’s got a billion billion pound business and just say how did you do it um grow so quickly and yet so sustainably at the same time because to me that that is incredible
And it’s um a trick of the trade I’d love to know makes sense the broader answer Max this was an incredible um interview um I I’m very confident that you’re going to have a amazing future in sales Ops um because you you’re relatively early in your career compared to other gu we’ve
Had on but the wisdom that you’ve shared already it has been pretty amazing um is still there two two point point from the start that I think we can highlight which is this focus on continuous Improvement and then the empowerment of reps with data but then I also did
Really enjoy your approach or ethos to working with reps as well so I think that’s going to be valuable for the audience Max thank you for coming on appreciate it Tom thanks uh thanks to you too Alex really enjoyed It thank you for listening to this episode of the sales of demystified podcast if you are listening on a podcast listening application then please subscribe rate and review and if you have any questions about the show if you know a guest or if you have any questions about sales operations just
Hit me up at Tom hunt.com that’s Tom hunt.com Oh