Most startups make their first SalesOps hire when they have struggled long with data in silos in different systems or worst still – in excel or google sheets.

And as a SalesOps professional, it is always a good idea to capture more data than less at first – until you figure what is necessary and what can be automated.

Take for instance if your VP Sales asked you:

“How many deals did we lose to Competitor X on Product Y QoQ?”

To answer that you need to know at the very least:

1. Why did we lose the deal?
2. Who did we lose to?
3. When did we lose the deal?

If you never captured the data in the first place – how are you gonna answer that?

So plan your CRM data architecture (design of how you want your CRM to capture the data and relation between different objects and fields) to capture all worthy data in ‘a structured format’ – meaning keep categorizing the data when you start seeing patterns.

Example:

In your first month amongst lost deals you see sales reps mention: “lost to a feature x, y, z…” – then add a value “Feature Gap” in your picklist. Ask them to update: “Why did we lose?” and then have another field: “Which feature?” to categorize data for ease of reporting.

You will be able to automate a lot of it down the line with different  sales  tool integrations and workflow rules. But at first more data is better than less coz with great data collection comes the ability to automate large part of it. So ask for exhaustive data inputs when building out the SalesOps function.