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Sales and management teams are looking to become more efficient in this rapidly changing economy. It sounds cliche, but RevOps teams help their companies win when they truly understand their customers, their processes, their priorities, their successes, and their failures. When done right, RevOps teams can transition their CRMs from a liability to an asset.
Increased visibility into the state of the CRM gives teams the insights they need to do the following:
Build streamlined and beneficial processes
Cut out the waste
Shift from reactive to proactive management
But where should marketing, sales, and CS teams start? If RevOps teams could pinpoint exactly where to drive change, then the company’s abilities to move deals through the pipeline improves dramatically. In fact, CRMs become disordered over time due to various factors such as:
Human error
Incomplete data
Outdated information
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to solve for this?
Can CRMs be graded?
Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Sanyog Rai, Sr. Product Manager at SetSail. They launched a tool that first caught my eye from one of Rosalyn Santa Elena’s LinkedIn posts. Thought I’d reach out. Here’s our conversation.
Jeff: What was the original inspiration behind the health grader?
Sanyog: Enterprise revenue team leaders always feel like they have a sales data issue, but they struggle to quantify it. They are also unclear how their organization stands against benchmarks, and what their biggest sales data challenges truly are. We wanted to build an immediate, easy way to answer these questions.
Jeff: Okay cool. I can relate to that. One of my pet peeves is walking into a meeting to present some data and midway through my presentation I’m interrupted by a senior leader pointing out that something doesn’t look right. Then the meeting goes sideways pausing altogether because we just can’t get past a data hiccup. I’ve known SetSail for a while now from my time working at another Insight Partners’ portfolio company. Was the goal always to launch a mini product?
Sanyog: Not initially, no. We started by developing a service called “Data Gap Assessment” where we provide detailed analysis of the data a prospective customer is currently missing in their CRM and what data SetSail will provide to help fill this gap. This process requires integrations (CRM, email, calendar) and security and legal sign off. We wanted a quicker process to at least help quantify the data problem, since everyone knows that they are missing CRM data but quantifying it usually takes time and analysis So we decided to create the CRM Health Grader that could provide important metrics quickly and easily.
Jeff: Love it. So you saw a need and then filled it with a lightweight product first. That’s smart. I’ve seen a few other startups essentially start out with a service based offering to essentially learn what makes their customers tick, what problems they actually have. All of this before committing a ton of product and engineering resources to go build the wrong thing. I see parallels with RevOps teams making sure they’ve understood the business problem and captured requirements correctly before running off to the races to go build something no one actually needs. Before digging into the details, what is the high level finding you discovered?
Sanyog: We learned that revenue teams know they may have a problem, or they aren’t fully getting the value of the CRM – don’t know what they’re missing. Our goal was simple: a quick and easy way to see at a glance what the biggest problem is.
Initial feedback
Jeff: After this interview I’m going to authorize the app to connect to my org by the way. I’ll share my own feedback with you if that’s alright. What feedback or early insights did you gather from your earliest users?
Sanyog: When we tested with users, we found that they loved the immediacy of the information they received, and the fact that it was self-serve.
Jeff: Makes sense. I’m a sucker for instant gratification.
Sanyog: They also appreciated the single score roll-up to give them an at-a-glance view of their CRM health. One of the most common requests we received was that users were interested in knowing more details. For example, show me which opportunities don’t have recent activity.
Jeff: I don’t know if you subscribe to my RevOps newsletter but that’s a core element I usually include for pipeline management, knowing which deals have momentum and which ones don’t. The data is key to that. Otherwise you’re trusting your reps during deal reviews and pipeline calls. Not that sales reps are not trustworthy, just that it would be better to have the data AND the anecdotes. Why not live in a world of “AND” instead of a world of “OR”. Did you dogfood it internally? If so, what type of feedback did you have?
[Sidenote: the term dogfood refers to the phrase “eat your own dogfood”… in a product org it basically says did you use your own product]
Sanyog: We dogfooded it internally a lot, including our leaders, and our revenue team. We were surprised with some of the results we ourselves weren’t even aware of which was great to see.
Jeff: Oh that’s good. Hey sales and revops! Gotcha! Sorry, I keep joking. Keep going.
Sanyog: Our internal testing showed the importance of being consistent with the direction/numbers we’re providing, as well as ensuring the takeaways are simple and obvious at the top of the report. Through testing, we also realized how to build the grader to account for edge cases. Finally, we didn’t just test the tool, but also the entire sign-up and user flow, including the landing page.
Jeff: Very cool. Hey I appreciate you jumping on a call with me. I was playing around with the CRM grader and thought it would be great to hear the backstory directly from the source. I’m going to post my thoughts in my newsletter and I hope you don’t mind if I share these gems with my readers.
My take on the CRM grader
Installation. First things first, log into the Setsail grader. Provide your email.
This is the next screen.
Then a cool loading screen pops up.
And voilà your CRM score should appear.
Okay not exactly the score one should want or expect. This panel was the most interesting and actionable.
Try out the grader for yourself. The process was smooth and quick. Now that I’ve received my grade it’s time to set up next steps for the team. My goal is to turn all of these metrics into green checkmarks by setting up the these next steps:
Establishing benchmarks to define “what good looks like”
Define “why” improving these benchmarks make sense (i.e accounts that haven’t been touched could mean it’s time to remove bad accounts,
Set directives to the organization to move towards said targets
Fill in data gaps for accounts, contacts, and leads with enrichment tools
With these initiatives in place I’m confident that the business will trend in the right direction.
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
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