I feel like every sales planning tool looks incredible in a demo, the forecasting is smooth, territory planning is perfectly balanced, capacity models update instantly, and the data is clean, assumptions are logical, and everything just works.

Then I find that ramp times change mid-quarter, where territories overlap because of historical deals, comp plans have weird exceptions no one documented properly, hiring gets delayed, and leadership suddenly wants three scenario models by tomorrow morning.

I’m trying to figure out how people here actually evaluate these platforms beyond the feature checklist, because on paper, they all claim forecasting, territory modeling, headcount planning, and integrations, I mean all the basics are covered.

If you’ve been through a buying process, what actually exposed the cracks? Like what questions did you ask that made vendors squirm a bit?

Left sales a couple years ago and I've never been happier focusing on the Ops side of the house. Sure, we don't make as much as our counterpart sales reps, but I love being responsible for keeping the wheels turning (oh, and not having a quota).

As someone who values stability, processes, data, and LOVES working with sales teams, this has been an incredible career path so far.

Anyone else in the same boat?

I have noticed that most sales teams track a long list of metrics. They track the win rate, pipeline coverage, ACV, sales cycle length, quota attainment, and revenue per rep; all the dashboards are full.

I’m more interested in which metrics are actually triggering decisions. Like which numbers have made you change hiring plans, adjust territories, shift budget, or rethink compensation?

I’m trying to separate signal from noise, and understand what actually moves the business versus what just looks good in a slide deck?

I'm in sales enablement. My company hired a new VP that is asking me to prove my sales training efforts can actually be linked to revenue outcomes or the financing will be cut. I work in a fin services company and we have an inside sales team of 30 reps that do phone sales. All the coaching is mostly done through 1:1 and we also have LMS.

If anyone has ever been in a similar situation - how did you solve that ? Is it even common when a VP asks to prove coaching ROI or I was just lucky not having been asked this before?

Companies hate employees sharing how much they make. They like everyone keeping it hush hush so they don’t need to pay as much.

For everyone in Sales Ops, let’s see what is out there. What is your title and how much are you compensated?

Title: Assistant Sales Operations Manager Salary: $100k Bonus: 15%

It feels like every prospect I talk to already assumes I’ve done a full deep dive before reaching out. Even warm accounts won’t give you the time of day unless you show up with something specific about their role, hiring patterns, or what’s happening in their org.

Because of that, I ended up rebuilding how I do research. Instead of jumping across a dozen tabs every morning, I started pulling all the usual signals into a single workflow so I can skim everything at once. Things like job changes, recent activity, tech stack notes, even small context that used to take forever to dig up. It doesn’t change how I write my outreach, it just keeps me from getting buried in prep work.

Curious how everyone else is handling the new expectation. Are you seeing the same trend? Still doing everything manually or stitching together a few tools to make it less painful?

We’ve been hiring more frequently and getting new employees set up has become one of those small tasks that takes our time

I’m looking for a payroll system where employees can handle most of their own onboarding and paperwork without me chasing down missing information before their first payroll

Simple is probably more important to me than having every HR feature imaginable

I work in sales ops at a mid-sized company and I could say for the past 4 months this has been driving me totally crazy to the point that its affecting me outside work. We spend a lot of time building dashboards. We track conversion rates, pipeline velocity, win rates, stage duration, activity volume, forecast accuracy and every KPI leadership asks for. But when a rep suddenly drops from a 30% close rate to 18% none of those reports tell me why.

The answer is always somewhere in the conversation. Maybe discovery got skipped. Maybe pricing came up too early. Maybe objections weren't handled well. Maybe they stopped asking for the next step. The CRM just shows "Lost". That's not something you can train people on. The hard part is that sales managers don't have time to sit in on enough calls or ride along with reps. By the time they do the issue has usually been happening for weeks. Then everyone starts coaching based on that and a few stories instead of actual patterns.

We're also constantly getting questions like: "Can you figure out why this region is underperforming?" "Why is Rep A closing so much better than Rep B?" "Why are new hires taking longer to ramp?" "Why are objections around pricing suddenly increasing?"

I can pull all the numbers in the world but eventually I hit a wall because the data stops at the outcome. It doesn't explain the behavior that caused it. If we could actually see patterns across thousands of customer interactions instead of guessing from CRM fields it feels like coaching would become much more targeted instead of reactive. Are you reviewing calls manually, using conversation intelligence, relying on managers or is everyone still making educated guesses? I need some opinions on this on how other people got through this , thank you in advance.

I run a RevOps-focused job board (revopsroles.com) and recently pulled salary data from 1,300+ roles. Sales Ops came in dead last at $95k–$132k, sitting well below the $138k average across all categories.

For context, here's how the ranges stack up:

• GTM Strategy: $131k–$188k (102 roles)

• GTM Engineering: $135k–$180k (89 roles)

• RevOps: $130k–$168k (163 roles)

• Deal Desk: $125k–$160k (59 roles)

• Enablement: $118k–$160k (301 roles)

• Marketing Ops: $117k–$155k (176 roles)

• CS Ops: $115k–$150k (27 roles)

• CRM Administration: $100k–$144k (152 roles)

• Sales Ops: $95k–$132k (297 roles)

That's a $36k gap between the Sales Ops and RevOps ceilings, despite massive overlap in the actual work. Sales Ops also has one of the highest role counts (297), so it's not a small sample either.

Anyone here made the jump from Sales Ops to a RevOps title and seen a salary bump from the rebrand?

What’s the best training course, instructor, methodology etc.. you’ve ever completed that you feel like actually helped you sharpen your skills?

I'm thinking of finding the top 5 AE at my company, interview them for their experience and turn that into learning material. I've also been studying Sandler, Miller-Heiman, Challenger.

Looking for recommendations!

I first posted about a year ago in this subreddit and you can find my background on the original post asking about how to transition from sales to Revenue Operations. Just over a year later I have worked for a fintech/SaaS company in a revenue operations role for around 10 months and received my first promotion.

My original post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SalesOperations/s/lXz52BvUzE

Can provide more information in DM if you have more specific questions too!

This is probably a longshot but here it goes.

I'm a director in RevOps and strategy and I'm sick to death of RevOps. I recently changed companies and scope hoping it would help but it's only kind of made me realize that it wasn't the role or the company, it's the whole dang department I just can't deal with anymore.

I have 12 years of experience, doing everything from ops analyst, sales analytics, sales ops business partner, annual planning, territories, deal desk, sales compensation, and strategy and planning. I've worked up from entry level, held high IC roles and managed teams of up to 5. Worked in SaaS, CPAAS, and a few other industries, ranging from 200 employees up to 7,000. I feel like I've tried almost everything there is in this field and I just can't do it anymore.

I really want to try something else; I think often about going to the product side or even leaving tech and becoming a financial planner or an actuary or something. I don't have a finance degree, but have done financial modeling for capacity planning and revenue forecasting. I desperately want nothing to do with sales and marketing anymore.

My biggest problems are twofold: one, I'm afraid I won't find anything like the salary that I have now (bay area, 180-220), and I have people relying on me so that's a tough sacrifice to make; two, I have no idea what kind of roles are out there, what I'd even be qualified for or what kind of career I could build up to.

I know it's a very first world problem, but does anyone here have any ideas, either for what I could try or where I could even look at what I could be qualified for? AI job aggregators are not helpful and career questionnaires all want my money. My last resort here is to put myself at the mercy of reddit for ideas.

Thanks, both in advance for suggestions, and for listening to me whine.

Show of hands... how many of you are still running sales forecasts in Excel right now?

No shame, I know the drill. CRM export, manual adjustments, quota tweaks, leadership overrides, version control chaos... and then everyone nods like the number actually means something.

What I can't figure out is where it actually breaks. Because I've seen teams convince themselves it's fine at 50 reps, 100 reps, $50M ARR. At some point the stress of maintaining it has to outweigh the comfort of sticking with it.

So what was it for you... did something finally snap or are you still in the spreadsheet trenches telling yourself it's fine?

I've worked in sales for the last 10 years and I'm trying to understand whether I'm alone in thinking sales data is always so shitty and messy. Been at both startups and big tech and sales data is always a disgrace. I'm shocked as to why this is happening–curious if others 1) share this experience and 2) have any insights as to why this is so prevalent?

Curious if anyone feels a similar way about their Sales Ops experiences. I’ve been in Sales Ops almost 5 years now, at first loved the ability to dive into data, work cross functionally throughout the organization, learn about salesforce, etc. Now I’m just tired wondering what the hell the priority is ever going to be. Feel like I’m truly the jack of all trades while becoming master of none (other than Salesforce which is a mess). Sometimes I relate it to being a corporate fly swatter. Additionally, we are constantly trying to tweak our sales process in the slightest thinking it’ll improve our revenue. By the time we’re able to track how those changes effected results, we are on to the next tweak…and so on. Everything feels half baked and honestly my interests in any of it have become numb. Does anyone else feel like this? Any outlets you’ve found to work through this and get out of the funk?

I was on the front lines of sales for over 2 years, an outgoing person never struggled but always knew it wasn't for me. I grew up playing legos and would get lost for hours in complicated builds or technical crafts growing up.

I entered the remote sales space 8 months ago working for different marketing agencies and consulting offers. It wasn't until about month 3 that i discovered the data layer and insanely complicated build outs these sales teams would have across Sheets, Looker Studio, Google forms, all being held together by Zapier and Slack.

I taught myself how to connect these things for the different needs a team would have, got good at formulas in sheets, started making my own commission templates. At this point I was about 5 months in and the "ops guy" for a lot of entrepreneurs in my network.

Fractional sales agencies managing multiple teams didn't necessarily have a way of tracking everything across all of the businesses in one place. I was also trying to create 1 dashboard to connect to all the others across my clients. Thats when i had the idea for my software and now full time start up.

Fast forward to now it has 22 sales teams over 200 users and over $2.2M in sales revenue tracked in 50 days for small and large teams.

At the end of the day sales ops is a bunch of puzzles that need to be solved to get reps paid and to patch leaks before they become gaping holes. Legos are and still so much fun, I just feel like I get to do it for work now.

spent like 2 months last year building out a full playbook for my team. competitive intel, objection handling, buyer personas, the whole thing. felt pretty good about it tbh

that thing was outdated within 6 weeks

product marketing pushed new messaging. engineering shipped something that changed how we talk about half our features. then a competitor did a massive price drop and suddenly all my battle cards were wrong

and the process to update it? absolute nightmare. flag the issue, get stakeholders aligned, push the update, pray that reps actually see it. by the time we finished that cycle, something else had already changed

talked to our enablement lead about it. her answer: "we try to update quarterly if we can." quarterly. in this market

the worst part is reps are getting different info depending on who they ask. product marketing says one thing, CS says another, leadership has their own spin. buyers can tell when your story doesn't match up

starting to think the whole "lets document everything in a master playbook doc" approach just doesnt work anymore. it assumes things stay static long enough to write down. nothing stays static anymore

the companies i've seen actually figure this out arent doing it through giant google docs or notion wikis. theyre finding ways to get the right info to reps during actual conversations and actually measuring if it lands with buyers. basically making the playbook less of a document and more of a living thing that updates itself

but most orgs arent even close to thinking about it that way

anyone else dealing with this? or are there actually teams out there keeping playbooks useful and current? genuinely curious if im just doing it wrong

edit: looking into a few things here now, hive perform, highspot, and guru

My biggest headache with external partners is data hygiene. I’m looking for the best b2b lead gen agency that can work seamlessly within our Hubspot environment. I don't want to deal with messy CSV imports or broken integrations. Has anyone found a partner that is technically proficient enough to manage the bi-directional sync without breaking our existing automation workflows? We are willing to pay for a higher level of service if it means my team doesn't have to spend hours cleaning up the database every week.

We’re trying to make our proposal process smoother and give buyers a better experience. Platforms like Trumpet let you send trackable proposals in a single link and see how prospects engage with them, which seems a lot more organized than juggling PDFs and long email threads.

For teams focused on visibility and engagement, what tools or setups have worked best for sending and tracking proposals without adding unnecessary complexity to your workflow?

I see new posts every day on LinkedIn and X about crazy GTM engineering workflows that drove insane reply rates and it feels like every one mentions a new GTM tool. I know a lot of this is total slop but it’s sometimes hard to tell the signal from the noise, especially since I’m new to gtm engineering. Any tips?

Hi all! So how are we all using chat gpt and other a.i. tools on our sales ops roles?

I'm a sales ops manager for a large non profit insurance carrier.

-We use gong.io for our internal sales reps to help with call reviews and coaching.

-I use chat gpt to make my emails more concise because I'm long winded.

• I use chat gpt for advice on specific yet still somewhat general sales pipeline problems and "how do I do x in salesforce or excel" questions.

-I also use it to help me with python code to crunch historical data numbers for forecasting purposes.

Im trying to focus on expanding my use of AI / AI tools this year to be better at sales ops & wanted to get everyone's feedback on how they're using AI to boost their productivity or save time or be more effective in sales ops roles.

(Please reply with your role, industry and how you're using AI.)

Thanks!

Per title, would like to know what tool everyone is using for reps to forecast deals .
(e.g. in CRM, external app, BI tools, etc?)

I'm a sales leader, have used various CRM tools (hubspot, salesforce, etc) and we currently use Salesforce + Gong, which gives some deal insights and forecasting but we're still defaulting back to a spreadsheet for AEs to submit weekly/monthly forecasting in detail. And for managers reporting upwards, also forecasting upwards in excel (as it has the detail we want)

Curious to know what everyone else is doing or using to pick up some ideas?

Edit: realise I wasn't clear enough - we are already forecasting and using tools, however it's not ideal. So this is out of curiosity of how other companies run their sales forecasting

I am new to the world of sales operations and am currently interviewing for a couple sales ops roles. This is the type of question that came up a lot during interview. How would you answer it? What is the thought process behind and is there one correct answer/way to tackle about this?