topic Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations in 📅 Events

[Now Closed] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

maggiebutler — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 17:45:30 GMT

HubSpot's SVP of Sales Strategy and Operations, Channing Ferrer, hosted a webinar in August 2020 focused on sharing the lessons he's learned designing sales teams. Click here to get the recording, or click here for the slides.

The Q&A with Channing below is now closed. Check out the thread for answers to questions like:

What are the top 3 attributes or skills you hire for?
How do you balance Sales & Account Management roles?
What were the greatest win and greatest lessons learned from experiments you ran?
My question is how have trained or incentivized Sales members to enter the data they need into HubSpot?

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

jennysowyrda — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 19:30:18 GMT

Thanks for getting this conversation started, @maggiebutler!

@ShanePunt, @GuyTaylor, @dianalcont, @AdamLPW, @rikkilear, @Krystina I thought you may be interested in participated in this conversation! 🙂

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

JenBergren — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 02:55:46 GMT

Thanks Maggie!

A question I see in groups a lot and am curious about myself is if there is a good way to judge when to introduce ops roles or departments to help sales teams, such as once the team has grown to a certain size, or other factors to use. As an ops person I would say "at the very beginning" but I realize that is not how most companies think!

I think people are looking for a magic number, like I saw one blog say once you have 100 people in your company you should have an internal RevOps department, and under 100 should have individual ops roles... I know there is no magic ratio but I would like to hear Channing's advice and experience.

Our agency is usually hired to help companies with ops later than ideally, so we have to clean up a lot of messes due to a lack of ops before us. So how can companies know they need to hire and/ or form ops departments before things get too messy and start breaking would be another way to phrase this 🙂

I signed up to get the recording, unfortunately, I have a conflict on Thursday. I look forward to watching!

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

pinnacle1234 — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:53:00 GMT

Looking forward to this...If you split Strategy and Ops into two teams, how do you define what success metrics are Ops and which ones are Strategy on the separate teams and what does this look like when they are one team?

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

bindiann — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:55:52 GMT

Hi Channing! Thanks for doing this! I want to know, what are the top 3 attributes or skills you hire for?

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

jeyso10 — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 11:48:52 GMT

What is the hardest part about working with marketing

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

VanessaR — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 19:51:41 GMT

I've dealt with a lot of reps who don't like automation or feel like it's not a helpful addition to their workflow. How have you overcome this in the past?

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

walterw — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 14:25:57 GMT

Channing, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. I want to ask about growing sales reps...

How do I know when it's time to split a rep function into a rep AND a sdr? I haven't done this well in the past so I figured I'd ask...

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

LFarabaugh — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:04:26 GMT

How do you balance Sales & Account Management roles. Do you add one before the other? How do you best incentivize sales people to keep hunting rather than hold on to accounts, if you do have a separate AM function?

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

AmandaRomeo — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:15:10 GMT

Is there an org chart that you can share for Strategy & Ops team at HS?

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

SalesIsScience — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:15:30 GMT

Any specific strategies for the upper right products in designing specific sales processes to accelerate close?

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

SalesIsScience — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:21:36 GMT

As you are in the upper areas of founding stage 2, what key strategies would help you push into phase 3 the most rapidly.

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

LFarabaugh — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:22:29 GMT

Do you see any differences in what needs to be done by stage for a professional services company as opposed to a product company?

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

SalesIsScience — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:32:33 GMT

Talking about quota strategy and impacts of missing it. In your recent blog post, you mentioned the value of considering whether to modify or eliminate quotas. With so many reps in most organizations, being below quota, or as I prefer to plan, how long do you recommend keeping these underperformers apart of the team?

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

SalesIsScience — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:43:27 GMT

What were the greatest win and greatest lessons learned from experiments you ran?

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

MegInVA62 — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 17:02:33 GMT

You answered questions about the characteristics you look for in sales / BDR. What characteristics do you look for in a sales manager? Do you look for a super-star sales person or are there other things you look for?

Re: [Open in August] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

dhills — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 20:20:31 GMT

First, thank you so much for taking the time to read my question and others!

My question is how have trained or incentivized Sales members to enter the data they need into HubSpot?

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

Channing-Ferrer — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:00:58 GMT

@JenBergren wrote:
Thanks Maggie!

A question I see in groups a lot and am curious about myself is if there is a good way to judge when to introduce ops roles or departments to help sales teams, such as once the team has grown to a certain size, or other factors to use. As an ops person I would say "at the very beginning" but I realize that is not how most companies think!

I think people are looking for a magic number, like I saw one blog say once you have 100 people in your company you should have an internal RevOps department, and under 100 should have individual ops roles... I know there is no magic ratio but I would like to hear Channing's advice and experience.

Our agency is usually hired to help companies with ops later than ideally, so we have to clean up a lot of messes due to a lack of ops before us. So how can companies know they need to hire and/ or form ops departments before things get too messy and start breaking would be another way to phrase this 🙂

I signed up to get the recording, unfortunately, I have a conflict on Thursday. I look forward to watching!

@JenBergren Thanks for your question. My suggestion is to discuss ratios and start early with hiring Ops. Today I talked about phases of growth and suggesting this hire in the $2-10m stage, but start w Ops at $2m and a handful of reps. Here are the slides - https://bit.ly/channingslides

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

Channing-Ferrer — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:02:48 GMT

@pinnacle1234 wrote:
Looking forward to this...If you split Strategy and Ops into two teams, how do you define what success metrics are Ops and which ones are Strategy on the separate teams and what does this look like when they are one team?

@pinnacle1234 I would say these are the success metrics in the split:

Strategy

Segment-specific sales performance
Ability to meet and achieve project-specific goals.

Operations

Achieve goals and timelines for annual planning
Keep the sales group aligned to FP&A guardrails
Minimize rep case queue inquiries

Let me know what you think about that...

Re: [Now Open] AMA: Channing Ferrer, SVP Sales Strategy & Operations

Channing-Ferrer — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:04:23 GMT

@bindiann wrote:
Hi Channing! Thanks for doing this! I want to know, what are the top 3 attributes or skills you hire for?

@bindiann The top three I hire for are track record of initiative, analytical mindset, growth mentality, and I would add diversity.

Others that are important too: project managaement analytical experience, coding experience, stakeholder management