BC Startup Sales Podcast – First Steps To Sales Ops Success with Emmanuelle Skala (Influitive)

Emmanuelle Skala from Influitive joined us in the Bowery Capital studio this week to walk us through her take on the “First Steps To Sales Ops Success” that every early-stage founder should know. Especially for SaaS companies with a driven-driven sales model, Sales Ops has become a discipline in its own right. We’re all familiar with traditional SaaS metrics like MRR, churn, CLTV, etc. But for the most part, these are lagging indicators. While important, they don’t provide the sort of foresight that modern Sales Ops leaders need in order to optimize sales performance 6 months or more in advance. In our podcast today, we’ll not only cover the basics, but dive into other types of metrics that can be the difference between a missed and blowout quarter. In particular, we tackle 3 new categories of Sales Ops benchmarks: sales capacity, funnel metrics and pipeline metrics.

Our guest today, Emmanuelle Skala, is the head of sales at Influitive. Influitive is the advocate marketing platform for customer engagement. In other words, it helps companies leverage their networks of users to get more referrals and reviews, effectively turning customers into salespeople. Emmanuelle started with Influitive over a year ago with just 2 reps and 3 SDRs, and has built the Company’s Sales Ops process from the ground up. Prior to that, she held various sales leadership roles spanning inside sales, channel sales, and sales ops / enablement with software companies including VMTurbo, Sophos, Vertica Systems (HP), and Endeca (Oracle).

Sales Ops are a big part of our day-to-day at Bowery Capital. We invest exclusively in enterprise software startups and work closely with our founders, specifically around early customer acquisition. And if there’s one thing you’ll hear again and again from our team, it’s that without proper measurement of sales performance from the beginning, it’s hard to really understand what drives your sales funnel or hire the right team to drive revenue growth. Emmanuelle is one of the most data-driven sales thought leaders we’ve met, and has put these benchmarks to work multiple times. So whether you’re a Sales Ops veteran, SaaS founder, or a newly-recruited SDR, we’re confident you’ll get something out of today’s chat. Give it a listen now!

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