Slack and meeting prep

Once I crack open my laptop, the first thing I do is check Slack and respond to anything that needs quick answers. There are usually a lot of messages and updates in channels so I go through and take note of what I need to address. In RevOps we're the melting pot of all the operations within the go-to-market strategy, so there are a tremendous amount of meetings. Most mornings I spend some time preparing. Today, I have a Sales Leadership meeting, an executive deal review, a team standup, and a bi-weekly forecast call. I quickly check the live People.ai dashboard I know I’ll use in these meetings.

The dashboards I’m using today are:

• Sales Leadership Engagement dashboard
• Pipeline creation
• Pipeline inspection
• External vs. Internal meeting dashboard for sales reps (Scorecard)
• Forecast in PeopleGlass
• Checking the dashboards only takes a few minutes so I spend the rest of my time asking the SalesAI assistant key questions and put together some strategic questions and topics to go deeper into.

Slack and Sales Leader meeting prep

Before People.ai I would have to spend hours preparing for meetings and playing detective trying to get information from each seller. I would be in and out of different tools (Salesforce, Tableau, multiple spreadsheets) pulling together last-second PowerPoints and reports. Then I would have to analyze everything I’d pulled together.

The process was very tedious and it was frustrating because the information in spreadsheets is inherently out of date almost immediately.

This morning, I only have time to prepare for my first meeting, the Sales Leader team meeting. I opened up Salesforce and pulled my first report: Closed/Won opportunities in the last week.

Then I repeat the process again with all the other key metrics we cover in the meeting, adding them all to a PowerPoint as I go.

Sales Leader Team Meeting

In team meetings with our sales leaders, I'm there as a support person, presenting engagement dashboards and answering questions.

We go over the following each week:

• What has closed-won for each region
• Leaderboard for net new this quarter and year to date
• Overall pipeline for the company and for each team
• What opportunities were created last week
• OKR scorecard showing all go-to-market activities highlighting internal vs. external time spent
• Announcing any changes or new tech and sales contents

I’m sharing my screen throughout the meetings and using the live dashboards to walk through the numbers.

Sales Leader Team Meeting

Before People.ai, I still attended Sales Leader Team meetings as a support person.

Data accuracy was another big challenge. Everything was all self-reported by the AEs. With People.ai, AEs can’t self-report meetings. It has to be on their calendar and it will automatically add it to the CRM and note if it’s an internal or external meeting.

Sales leaders might have AEs share their calendars live on the call to understand how busy they are and what kind of meetings they have. This doesn’t create the best culture and can feel accusatory vs. trying to help them get more time with customers.

These meetings tended to be a highlight reel from the sales teams vs. just the facts. There would also be a lot of follow-up and verifying things with sellers after the fact.

Executive Deal Review

I run a bi-weekly executive deal review with the Estaff, reviewing the top 10 deals in our pipeline for this quarter. Before the meeting, I queue up the accounts we will review in our CRM.

I bring up each account and read through the SalesAI Summary. Usually, I ask the SalesAI assistant a couple of questions to add more context. I like to ask:

• When did we last meet with this customer? Who was in attendance and what was discussed?
• What is needed to do to close this deal by the end of the quarter?

Then I asked the AE, “Is there anything you want to add about this account? Give me your take”

The AE might share that this account expects to get budget approval in the last meeting. I can instantly verify it with SalesAI and add more details from their conversation. What usually happens is the AE tells us what’s going on and SalesAI validates and adds to it.

This week, one of our AEs was out. I was still able to pull up the account and report an accurate and complete picture of what was going on. Running deal reviews like this makes it a lot easier for sellers to prioritize customer meetings over internal meetings and they don’t have to spend time preparing or writing executive summaries.

Executive Deal Review

Executive Deal Reviews looked a lot different before People.ai. I would pull up the list of accounts we are reviewing and the team would run through them one-by-one. They were run based on storytelling from the field.

The meeting starts, and I ask the first seller, “Hey, tell me what’s going on in this account?”

They say, “We had a great meeting last week!” I open Salesforce and it’s not there… *sigh.*

And then we go over this again with the next five AEs.

Only about half the AEs are on the call because they had to prioritize client meetings. I then have to follow up with these reps and get their deal reviews. I then add all the details to a Google Sheet and share it with the sales leadership and executive team. On top of the hour meetings we already had. I spend about another two hours chasing down this information.

BizOps Steering Preps

I have a BizOps Steering Committee later in the week that I need to do some work for.

Today I am working on a Lead to Opportunity workflow. We need a new workflow to reroute event leads from an AE to a BDR if they have not been followed up in a timely manner. I am focused on improving response time. Many of our sellers have higher-priority deals in motion they are focused on. But I need to make sure we are thinking quarters ahead and these leads are being properly handled.

I want to consistently improve seller participation and setting up these workflows will help them with the ongoing pipeline.

Update and share seller dashboard

With People.ai, I can quickly create a one-stop shop for our sellers. If a leader comes to one of our sellers, “Sal Esperson”, and asks, “How many organized meetings have you had this last month? Sal can open his People.ai board I created for him and give an accurate answer in seconds.

This is where our sellers start their day. They know instantly how many organized meetings they’ve had, how many in-person meetings, how many people engaged, meetings with VPs and above, and so on. So when our AEs are in a 1-on-1 with their sales leader they have answers.

I created a dashboard for every seller on the team called “People.ai for sales reps,” and a similar version specifically for sales leaders. If I or one of our executives decide we want to add a specific data point I can add it to those and everyone’s dashboard is instantly updated.

We hired a few new salespeople and a new sales leader. I need to share their custom dashboards. Once they are set up as a seller in People.ai, I simply send them a link to their dashboard and explain that these are the success metrics we are measuring.

My CRO also asked that we add an additional metric. I add it in and it automatically updates across all the sales leader dashboards for the leadership team.

Write Estaff update

I owe the Estaff an update today. I am including our forecast for the year, a few key deal updates, and project updates.

I use Engagement Dashboards and SalesAI to make these updates. I open up my dashboards, jot down the highlights they need, then ask the SalesAI assistant a couple of questions on key deals and simply copy and paste the answers into my updates. I get through the reporting aspect of the update in minutes and spend the rest of the time on project updates and triple-checking my writing (I am always overly concerned about a well-written update).

Rest of the day

• Work on new Sales SPIFF
• RevOps Team Weekly Sync
• Bi-Weekly Sales Forecast Call