BC Startup Sales Podcast – Sales Ops Strategies for Growing Startups with Dharmesh Singh (Fullcast.io)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Dharmesh Singh, co-founder and CEO of Fullcast.io, to discuss “Sales Ops Strategies for Growing Startups.” Fullcast.io is a software company that provides sales-ops-as-a-service to transform sales operations to growth operations. By automating sales ops functions that are replicable across companies, Fullcast.io enables sales ops people to devote their attention to more productive, big-picture strategies, as opposed to the micromanagement of day-to-day sales motion.

Dharmesh Singh serves as CEO and is a co-founder of Fullcast.io. He brings over 25 years of experience in sales, operations and engineering, building and selling enterprise solutions. His background includes managing operations teams at both Salesforce and Microsoft where he developed his passion for molding ideas into action.

To explain the foundation of sales ops strategies, Dharmesh hones in on the concept of sales planning. It’s essential to free a company’s sales ops person from tedious, replicable functions, like cleaning data and building reports, so that they focus on the company’s go-to-market plan. This plan must begin with a concrete company goal in mind, whether it’s revenue, profitability, or predictability. Once this goal is set, the sales ops team can think about the appropriate customer base, necessary investments, measures of progress, and so on and so forth: the team can fully operationalize its plan.

Dharmesh describes sales ops as a “dynamic beast” and explains that issues arise when teams attempt static solutions to a dynamic problem. A bottom-up approach to sales ops inevitably results in infinite tasks and little productivity, as the team gets bogged down in the details. For instance, sales ops people often buy one-off management tools, building a “tech deck” that results in inconsistent, unreliable data usage and entry across the board. Team members also tend to be disconnected from one another, as they use disparate tools of communication like email or Slack. Taking a growth ops lens and using a platform like Fullcast.io, Dharmesh explains, allows teams to democratize data, automate the trivial processes, and elevate the discussion to the greater picture of the firm.

Dharmesh finally divides sales ops into three distinct buckets and stresses the importance of treating each bucket differently. These buckets are 1. deciding the go-to-market design, 2. managing day-to-day sales motion, and 3. sales enablement (e.g. playbooks, bootcamps). Much of the design and motion processes can be fully automated, but sales ops people tend to get sucked into the technicalities of motion, in particular. According to Dharmesh, proper automation through tools like Fullcast.io allows sales ops people to devote more attention and resources to enablement, which will truly help a company produce more bang for its buck.

If you liked “Sales Ops Strategies for Growing Startups” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!