Guest Speaker Series – Lewis Chawko

For our Guest Speaker Series this week we welcomed Lewis Chawko – Solutions Manager at Superscript and formerly part of the sales development team at Tessian. Here he worked with SaaSLeads.io COO and Co-Founder Chris Ritson whereby they formed an instant bond over their love of Chihuahuas and Judo – a strange mix I thought!

Lewis came to talk to us about why Sales Ops is so important and how it adds value to you as an employee. 

 

What is Sales Ops?

Sales Ops is defined as “helping frontline sales teams sell more efficiently or effectively by providing strategic direction and reducing friction”. The reason why getting this right is so important is it allows you to take control over your performance and results. Using the right tools to determine where your weaknesses/strengths lie and to understand how your prospects best respond to outreach to build more pipeline, faster – the holes in your process are hidden within the data! Beyond this, the wider ‘pyramid of experience’ you build for yourself as an SDR the more valuable you become to a company. The more valuable you are, the bigger the salary package 😉 

 

Why pay attention to data?

Techniques will stop being effective, so it’s important to keep looping back and monitoring what’s working and what’s not. Move with the times. Often SDR’s have an opinion on how to do something but have no data to support their opinion, then when they track the performance of that process, it’s not as effective as they believed. Create A/B tests for your outreach and continuously add the best performing content to your primary cadence. However, watch out for getting too caught up in dashboards, it’s super easy to do. We recommend testing 1 thing at a time i.e email subject lines and once you have a good sample size and subject line that’s successful and backed up by data. Move on to the next thing you need to test. A good way to know where to start is to think about what I want to improve and then reverse engineer from there. E.g. how to measure the chosen area, build the AB test, monitor over a week, implement a new strategy. Then rinse and repeat. 

 

Chief Meme Officer?!

Lastly as CMO (Chief Meme Officer) – Lewis recommends using meme’s to communicate with the team and keep spirits high during remote working. Use https://imgflip.com/memegenerator to easily create memes!

 

Key Takeaways

• Using data efficiently helps make better decisions
• Communicating your data findings with your team is key
• Don’t generalise data on a bad experience/thought
• CRM hygiene will help you and your team to stay on top of future opportunities
• Know that techniques, methodologies and results will change
• Using tools correctly will provide strategic direction, reduce friction, quantify results and make you scaleable
• Don’t get caught up in predicting the outcome because data will sometimes show otherwise!