How Nektar Automates Buying Committee Engagement RevOps 10 min In today’s complex B2B sales environment, understanding and engaging with buying groups is crucial for driving revenue. Modern B2B buying decisions are made by groups, not individuals so traditional methods, like tracking Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), are no longer sufficient. This shift necessitates a new approach to tracking engagement, one that leverages advanced technology to automate and streamline the process. Nektar offers a powerful solution for sales teams looking to stay ahead. By automating the tracking of Buying Group Engagement, Nektar’s features ensure that every interaction is captured and analyzed, providing deep insights into the buying process. Features such as Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation, Conditional OCR, Intelligent Meeting Tagging, and Contact Participation (Meeting Intelligence) work together to create a comprehensive and automated engagement tracking system. In this blog, we will explore how Nektar’s advanced capabilities can transform your sales process, making it more efficient and effective by automating the tracking of Buying Group Engagement. We’ll delve into each feature, highlighting its benefits and real-world applications, to show you how Nektar can help your team achieve greater success in today’s competitive market. Understanding Buying Group Engagement Buying Group Engagement refers to the interactions and activities involving multiple stakeholders within an organization who collectively make purchasing decisions. Unlike the traditional focus on individual leads, Buying Group Engagement acknowledges the collaborative nature of B2B purchases, where various roles such as decision-makers, influencers, and end-users all contribute to the final decision. In modern B2B sales, it’s essential to track and manage these engagements effectively. Understanding who is involved in the buying process, their roles, and their level of participation helps sales teams tailor their strategies and communication. This approach not only enhances the relevance of sales efforts but also increases the likelihood of closing deals by addressing the needs and concerns of all key stakeholders. By automating the tracking of these engagements, sales teams can gain comprehensive insights into the buying dynamics, enabling them to engage more effectively and drive better outcomes. How Nektar Automates Buying Group Engagement Choosing From 5 Types of Sales Territory Mapping Nektar’s innovative approach to automating Buying Group Engagement leverages several key features that streamline and enhance the process of managing interactions with multiple stakeholders. Here’s a detailed look at how each feature contributes to a more efficient and effective sales strategy: 1. Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation Nektar’s Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation feature automatically identifies and assigns contact roles to opportunities within your CRM. This automation ensures that all relevant stakeholders are accurately documented and associated with each opportunity, reducing the manual effort typically required. Benefits: Time-Saving: Eliminates the need for sales reps to manually input and update contact roles, freeing up their time to focus on selling activities.Accuracy: Ensures that all contact roles are correctly and consistently assigned, reducing errors and improving data integrity.Visibility: Provides a clear view of all individuals involved in the buying process, helping sales teams better understand and manage their interactions. 2. Conditional OCR (Opportunity Contact Role) Conditional OCR allows for the creation of contact roles based on specific, predefined conditions. This feature enables sales teams to customize how and when contact roles are created, based on criteria that are most relevant to their sales processes. Benefits: Customization: Tailors the contact role creation process to fit the unique needs of different sales teams or business units.Efficiency: Automatically applies the right conditions for contact role creation, ensuring that only the most relevant contacts are included.Scalability: Supports the management of complex sales environments with numerous stakeholders and varying engagement scenarios. 3. Intelligent Meeting Tagging Nektar’s Intelligent Meeting Tagging feature automatically tags meetings with relevant information, making it easier to track and analyze interactions with buying group members. This feature leverages AI to identify key details from meetings and associates them with the appropriate contacts and opportunities. Benefits: Enhanced Insights: Provides detailed insights into the content and outcomes of meetings, helping sales teams understand engagement levels and follow up effectively.Consistency: Ensures that all relevant meeting information is captured and tagged correctly, enhancing the quality of data in the CRM.Productivity: Reduces the manual effort required to document meetings, allowing sales reps to focus more on strategic activities. 4. Contact Participation (Meeting Intelligence) The Contact Participation feature tracks and analyzes the participation of contacts in meetings. By monitoring who attends and actively participates in meetings, sales teams can gain valuable insights into the engagement levels of different stakeholders within the buying group. Benefits: Engagement Tracking: Identifies key influencers and decision-makers based on their participation and engagement in meetings. Actionable Insights: Helps sales teams tailor their follow-up strategies based on the involvement and interest levels of different contacts. Data-Driven Decisions: Provides a data-driven approach to understanding and managing buying group dynamics, leading to more informed sales strategies. How GuideCX got Visibility into $1.7Mn Inactive Pipe Every company wants to squeeze out every drop of revenue from its active pipeline. Missing out on achievable quotas and letting potential revenue slip away due to inactivity and poor engagement have become the biggest sins in Sales. But what if there was a way to bring these dormant deals back into the spotlight for the sales teams? This is the scenario we explore—a practical challenge met with a pragmatic question, setting the stage for the journey ahead. This is the story of GuideCX and how they transformed deal prioritization using process automation, powered by customized rules that considered the engagement data that Nektar captured in their CRM. This helped GuideCX gain instant visibility into $1.7M worth of inactive deals, which otherwise would have been lost forever.   Ready to revolutionize your sales process with automated Buying Group Engagement? Discover how Nektar’s advanced features can help your team capture every interaction, gain deep insights, and drive better outcomes. In this blog

Configure Contact Roles on Salesforce to Unlock Immediate Efficiency Gains Discover how defining OCRs can enhance visibility into your buying committee, improve sales execution, and boost win rates. RevOps 10 min Let’s begin by simply defining what is an opportunity contact role (OCR). An OCR is a standard object on Salesforce within the Opportunity object that links Contacts to Opportunities, specifying the Contact’s role in that Opportunity. Having great OCR hygiene means sales leadership teams gain better visibility into the buying committee for each opportunity. Better visibility helps monitor if reps have at least identified the necessary people needed to win the deal. If the necessary people are involved, then sales leaders can guide their teams on the right engagement playbook to navigate the deal toward success. While sales teams know the importance of identifying and engaging the entire buying committee, not many follow this through to execution. This becomes worse when we consider the OCR data available in a CRM. Open any CRM today, and you will notice that a majority would have an average of 3 contact roles. Of those 3, one is usually a required field made mandatory by the revenue/sales operations or CRM admin. In companies that practice MEDDIC (and its variations), the ‘Economic Buyer’ and ‘Champion’ are identified and added to the CRM, but the remaining buyer roles are either identified but not added to the CRM or not identified at all. So why should OCRs matter? The answer to this question lies in whether or not you’re working on improving sales execution, rep efficiency, win rates, and forecasting. You’d be surprised if we told you how often we hear prospects say “We have no idea who our sellers are talking to” or “We don’t know how often we’re engaging buyers in open deals”. ‘Who’ you are talking to and ‘how often’ are you talking to buyers are the fundamental units of generating revenue. The ‘process’ of generating revenue can only be improved by tracking and measuring such fundamental units. You may be doing a great job with creating contact lists from third-party data tools like Zoominfo or Lusha or by auto-creating contacts in accounts with tools like Clari or Gong, but if such contacts are not being linked to opportunities, you are losing out on critical data. Technically, in CRM terms, opportunities are won, not accounts. And so having contact data is not good enough. You must aim to have granular and comprehensive contact role data. Introducing Configurable OCRs Using AI, automation, and graph inference, Nektar automatically creates contacts in the relevant accounts present in Salesforce. Until recently, Nektar would automatically associate these contacts as OCRs within the relevant open opportunities. There was no configuration needed. However, through customer feedback and research, Nektar is excited to announce ‘Configurable OCR’. An OCR record is only useful if it is: associated because it is actually involved in the deal a buying role was identified and assigned to it With configurable OCR, you can define rules using buyer-seller engagement data that Nektar has already added to the (open) opportunity and account. For example, a rule can be: “If engagement with contacts in an account is more than 5 times in the last 10 days, and if there is an open opportunity in those accounts, then associate such contacts as opportunity contact roles.” This example considers the recency and frequency of buyer engagement. So, only those contacts that are frequently engaged by the seller will get added to opportunities as OCRs. As a result, sales leaders gain instant visibility into who is actually involved in deals. This is just a simple, straightforward example of a rule. You can define your own rules. Additionally, you can customize the rule for the different segments you may have. For example, have a rule specifically for strategic accounts, expansion accounts, new business accounts, vertical-specific accounts, or any other segmentation you may have. Next, you can configure the second component – the buying role. If you’ve used Nektar, you would know that it extracts job titles from email signatures. A default capability we’ve always offered is to map out job titles to the respective buying roles. With this one-time configuration, as and when Nektar links OCRs, it also assigns a buying role to the OCR based on the corresponding job title. Now, using genAI automation you can define rules to assign an appropriate buying role. You can consider a combination of job titles and engagement trends, job titles and seniority, job titles and engagement and segment – whichever factors address your requirements. After all, the process of generating revenue is unique to a company. The best part is that all this is done using the standard Salesforce records, so they are easily reportable on Salesforce. This can also be achieved for your historical opportunities by backfilling them. Benefits of configurable OCRs Nektar customers use this OCR data for deal inspections, win-loss analyses, playbook optimization, and enhancing their multithreading strategy. Every opportunity has only those contact roles that are involved in the deal while the remaining stakeholders such as legal remain in the account as contacts. So sales leaders are able to monitor which job titles and buying roles are being engaged. Since historical data is also plugged in, you can study buying committee engagement for won and lost deals to analyze what worked and did not work. Some of our customers identified new personas in their closed deals, and have now started prospecting this persona actively to generate new pipeline. By studying won deals, you can also track the engagement pattern and work towards improving your multithreading strategy. Lastly, playbooks can be transformed. For example, one of our customers now has made it mandatory to have a specific number of contact roles if the deal is in stage 3 of the sales process. Similarly, answers to who, how often, and when should different people of the buying committee be engaged can be detailed out. Outside of the sales team, a clean and

Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2025 RevOps 10 min Sales operations has become one of the fastest growing functions over the last few years. According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Operations 2021 Report, the number of sales operations professionals increased by 38% around the world between 2018 and 2020. What’s the reason behind this growth? Bradley Gray, Director of Business Development at Enterprise Holdings attributes two reasons for the growth in this role. There has been a significant increase in the amount of data that gets generated within organizations. The proliferation of data is creating a need for sales operations to generate contextualised insights for sales teams to succeed.   RELATED RESOURCE : SALES OPERATIONS TRENDS FOR 2025   A well run sales operations function enables businesses to operate efficiently with data-driven decisions, and also identify gaps that exist in the sales process, and help fill them up through analytical insights.  In short, a great sales operations function can help an organization unlock massive productivity gains.  To make the most out of your sales operations function, it is important to be aware of the trends that will shape in 2025 (and beyond). Let’s take a look. 1. Multithreading Will Be a Key Sales Tactic The world is in the midst of a great reshuffle for talent. The turnover among corporate director-level-and above, that constitutes the majority of B2B buyers, increased by 31% in 2021. With key people in the B2B buying committee quitting jobs so often, many deals fall apart because reps fail to develop strong relationships with more than one buyer. And with an average of 6.8 decision makers in every B2B purchase, not having strong relationships with all of the key players within the buying committee can be a big risk. When a key stakeholder leaves the organization, reps are forced to start from scratch, causing 80% of them to lose deals. Having just one primary contact for an account, or single-threading, thus increases the chances of missing out on deals. This is where adopting multithreading as a sales practice becomes extremely crucial. Multithreading is when reps form relationships with multiple stakeholders on the buying committee of an account.  This way, even if the primary stakeholder quits the organization, reps can capitalize on the relationships they have with the rest of the stakeholders within that account. Multithreading increases the chances of closing a deal by 16%. Successful sales teams in 2025 will master multithreading by gathering champions, influencers and decision-makers, and engaging with them on a regular basis. 2. An Increase in Regulations Will Impact Tech Stack Decisions There has been an increase in the number of regulations across the globe around protection of consumer information and data privacy.  Non-compliance of these regulations can be a huge cost. Organizations lose an average of $4 million in revenue due to a single non-compliance event.  To prevent such events from taking place, sales and revenue leaders must narrow down on their tech investments from a compliance-first lens. With the world increasingly moving towards a cookie-less world, highly compliant first-party data will become key in helping sales teams make data-driven decisions. First-party data is the information that is handed off with consent from a user to a company. This can be from sources like email, calendar, Zoom or other tools that buyers use.  For example, organizations can use their own first-party data to drive contextual insights that can help them make their sales operations function more efficient, while staying compliant with GDPR regulations.  Forward thinking leaders will realize this and take control of their first-party data in 2025, and use it to make powerful data-driven decisions.  Technologies like artificial intelligence can help enrich CRM with first-party buyer and seller interaction data. Nektar has built an advanced data capture solution that intelligently connects first-party data to the CRM and enriches it for sales teams. 3. AI Based Guided Selling Will Help Sellers Win More Deals B2B sales is getting increasingly complex, with buyers getting bombarded with information across channels, and sellers tackling multiple tasks and responsibilities while chasing their quota. AI based guided selling is helping sellers navigate this complex selling environment by helping them improve their sales execution through a data-driven approach.  Along with increasing productivity, AI based guided selling helps identify patterns that lead to more intelligent business decision making, ultimately helping in revenue generation. The pandemic exposed cracks in many organization’s sales processes. Knowing that sales process discipline must be improved to increase the chances of closing new deals, sales leaders are investigating new data-driven, AI-based guided selling functions for improving sales execution. Tad Travis, VP, Gartner AI-based guided selling offers prescriptive as well as predictive insights to sellers to close more deals.  From a prescriptive lens, it recommends the next best actions for sales reps and managers to undertake within the sales process. As an example, organizations can use AI to improve their playbook compliance within teams for consistent selling.  From a predictive lens, it offers insights that help identify lead indicators to make the sales process more efficient.  For example, by having insights on the activity data of sales reps, sales managers can define which deals are real and which need to be eliminated from the pipeline. With such functionalities, sales teams can decide on what to do next to move a relationship, deal or quote forward on the basis of analytics (rather than relying on instinct to make decisions). 2025 will see organizations add AI based guided selling solutions to their tech stack. 4. Training in Consultative Sales Will Take Priority Today’s B2B buyers prefer to conduct their own research before they speak with sales reps.  According to research, most buyers engage with more than 13 pieces of content before connecting with a seller.  Forrester’s research found that buyers went to all forums for information in 2021 – from webinars and online events to learn about the category and competitors, to speaking with peers and industry experts to have their questions answered. These changes in buyer preferences have raised the bar for sales. Understanding the buyer’s intent and offering them personalized solutions

Revenue Leader Caroline Holt on Putting Together the Best Sales Tech Stack RevOps Sales Techstack 10 min Extracting value from a sales tech stack continues to be a frustrating challenge for revenue leaders. Budget freezes across the board have forced revenue leaders to be more mindful of the tools they add to their tech stack. But it can be a daunting project to undertake with the market being so crowded with tools across multiple categories.How can revenue leaders select the best tools for their tech stack? How can they derive value from this steep investment? And how can they make their sales teams more productive? We sat down with Caroline Holt, VP Revenue Training & Enablement at Bonterra, to unpack some of these nuances around creating the best sales tech stack. Caroline shares some brilliant insights on how revenue leaders can create the best sales tech stack. And make the process more efficient and effective. If you’re short on time, here is a quick summary of the conversation.   If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode. The Sales Tech Landscape Has Exploded & Disrupted Sales   Abhijeet: Caroline, thanks for coming on the show. Caroline: Thank you so much for having me. Abhijeet: You’ve been in the sales tech industry for quite some time. How have you seen it change over the last few years? Caroline: Well, it has not only transformed. But it has exploded, right? Technology has disrupted sales. I think the buying process in some cases has not changed over the last 20 years, but the way we sell and the way that the buyer wants to purchase has changed. So when I think about my role as a BDR early on, I was calling, I was faxing, I was emailing. But I could get to someone typically. And I think in some cases the proliferation of things like cadence tools that allow people to drop somebody into a constant flow of information has actually hindered our ability to get to people that we want, who might actually need what we need to do. So to the overarching question of how technology has changed, I think in some ways it’s changed in a really incredible way. Because I am an efficiency geek. I like removing friction from the sales process. But I think that sometimes we actually get in our own way because of how we purchase technology. I think of the tech stack in terms of where your business is and what you need to be successful. And I think that’s actually the biggest challenge right now. The first thing that I would say is that when you think about technology, it’s a great solution if you have a really good process to start with. And people to manage the automation, ongoing configuration, updates, maintenance, and so on. CarolineHolt VP, Revenue Training and Enablement Technology is going to be great at a foundational level. So the first thing you need is a way to engage with people, whether that is your regular old telephone and email, or whether that is some sort of a dialer tool where you’re capturing that information. And then you need some place for that information to live. So you need some sort of CRM to be able to capture that information, figure out who you’ve been talking to, what that’s been like, if you’re opening opportunities, what that opportunity looks like. Then you need to figure out what’s actually happening in those calls.  And then that you can analyze a lot of that data over time in terms of what people are saying in aggregate. So our whole roadmap should be focused on it. It  provides just a really powerful level of insight. But I think for a lot of organizations, they don’t ever optimize those parts of the tech stack, and then they start adding new stuff. They either haven’t gotten it right the first time, or they think that that’s table stakes.  That foundational piece, particularly the architecture around the CRM, if that stuff isn’t right, none of the other tech is really that helpful because you wind up buying stuff and building stuff that doesn’t really help that whole flow from who are we talking to, what are we talking to them about, what’s happening with those deals to closing those deals. Caroline Holt VP, Revenue Training and Enablement So that’s a really simplistic way of thinking about sales technology. But I would say that most organizations need to start with those fundamental pieces and then start thinking about, okay, once we know, now we need to figure out who those prospects are. So what sort of technology is gonna help us identify who those folks are. So how you build that stuff over time becomes really powerful. And then what you do with that data and analytics becomes really powerful over time. But sometimes people invest really quickly in a lot of technologies, but they never really optimize them for performance. So the other part is just thinking about having what you can actually bite off in terms of tech investments in any given year to be able to do the right thing for your business.  Where is Sales Tech Heading Towards?   Abhijeet: If you don the hat of a sales leader who’s going to spend a hundred dollars this year across the technology stack, how should they go about their investment approach? Where should those a hundred dollars be allocated?  Caroline: So I would say that like everything in enablement or any of the back office operations, it’s where are your problems? So if the business should be investing based on what technology is going to actually help them be more effective, where they’re less effective than they could be today. So

10 Best Revenue Operations Software for 2025 RevOps 10 min Achieving revenue goals is challenging, irrespective of the size of your sales operations. Your sales team can face numerous challenges, including managing complex sales processes, streamlining data, and aligning sales, marketing, and customer success efforts. Fortunately, revenue operations software simplifies how businesses optimize their sales performance. Revenue operations software empowers sales teams to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. Leveraging automation and advanced analytics allows these tools to provide a streamlined approach to manage sales operations and drive revenue growth. Tune in to our exclusive podcast – The Revenue Lounge, specially curated for Revenue Operations Professionals. Here’s a latest episode: Ep #1: Hubspot Customer Retention With RevOps ft. Sid Kumar This article looks at the top 10 revenue operations software solutions leading in 2025. Let’s uncover the best solutions and understand how they can position your sales team for success. 10 Best Revenue Operations Software Here are the ten best revenue operations software to consider for your business in 2025: 1. Nektar 2. Gong 3. Groove 4. HubSpot Operation Hub 5. Aviso 6. Kluster 7. Fullcast 8. Breadcrumbs 9. InsightSquared Analytics 10. Chorus What is Revenue Operations? Revenue operations or RevOps is an end-to-end operating model that helps organizations run their business in an interconnected way across GTM functions like sales, marketing and customer success. A tight alignment of the GTM model enables organizations to drive predictable revenue.  The role of RevOps is to drive visibility, accountability and transparency across the entire revenue funnel, improve efficiency across a unified revenue process, and unlock potential for revenue growth. RevOps connects teams, processes and people that have been otherwise functioning in silos. It also aligns them to work towards common revenue goals. Overview of 10 Best Revenue Operations Software   1. Nektar Nektar is an AI for revenue operations that drives funnel efficiency by plugging your CRM data holes/gaps and discovers hidden revenue from your customer interaction data. The software provides a unified contact and activity capture solution that ensures CRM data integrity and hygiene, resulting in a clear picture of revenue intelligence. Nektar offers a robust data capture and intelligence layer purpose-built for revenue operations. It enables sales teams to capture and consolidate critical data from various sources. Sales teams can get a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the pipeline. With Nektar, there are no more scattered information and data silos. You get a centralized platform that empowers your team to make data-driven decisions. Key features: Actionable pipeline visibility in real-time Accurate and comprehensive CRM data and reporting Enriched contact data for account-based selling Enhanced ROI for your sales tech stack 2. Gong Gong’s revenue operations software allows RevOps leaders to capture activity data from every touchpoint and unlock superhuman forecasting abilities. Gong’s RevOps platform leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze customer interactions across sales and customer success. It provides invaluable insights into deals, pipelines, and team performance. Gong is your partner in breaking down barriers and aligning your sales, marketing, and customer success operations. Harnessing the power of Gong’s RevOps software will help your team seamlessly collaborate and work in tandem. It will drive revenue growth and customer satisfaction. Key features: Clean activity data Pipeline visibility Deal risk warnings Closed-lost analysis 3. Groove Groove is a revenue intelligence and operations software that offers complete transparency. It provides advanced activity capture capabilities for reps, managers, and operations teams. With Groove, organizations can rely on real-time Salesforce reporting and collaborate on account lists. Furthermore, the platform offers insights into the entire buying committee and allows to conduct interactive pipeline reviews. Groove enables organizations to capture and track critical sales interactions in real time through its advanced activity capture technology. It allows reps, managers, and ops teams to stay up-to-date on the progress of deals. Sales teams can also quickly generate comprehensive reports within Salesforce to get insights into sales performance. Key features: Advanced activity capture Auto contact capture Opportunity and pipeline management 4. HubSpot Operations Hub HubSpot Operations Hub allows your entire team to stay aligned with a clean and connected source of truth for customer data. It enables your business to adapt seamlessly to the ever-changing needs of your customers. With Operations Hub, organizations can sync data across various systems, ensuring customer information is up-to-date and accessible in one centralized location.  Operations Hub helps maintain data integrity and eliminates inconsistencies by cleaning and curating customer data. The platform offers other tools, including programmable automation, data sync, and data quality tools.  Key features: Data sync Data quality automation Data quality command center (BETA) 5. Aviso Aviso is a conversational intelligence software that provides revenue leaders with a clear path to plan and key deal actions to accelerate success. It enables sales operations and planning teams to track progress and course correct. With Aviso’s AI-powered capabilities, revenue leaders gain valuable insights that help them confidently navigate their portfolios. Leveraging advanced algorithms, Aviso provides a predictive view of revenue. It allows leaders to anticipate potential outcomes and make informed decisions.  Key features: Advanced view of sales metrics filtered by product/team Advanced briefing for forecast calls Human and AI combination to close deals faster 6. Kluster Kluster is a revenue operations software that enables businesses to build repeatable processes. They can also scale their sales funnel and deliver reports on time, every time. With Kluster, organizations can optimize their revenue operations for consistent and predictable success. Leveraging Kluster’s intuitive tools and workflows allows organizations to establish standardized and efficient sales processes. It ensures every deal follows a consistent path. There are maximized chances of success and minimized errors or missed opportunities. Organizations can also track and analyze key metrics throughout the sales funnel, from lead generation to closing deals.  Key features: Build repeatable process Scale your funnel Deliver reports on time every time 7. Fullcast Fullcast is a revenue operations software that enables businesses to improve RevOps efficiency. Organizations can create territory, quota, and capacity plans without relying on complex spreadsheets. Operations teams can painlessly align their activities with the strategy and eliminate hours of manual effort. With Fullcast’s intuitive interface and

Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2025 RevOps 10 min The sales operations function went through dynamic changes this past year. Economic uncertainties in 2023 killed the “growth at all costs” model.  In 2025, budgets will be tighter, talent scarce and selling more challenging. All these challenges make one thing clear –  Delighting customers at every turn is what matters.  If we walk backwards from this larger goal, it requires a maniacal focus on the customer. What do customers really need? How can they be assisted? How can they be helped with making confident purchase decisions without seeming pushy? To achieve this, sales teams have to meet customers where they are, at the right time. And act as their trusted advisors.  Having complete visibility into the customer journey from lead to cash (to renewal and expansion) is critical to survive what lies ahead. The new mantra for sales operations in 2025 will be to “build a seamless customer journey.” This article will cover the top sales operations trends that 2025 can expect. It’s vastly different from the trends we saw last year. Which is a testament to the fact how fast things are changing in the B2B sales world. What is Sales Operations or SalesOps? Sales Operations refers to the function, role, activities or processes within a sales organization that help sales reps sell faster and better. This department is responsible for reducing frictions within the sales process. It enables reps to achieve higher win rates in a predictable and repeatable manner. The sales operations function strategizes on ways that can help sales reps focus on tasks that contribute to revenue. This includes implementing sales training, investing in tools and technology that eliminate roadblocks in selling, or creating processes that optimize the sales process for all reps. The ultimate goal of a sales operations function is to create a sales engine that runs smoothly. The sales operations function has a direct impact on business revenue. This department continues to be a strategic component of an organization’s structure. Top Trends To Expect in Sales Operations in 2025 B2B sales has been evolving at a rapidly fast pace, making traditional processes of operations obsolete. Some of the biggest challenges facing sales operations today include: 72% of B2B buyers demand a rep-free experience. 47% sellers say their sales tech stack does not boost their productivity or improves results. Close to half of operations professionals say that processes within their companies are only moderately data-driven or not data-driven at all.  The confidence of operations professionals dipped over the last two years. As companies hold back on investments because of the downturn, sales leaders will have to devise new ways to survive and sustain in 2024. This puts sales operations in a unique position to help organizations navigate these new challenges.  By embracing innovation and pivoting at the right time, sales operations leaders can provide some much needed relief in the tough months that await. They can do this by staying on top of these trends that demand attention: 1. Reduce Technology Overwhelm Among Sellers 2023 was the year of AI. The space of sales technology was already an exhausted field, and artificial intelligence tools just got added to the mix in 2023.  But too many tools also cause overwhelm among salespeople.  As high as 49% of sellers feel overwhelmed by the tech they are required to use for their jobs. This reduces the likelihood to attain quota by 43%. More tools in the tech stack add the burden of deployment, management and adoption. The goal for sales leaders is to evaluate what they have, consolidate wherever they can and optimize their tech stacks to improve productivity and execution across every role. Bloated tech stacks can also create many problems in disguise and add to a lot of hidden costs such as cost of integrating, tool fatigue, cost of siloed data and much more.  Which is why 2025 will be the year of tech stack consolidation.  Tech stack consolidation is the process of reducing the number of tools in a company’s tech stack by merging functionalities into lesser and more exhaustive platforms. The goal of consolidation is not to knock down all of the investments in point solutions that already exist. It demands a structured approach in analyzing which tools offer real value for sales teams. And eliminate tools that don’t add any merit to their day to day workflows. Sales leaders will have to do a cross-functional exercise to identify what their top use cases are for sales operations. And lay down a complete technology roadmap against these use cases.  Teams that use tech stack that enable the full sales motion, from creating pipeline to closing deals are more likely to meet their revenue goals. A lean and fully capable sales tech stack is a reality as companies look to consolidate vendors while retaining the features and capability of their previous array of point solutions.  If you are also looking to consolidate your sales tech stack in 2025, here’s an evaluation framework to get started on. 2. Strategic Multithreading Will Become a Competitive Differentiator B2B buying has changed drastically over the last few years. Relying on decade old strategies to close deals do not appeal to the modern buyer. Especially when buying is no longer a linear process or a one person event. From an average of 6.8 decision makers in every B2B purchase, the number has now gone up to 14. And most of these contacts never make it to the CRM. As they can be from other departments within the company calling the shots in the background. This is where strategic multithreading comes into the picture. Knowing exactly how many people are involved in a deal and having complete visibility into their needs, aspirations and expectations are vital for sales people to know.  This kind of relationship intelligence enables reps to form relationships with multiple stakeholders on the buying committee of an account. And they have to do it in a strategic manner. Having access to the list of contacts that might be influencing a deal will be a saviour for sales

Welcome Efficiency Gains in 2025 with a Suite of Meeting Insights Built for Revenue Teams Product 10 min Imagine you’re preparing for a 42 km marathon. You’ve set a weekly running plan across terrains and weather conditions. You’ve brought the best equipment – wind-resistant clothing, a sleek water pouch, well-fitted goggles, perfectly cushioned shoes with the right grip, and a pace calculator. There were days when you completed 42 km, there were days you only did 5 km, and there were days you did 25 km, and so on. But, throughout your preparation, the pace calculator unfortunately missed capturing your pacing and the time taken to run the distance. Oops! Now, you have no idea what is the average time you take to complete 42 km or what is your average pace. So you’re going in blind and decide to pace yourself by winging it. Yes, this blog is not about preparing for a marathon. But this example is an analogy to sales. The runner is the revenue leader. The equipment refers to the sales team and tools. Each run refers to a meeting with a buyer. The pace calculator refers to a tool that is meant to provide key insights – what are you doing well, and what you should improve. So, with the analogy and this context, let me challenge you with some questions: How many meetings does it take your SMB and your enterprise teams to win a deal, respectively? How many meetings get completed out of all the scheduled meetings? How often are meetings happening in each of your accounts? How often are the different members of the buying group invited to these meetings? How often are these buying group members attending these meetings? What is the nature of the meeting? What is being discussed exactly? How much time is being spent or wasted in meetings by your sellers and deal support team like solution engineering, executives, etc.? Sure, conversation intelligence tools may help answer a couple of these questions. But, not all. Moreover, most conversation intelligence tools only capture data if they’re set to record that meeting. If it’s not set to record, then the data does not get captured. And before you jump to a conclusion, no, this is not a blog on conversation intelligence. Rather it’s about zooming into your buyer-seller data with a specific focus on meeting insights. Meeting Insights Missing from Your Engagement Data Over the last two quarters, Nektar introduced several useful features that surface insights into buyer-seller engagement. Some of them are specific to meeting data. These insights are 100% accurate because they stem from data picked up at the source of action – your calendar invites, be it Google or Outlook. What’s more? All the data is provided to you in your standard Salesforce objects – account, opportunity, contact, and lead. So you can leverage Salesforce’s powerful reporting capabilities to surface these meeting insights. Let’s dive into some insights that Nektar.ai unlocks through these recently launched features. 1. Meeting Status Every week revenue leaders conduct 1:1 deal reviews where the rep shares with them all the meetings that are scheduled, that took place, and that got canceled or rescheduled. Additionally, the rep also has to share who is invited to the meeting and who attended. The revenue leader then suggests adding a key stakeholder, and the dialogue continues. With Nektar, this ‘zero value information exchange’ can be eliminated. Instead, revenue leaders can access such data in their Salesforce. Nektar automatically marks the status of a meeting across the meeting lifecycle – scheduled, completed, aborted, canceled, missed – to give deep visibility into how meetings are impacting sales cycles, win rates, and revenue generation. The most important question this helps answer is: How many meetings do I need to complete to win an enterprise deal and an SMB deal, respectively? This can be further segmented at an industry or region level for further granularity. Layer Meeting Status with additional factors to unlock clear visibility into deal activities and understand what’s working and not working. 2. Meeting Type Let’s assume an enterprise deal had 55 meetings from creation to close. With Meeting Status you will easily know how many were completed. You may also choose to use native Salesforce reporting to slice this data across deal stages. The only insights you have are that 55 meetings were scheduled, 40 were completed, and each deal stage had a specific count of meetings. But, you’re still not sure what each meeting was about. Was it a demo meeting, a discovery meeting, a use case mapping meeting, a mutual success plan meeting, a proof of concept discussion meeting, or something else? And how many such meetings took place? This is where Activity Tagging becomes beneficial. Nektar automatically assigns tags to meetings based on the context of the meeting using certain keywords. This tag is then automatically added to a custom field on Salesforce within standard objects, making it completely reportable. Equipped with this data point, revenue leaders can easily spot what types of meetings are taking place and how many meetings of the same type are taking place. Most importantly, you can define these tags yourself. For you, you may define one of the tags as ‘use case mapping’, while another company may not. Or, you may have defined only 4 tags while another company may have defined 12 tags. It’s easily customizable to suit your revenue process. Going back to the example we started with, you’ll have the following insights – 55 meetings were scheduled, 40 were completed, 3 discovery meetings, 5 demo meetings, 3 use case mapping meetings, and so on. This insight helps you gather which types of meetings are critical to winning a deal. For example, if deals over $100,000 had more use case mapping meetings and deals less than $50,000 had more negotiation meetings, you can now optimize your plays to replicate this more often to improve your chances of winning deals. Activity tags are customizable. Based on your sales process,

Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2025 RevOps 10 min Imagine having a machine. A machine with all the parts in working condition, it’s even run daily but produces suboptimal outputs.  The issue is – ‘Oiling.’ Without proper and regular oiling, the various parts of the machine can’t function properly. To make the machine work cohesively, oiling is required.  Sales optimization tools can help with the oiling. It is done so that the sales function produces optimal results.  What is sales process optimization? Sales process optimization refers to refining and improving the steps in selling a product or service to a customer. The process typically includes steps such as lead generation, lead qualification, needs assessment, proposal creation, negotiation, and closing the sale. Sales process optimization aims to increase efficiency and effectiveness, resulting in more successful sales and increased revenue. How do Sales Optimization Tools Work? Sales process optimization is essential in B2B sales, where the sales cycle is often longer and more complex than in B2C sales. In B2B sales, the process typically involves multiple decision-makers and influencers, and the sales rep needs to demonstrate how the product or service will address the business’s specific needs. Here are some key ways in which sales process optimization works in B2B sales: 1. Identifying and targeting the right prospects Sales process optimization in B2B sales involves identifying and targeting the most promising prospects with customized messaging and outreach. This involves using data analytics to identify businesses that are a good fit for the product or service and creating targeted marketing campaigns to reach them. 2. Understanding the buying process B2B sales often involve multiple decision-makers and influencers, and it’s important to understand the buying process for each prospect. Sales reps need to identify the key decision-makers, understand their needs and priorities, and tailor their messaging accordingly. 3. Creating a value proposition In B2B sales, it’s important to demonstrate how the product or service will provide value to the business. Sales reps need to articulate a compelling value proposition that addresses the prospect’s specific needs and pain points. 4. Managing the sales process B2B sales often involve a longer sales cycle than B2C sales, and it’s essential to manage the process effectively. This may include using CRM software to track leads and opportunities, setting up regular touchpoints with the prospect, and managing the negotiation and closing process. 5. Analyzing and optimizing the sales process Finally, sales process optimization in B2B sales involves analyzing sales data and feedback to identify areas for improvement. Sales reps need to be able to adjust their approach based on what works and what doesn’t and continually refine their sales process to improve outcomes. A Closer Look At a Sales Optimization Process Now that we have understood the role of sales optimization in B2B segment, let’s understand the process in a step-by-step format:   1. Define your goals The first step in sales optimization is to define your goals. This may involve setting specific targets for revenue, number of sales, or other metrics that are important to your business. 2. Analyze your current sales process The next step is to analyze your current sales process to identify areas for improvement. This may involve reviewing your sales data, talking to your sales team, and gathering feedback from customers. 3. Develop a plan Based on your analysis, develop a plan for optimizing your sales process. This may involve making changes to your sales strategy, implementing new tools or technologies, or providing additional training to your sales team. 4. Implement your plan Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to implement it. This may involve rolling out new processes or tools, providing training to your sales team, or adjusting your sales strategy. 5. Monitor your results As you implement your plan, it’s important to monitor your results. Track your progress against your goals, analyze your sales data, and gather feedback from your team and customers to identify areas where you can continue to improve. 6. Continuously improve Sales optimization is an ongoing process, so it’s important to continue refining and improving your sales process over time. This may involve making small adjustments based on feedback and data analysis or making larger changes if your goals or market conditions shift. Let’s have a look at some sales optimization examples to understand the use cases of the above processes in real-life.  Use Cases of Sales Optimization Tools Sales optimization has a wide range of use cases in B2B sales, including automating lead generation, personalizing the sales experience, improving group intelligence, and implementing a sales enablement strategy. By leveraging sales optimization tools and techniques, businesses can improve their sales outcomes, increase efficiency, and drive revenue growth. Here are some examples of sales optimization that businesses implement to improve their sales outcomes: 1. Automate lead generation Businesses can use automated lead generation tools to identify potential customers based on specific criteria instead of relying solely on manual prospecting. This can help streamline the sales process and reduce the time and effort required to find new leads. 2. Personalize the sales experience Personalization can help sales teams better understand the specific needs and preferences of the stakeholders in a buying committee. This allows them to tailor their messaging and approach to each stakeholder, increasing the likelihood of resonating with each individual and ultimately closing the deal. By having insights into all the stakeholders, sales teams can also multithread better, meaning they can engage with multiple stakeholders simultaneously and build a rapport with each of them.  3. Open more doors with more active contacts Encourage multithreaded conversations by equipping your reps with additional contacts. Provide your representatives with more contacts automatically discovered from all sales tools.  4. Improved group intelligence Instantly grant your reps the knowledge of a buying committee map, so they know whom to engage, how, and when to best influence deal progress. 5. Real-time activity intelligence Automatically capture both structured and unstructured data and update it in real-time against active opportunities

Revenue leader’s guide to successful board meetings! GTM RevOps 10 min It’s quite common for sales leaders to get invited to board meetings. So, what do you do when called in to present your sales strategy and report card to the board? At Nektar.ai, we spoke to 72 professionals who have been Board members, VP Sales, Founders and CEOs and asked them this very same question. This playbook is a result of those responses and best practices. Just like for any deal in your CRM system, where you define your sales process, you need to break your board interaction as well into logical stages. Pre-meeting: What’s the construct of the board? Research about the board members and the role they play. What’s the preparation required for the board meeting? In-meeting: What’s the approach one can take to handle the board meeting successfully and build one’s credibility? Post-meeting: How should revenue leaders engage with boards and their CEO post-board meetings? Pre-Meeting Checklist Understand the dynamics of the board. A VP of sales must analyze his/her board similar to how they would draw an account plan and relationship map for a strategic prospect. Eg. Which board members are very involved in the strategy side and carry a big influence on the board? Which members are functional experts and tend to get operationally involved? What are the backgrounds of the various members? What role do they play? Know what matters. Spend time in advance or at the beginning of the meeting asking the question “What are the top 3 things you want to know about our sales strategy?” Going prepared with an answer to this question will help you to save a lot of time and trepidation. Begin with the end in mind. Before you begin, understand what they want. It can be tempting to spend a lot of time to prepare for every possible scenario of what they could ask for. You should know that there are probably only a couple of key things they want to know. In-Meeting Checklist Keep it contextual & crisp. They will never have the context, but you do. When you share your strategy, you need to meet them at their level. Most investors usually fly around 30k feet & do not have the time or interest in coming down. They need to be able to grasp your strategy easily & not get over-involved in a barrage of details. Remember, Less is More! Use frameworks. Your strategy needs to be at a framework level. The key question to answer is, can this strategy be applied to ‘N’ number of different companies or scenarios? A framework always helps! Articulate clearly and simply. Board members generally try to ascertain if the sales leader delivered the quarter because of some lucky save or it was a quarter-end “home run” deal, or because of a predictable sales playbook that’s well integrated into the revenue management system that is put in place leading to repeatable results. Build credibility. Building credibility with the board is important, once it’s lost, it’s hard to recover. Sales leaders should be forthcoming on the key problems in the business. You should be willing to tell and not just sell! Be critical: Even if it’s a great quarter, a VP Sales must take a critical view on what could be the areas of improvement. Board members want sales leaders to demonstrate that they are continuously iterating and finding ways to improve results, even when they are hitting the quota. Be a business leader & not just a functional leader. Boards of directors value sales leaders who can take ownership over the business instead of just demonstrating mastery of the sales function. Keep the presentations simple and consistent. Use a small set of leading and lagging data indicators to demonstrate the progress being made against the intended benchmarks and consistently highlight them during quarterly board presentations. Be prepared to wear a suited armor of data, trends, insights and examples to handle the spear-shaped questions thrown at you like – How do we win in the market? Why do we lose deals? What are the win/loss reasons in each deal? What is our action plan to fix the reasons we lose? What are the biggest objections we get from potential customers? How often do we hear them? Is our sales team enabled with the battle card responses to these objections? How do we train our reps to respond? Where conversations are going off the track during the sales process? What discovery questions should we eliminate or add to qualify the prospect better? Do we identify and engage the right influencers and decision-makers in the opportunity? Have we identified the Ideal Customer Profile and do we sell to the right persona? Why are you waiting till the end of the quarter to make the changes to the sales process? Why not do them earlier? For you to be prepared with these responses, you must have a well-defined sales process and playbook. If implemented and tracked well, the sales playbook and the deviations to the same will give you enough insight into: Why sales reps go off script during the calls? How do prospects respond to the discovery questions? When prospects ghost you during the sales cycle? Which reps are single-threading on key deals? or Which deals are at risk even though the internal effort on them is already higher than the deal value itself? Now imagine, if you can operationalize and track your sales process and usage of the winning playbooks, the answers to the probing questions with data-backed responses can be like: Based on the 15 deal reviews, we found a trend in discovery calls going off-script when sales professionals get to budget-related conversations. To fix this, we have modified our calling script to help the sales team be more confident when talking about our pricing and value delivered. We have identified the top 3 objections during the sales process, and they are usually asked after the proposal is sent. We have started to address those objections during our first call itself, and we have also

What is Salesforce Tech Debt? And How Can You Reduce it? RevOps 10 min In a recent statement, Salesforce disclosed its intention to raise list prices across several product offerings, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries, and Tableau, with an average increase of 9%. Starting in August 2023, the revised list prices for certain Salesforce products will be implemented, targeting new customers and existing customers acquiring additional cloud services. Salesforce has outlined the following adjustments in pricing for their fundamental Sales and Service Cloud offerings: Professional Edition will increase from $75 to $80 Enterprise Edition will increase from $150 to $165 Unlimited Edition will increase from $300 to $330  These changes are going to affect a lot of organizations. Over 150,000 companies across industries use Salesforce. With specialized solutions for operations across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, it is no wonder that the hike in price would affect almost every industry. For companies using Salesforce, the major concern is: Salesforce Tech Debt.  What is Salesforce Technical Debt? Technical debt refers to the expense of having to do extra work later on due to opting for a quick solution in the present rather than investing the time in a more optimal approach. This concept is also commonly referred to as “Shift Left,” which emphasizes the idea that the sooner you identify and address issues, the more cost-effective it is to resolve them. Technical debt represents the additional effort required to rectify a hasty, less-informed solution chosen in the present (constructed quickly without a deep understanding of business requirements), as opposed to adopting a more time-consuming but superior approach. In a broader sense, technical debt encompasses any customizations, whether through code or declarative means, that were implemented when standard functionality wasn’t suitable or accessible. Technical debt can also contain situations where solutions were initially designed for a specific purpose, but as business needs evolved over time, small adjustments were tacked on. A more constructive perspective on technical debt is to recognize that virtually everything can be considered a form of technical debt, but it’s termed “debt” because it necessitates future efforts to address and resolve. In the past, technical debt was primarily associated with developers taking shortcuts in their code. However, in the era of low-code platforms such as Salesforce, technical debt can arise not only from coding decisions but also from the configuration choices made through user-friendly “clicks” within the platform. What Causes Tech Debt? Salesforce technical debt arises from rushed or suboptimal development practices, including quick fixes, inadequate adherence to best practices, complex customizations without proper planning, and neglect to update and adapt solutions over time. This debt accumulates when shortcuts are taken, making future maintenance and scalability more challenging and costly. Here are a few factors that can cause technical debt: 1. Modified or outdated design This occurs when the business requirements change, rendering certain functionalities unnecessary. However, it’s often deemed safer to retain these functionalities. 2. New releases This arises when the introduction of new platform features surpasses the capabilities of previous releases or custom development efforts. For instance, Salesforce Flows are taking precedence over process builders and workflow rules. 3. Intentional technical debt When a deliberate decision is made to expedite development, fully aware that it will entail higher long-term costs, but it’s considered the appropriate course of action. 4. Unintentional technical debt Accumulates when shortcuts are taken for various reasons, typically due to time constraints or concurrent workstreams. 5. Tacked-on technical debt Occurs when a particular functionality is continually extended incrementally and “bolted on” to maintain its functionality rather than undergoing a proper reconstruction. Up to this point, we’ve delved into the theoretical aspects of technical debt, discussing its causes and mechanisms. However, what does it actually manifest as in real-world scenarios? Let’s have a look: Common Forms of Salesforce Tech Debt Common forms of Salesforce technical debt include the accumulation of unused customizations, outdated roles and permission sets, complex and undocumented workflows, inadequate data modeling, and the absence of thorough testing. This technical debt arises when shortcuts are taken or best practices are overlooked during Salesforce development, making the system harder to maintain and optimize over time. Several prevalent forms of technical debt can be identified In Salesforce, including: 1. Visualforce component vs sales path Before the introduction of Sales Path, organizations required a visual means to depict the progress of an opportunity stage or process. To achieve this, they had to customize a Visualforce component. However, with the release of Sales Path by Salesforce, these visualizations became standardized, which subsequently led to an increase in the technical debt interest rate. 2. Adapting process automation The creators of 10K recognized the necessity of automating their invoice generation process. They initially developed an hourly function to create invoices, incorporating some basic rules. However, as their contract structures evolved, they found themselves adding more functions to their initially straightforward task. Managing these changes became increasingly challenging, prompting them to allocate time to rewrite the process based on the current state of their business operations. 3. Excessive customization As previously mentioned, Salesforce provides a user-friendly environment for creating custom Objects and code, even when a simpler declarative solution would suffice. For instance, opting for a workflow instead of resorting to triggers for scripting tasks. This form of technical debt often arises from an overly responsive approach, where every requested change is implemented without exploring alternative options within standard configurations. 4. Unused customizations Despite being promoted as a ‘no-code’ platform, Salesforce cannot handle every task declaratively. Changes in business requirements may render customizations that were once essential unnecessary. Unless these customizations are retired, they can introduce inherent complexity to every new change and potentially hinder end user adoption by making your Org more challenging to navigate. 5. Access controls You’ve likely encountered the concept of “the principle of least privilege.” On the flip side, we have the “principle of most privilege,” where users end up with excessive access as their roles within the organization evolve. While other forms of technical debt can impede progress, retaining unused profiles and permission