When RevOps Co-op partnered with Scratchpad to survey 200 RevOps leaders about their biggest challenges, we thought that data would be in the top three. And we were right, data hygiene was their biggest challenge.
Natalie Blardony and Mackenzie Clements, RevOps managers at Crunchbase, have data quality and effective data governance as 2 of their main goals. They recommend paying attention to duplicates, improving process adherence, improving notifications for your reps, and ensuring on sales alignment.
“Data quality is the means to success for the reps I support” - Natalie Blardony
Sometimes you find 10 duplicates for one account. This creates big problems for your rules of engagement. One rep can have a meeting set while another is reaching out to another lead at the same account. At Crunchbase, they use AppExchange tools, like No Duplicates, to help dedupe in bulk. They’re also big fans of LeanData for identifying existing accounts and staying organized.
They also began hosting weekly RevOps office hours to work on duplicates. Instead of asking reps to dedupe on their own, they broke out office hours by team–AEs, SDRs, CSMs can come in and work together as a team. Mackenzie also recommends setting a theme, like pipeline management, so reps know what to focus on and can prepare questions ahead of time.
Reps at Crunchbase rely on Salesforce’s Guidance for Success which recommends actions for each stage in the deal cycle. They also set up validation rules in the backend, broken out by role, that require fields to be completed, cutting down on duplicates.
“This is a continuous process. We’re always thinking about the many ways we can continue to improve and change our data” - Mackenzie Clements
Using Scratchpad, they highlight when an opportunity age is greater than the average sales cycle. At a glance, an opportunity can seem like it has a lot of activity, but after digging in, the customer may not be responding. These processes help align top down forecasts from RevOps with bottom up forecasts from sales leaders.
Crunchbase uses Scratchpad to send data hygiene notifications to sales reps and customer success managers about the opportunities they’re working on, which include:
When the operations team heard from sales that deals were being pushed out further and further due to the economy and layoffs, they knew Crunchbase could help. They built a search for managers to track their AE’s active deals and whether there were layoffs at those accounts in the last two weeks. This information can quickly be included in forecasting and customer QBRs.
When it comes to alignment, start somewhere. It might be daily meetings that evolve to weekly or bi-weekly meetings. You don’t need a perfect solution right away, but you do need to prioritize sales and RevOps alignment.
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