Newsletter #15: I Love Sales Operations

Don't overcomplicate sales operations; it's not just about CRM automation. It's about transforming sales teams into agency owners. This is how true sales organizations operate. Don't believe me?

Traction is picking up; old clients have reached out to renew their engagements, new clients are signing contracts, and the sales team is looking motivated and excited. This is how I can describe Belkins in January.

Months like this are great for business, marked by a lot of movement and growth. Today's edition of From Zero To Agency Hero is dedicated to the art of sales sales operations.

Back in 2018, when I brought in my first Senior Sales Executive, Ariel, he had probably 10-15 years of sales experience at that time, while I was only 24 years old with 3 years of selling. Ariel mentioned that I was the only less experienced and younger manager he was ready to follow because he respected my skill and vision. It was a kind and inspiring thing for him to say, and I remember it to this day.

I always approach sales from two perspectives:

1. Active Sales (demo, pitch, hard skill, physiology of sales, solution selling, etc.) - basically, how you are selling.
2. Sales Operations (CRM, automation, workflows, buyer's journey, follow-ups) - basically, what your process of selling is.

Great sales leaders can do both. Good salespeople usually rely on the former while sacrificing the latter, which works in their favor in the short term but doesn't allow them to build a sustainable pipeline in the long term.

Meanwhile, great salespeople, after mastering the active selling part, learn and follow a robust sales process with all the nerdy data entries, notes, recording, and automation.

You should aim to be great!

I am proud to feature Belkins' sales team here, as they are truly special and great salespeople. And big shoutout to Brian Hicks for hitting his targets two consecutive years. Brian, you are the gem in our crown.

Sales Operations

As a rule of thumb, agency executives are great sellers because we think of clients from the perspective of their problems and our solutions, thus making solution selling our default setup. This gives us a unique edge to speak the same language, operate with the same metrics, and provide clients with perspectives and insights they were not aware of.

Here is an example using Belkins sales. Usually, it goes like this:

• As a Sales Executive (SE), “Our cost per appointment can vary per industry, it could be average between $400 to $600/appointment which makes our solution more cost-effective while ensuring high quality” or
• As the agency Executive-seller (ES), “As we speak, I am looking at our dashboard of clients in FinTech from the last month. It’s $500/appointment. This won’t give us huge margins but ensures a high quality of service and continued engagement with you. Our own costs are usually 70%, plus the tools.”

The difference between SE pitch and ES pitch lies in connecting multiple business metrics (cost, cost of service, tools, margins) while doing it in a style that people understand the logic behind it and have no arguments against it; it sounds solid.

Having built your own value proposition, you are the best person to speak with such detail.

Unfortunately, I would argue that this is not something you can easily train, and you shouldn't expect this level of detail from your sales team. Instead, your sales team can have a process built where they have access to a resource, for instance, in my example, a table of costs per appointment per industry or per ICP to provide more accurate business-oriented answers for clients.

This is enough for your clients to understand that if your sales team has this handy in front of them, it means you track and care about these deliverables. Thus, it shows it's not just something they learned by heart but something they live by, so there will be a trust component.

In this example, there is a transition from active sales skill (you connecting metrics in a pitch) to sales operations (SE having the table with the most recent stats in front of them).

Your role as a sales leader, whether as an agency executive or as a manager leading your sales team, is to pinpoint the special nuances that create trust for buyers and, instead of trying to teach your sales team, as an active sales skill, transform it into a sales process.

Transforming the Mindset

I've mentioned a few times already that agency executives are some of the best sellers because early on, you are passionate about your offering, you know your clients, understand and calculate business metrics, and are capable of making any decisions—or not making some decisions—thus thinking outside the box.

That was the reason I was a great seller; I was doing exactly this.

Now, if you follow my logic, the question is, can you transform these natural executive sales techniques into a sales process?

Let’s break down my statement above into pieces:

1. From ‘you being passionate about your offering’ to ‘creating an environment where your sales team is passionate about your offering’. Usually, this means:

• Your offering should be one of the best on the market, and your team should know about it (best client reviews, awards, many happy clients, tons of content, or insights you generate).
• Your sales team is involved or has access to the client delivery process, being able to get firsthand feedback on progress and results.
• Share client results across team channels while highlighting both the delivery and sales teams.
• Produce training, guidance, and mentorship to improve service knowledge.
• Involve the sales team in new product/solution development.
• Produce PR, social content, cases, etc., to highlight clients and your sales team.

2. From ‘you know your clients’ to ‘build a culture where the sales team knows the clients and understands how deliverables are made’. Usually, this means:

• Providing access to client dashboards with KPIs.
• Facilitating cross-functional communication between client teams and sales teams at the client level, not just at department levels.
• Promoting client success as one of the key success factors in your organization.
• Regularly producing and sharing client results.
• By transforming your executive-selling (ES) features into sales operations within your team, you can replicate the effectiveness of an executive-seller approach across your entire sales force, ensuring a deeper understanding of and passion for what you offer.

3. From ‘you understand and calculate business metrics’ to ‘creating a resource for the sales team to access the most recent metrics and build their pitches around business metrics’. This includes:

• Giving access to client dashboards with LTV, CAC, industry analytics, KPIs, and whatever other metrics you track.
• Providing a detailed breakdown of how costs are structured in your organization and how they relate to overall company targets.
• Highlighting a few key metrics that your solution helps to achieve and correlating them to other metrics in the client's business.
• Discussing retrospectively how these metrics are changing and evolving over time during monthly or quarterly meetings.

4. From ‘you being able to make any decisions, or not making some decisions’, to ‘giving the sales team the flexibility to negotiate the deal and making them accountable for bringing in the right clients’. This usually means:

• Having multiple packages and offerings, flexible payment, or contract terms.
• Allowing the sales team to make decisions on the spot while talking to clients which makes a great impression of the authority they have.
• Creating a deal qualification and scoring process to streamline the lead generation process and enable your sales team to talk to high-potential clients with a high success rate.
• Providing training, documentation, and access to data to connect your agency's business metrics to the type of engagements that the sales team is working on, explaining the engagements worth pursuing and those that won’t benefit your agency or simply are not a good deal.
• Creating a simple but effective baseline of criteria for engagements, providing your sales team with something to support their decision-making process.

If you think about all these examples, it’s essentially us engineering our salespeople into agency executives and setting them up for success.

This way, sales + operations come together.

Now, you realize that sales operations is not only about CRM implementation but a well-thought approach to recreating unique best practices into a scalable resource that everyone has access to, and it becomes the only way people think.

It also reconfirms my statement that all agency executives should start and continue selling until they've engineered the sales operation to reflect the solution selling they've adopted early on, to later be adopted by your sales team.

Call 911

Many reading this are completely swamped in sales and are not at the stage where there is a professionally engineered sales team, or are just looking for any help they can get to optimize the sales process they have.

I don’t know anything about your services, so I cannot contribute to how to sell them, but the sales operation part is similar for everyone.

Today, I’ll be your sales emergency dispatcher. Follow my instructions:

1. The default first step is to get a sales CRM that you will use throughout your agency's lifecycle. Don’t use Notion, spreadsheets, or keeping tabs in Gmail. Get yourself HubSpot; no other CRM will be as efficient and scalable.

It’s actually super easy to set it up, and the only two things you’ll do with it are:

• Keep all of your contacts and leads.

• Keep all of your deals and ongoing conversations with clients.

This means you need to:

• Integrate website forms into HubSpot.
• Set up an extension to pull all emails into HubSpot (it means logging into it when needed).

Now that you've started collecting all data in one place, which is great since all of your conversations from now and for the next 10 years will be easily searchable via HubSpot, the next step would be

2. Mapping leads based on their status and lifecycle.

Early on you want to know which leads are new, in progress, or processed. Build several statuses for yourself, updating and cleaning them on a weekly/monthly basis. There is some automation via HubSpot Marketing Pro if you have the budget to automate mapping.

Once you figure out the lead status, the next step would be a lead lifecycle. This is basically the stage of your relationship with the client. Honestly, you can have just 4 stages: lead, SQL, client, others. Pretty self-explanatory.

This will allow you to categorize and prioritize your leads to be able to access the right category when you need it, for instance, when sending a newsletter to clients or a product update email to your leads.

3. Build a Sales Pipeline. This task is also very straightforward, involving 5-6 stages: appointment scheduled → demo → trial → highly qualified → contract → won client → lost client.

Here, you will need to be disciplined in:

• Changing pipeline stages.
• Leaving notes.
• Adding contracts and tickets.
• Perhaps even sending proposals—who knows?

Approach the pipeline as follows:

• My newly entered opportunities (appointment scheduled, demo).
• My existing opportunities (trial, highly qualified, contract).
• My clients (won).
• My lost deals that I’ll re-engage with later.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this; the main mistakes I see people make are:

• Not adding new opportunities consistently (working only with the existing pipeline).
• Not following up with the existing pipeline (even a simple form submission).
• Not nurturing and re-engaging with lost deals.

HubSpot offers templates, workflows, and sequences to help automate this. It also provides tasks, priority settings, notifications, and so on.

Advice I could give here is to hire a junior sales support specialist who will operationally run the data entry, mapping, staging, and other operations if you really don’t have time. The end goal is to have your CRM as clean as your P&L.

4. Templatize your Lead Status, Lifecycle, and Sales Pipeline. Each stage should have canned responses, email templates, and pre-built LinkedIn messages. Keep them in HubSpot and add variables for personalization.

5. Integrate your Notetaker with HubSpot. Then, use Zapier to add an AI component that attaches a summary of all calls with clients to HubSpot notes.

With these steps, several tools, and a sales support specialist, you can maintain a healthy pipeline without compromising the quality of data and the scalability of your process. Since you will have a CRM with all deal records, recordings, notes, templates, etc., it's easy to train your newly hired Sales Exec, and you don't need anyone to build this entire process for you. It just requires a bit of time, curiosity, and discipline.

Everything I've shared with you has helped me build a small team early on that has now grown into a sales force: 8 Sales Execs, a Head of Sales, a VP of Sales, a Head of Sales Operation, Sales Support Reps, and several Data Entry Specialists. Our team handles up to 400 incoming new deals every month, and as for the pipeline, well, see for yourself:

For all people reading and sharing feedback on this newsletter, thank you for your support. Your feedback motivates me to write.

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