Sales Operation Activities: How to Improve and Win

If you’re new in sales operation activities, especially if you’ve just started building an IT company from scratch, this article will help restore some confidence by highlighting common old and new mistakes you’ll learn from here rather than from personal trial and error or hype. You might know that my partner and I at Sales Label have been offering niche consulting for IT companies for over 8 years. Each year, at least five startups approach us asking to figure out what they’re doing wrong in building their sales processes.

The AI Sales Myth

Let’s start with the fact that many people read or learn from courses like “How to Make Sales with One Tool.” After such a course, we often solve the motivation problem—namely, starting to do something—but we don’t know how effective smart AI sales tools will be in selling complex B2B deals in the IT industry. Over the past 1-2 years, most tools have marketed themselves on the premise that there’s supposedly a lack of personalization in messages to potential clients. They claim that most run banal, simple campaigns and can’t convey anything important in their initial communication.

This is true, but the shift toward overusing unique inserts like, “Wow, you studied at that university; we thought you’d be interested in buying our outstaffing services,” or “Oh, you just launched your product and have an open vacancy; I thought I’d sell you our outstaffing services,” is problematic. The issue isn’t having extra information about the client that you can internally analyze and use to prioritize your database. But inserting this into messages isn’t necessary because, first, it doesn’t make much sense, and second, we’re not addressing their main potential challenges. We show them that we’ve done some work studying their profile or company, but it all boils down to a quick pitch that nullifies all personalization.

Furthermore, all message prompts and templates from tools like Clay and ChatGPT are already recognized by any CTO or CEO who receives similar, stylistically identical messages. Yes, they are unique in inserts like, “You were on a podcast,” “You attended an event,” or “You wrote a post about this.” This is now perceived as artificial communication and clearly not person-to-person. In B2B, people communicate with people, and no one likes cheating.

Always remember this before launching your unique campaigns. The second thing we’ve noticed is how AI tools actually make mistakes in validating databases or contacts. The error margin can reach up to 40%. A specialist does it better and more efficiently; ChatGPT is an accelerator but not a replacement for a specialist who can gather more analytics and keep that contact in the database. A bot that searches for specific words might remove up to 40% of valid contacts from your database.

Thirdly, all database aggregators that everyone uses have a high error rate. They show you the validity status, but upon detailed rechecking, that contact hasn’t worked there for more than 3-4 months. In most cases, up to 50% of the contacts in the exported database are invalid.

Sales Strategy

How do you believe in what you’re doing? Correct—you ask colleagues who have achieved success in what they’ve launched or implemented. It seems that many initiate projects purely based on rumors of future success. The main task of any manager is to ensure that the information you receive through friends, clients, or exhibitions is confirmed by data, articles, and mentions—that this trend clearly influences something you can implement soon and can systematically bring you results. What is most lacking in all this? Correct—analysis, research, interviews. Who should be doing all this? The marketer or you personally? Both of you together.

The second problem arises when you either completely trust the marketer and it doesn’t work out, or you don’t trust the marketer and it still doesn’t work out. Everyone has different experiences and abilities to analyze market information, and relying on just one solution is a sure path to zero results.

Team Management

Are you doing everything yourself using a bunch of AI assistants? Or are you first building a team and going through joint adaptation to each team member’s management level? We often meet sales enthusiasts who want to manage everything themselves and don’t see anyone to help alongside. “I write all the best emails myself, implement all the tools myself, generate all the ideas on where to go with my outstaffing offer myself, make mistakes myself!” The only good thing about this approach is that one person in the company holds all the knowledge, and if this colleague decides to leave, all the knowledge leaves with them.

Secondly, a single specialist who is currently handling the main tasks and bearing the main stress load will potentially, after six months, reduce their productivity and lose confidence that they’re doing everything right. Stress, combined with focusing everything on oneself and not considering external feedback, puts you at risk of either winning or ruining everything after six months of active effort. According to our statistics, about 5% are such talents who can succeed on the first try; the rest, after 3-4 attempts, return to employment or simply abandon the business due to burnout.

What We’d Like to Advise You

From the main set of solutions I’ve touched upon in the article, there are still cycles that young companies fall into when they get their first client. Here are the main pitfalls that can derail your strategy:

1. The first client is a victory, but it’s not a pattern.
2. Your ICP client profile should evolve as the company grows.
3. It will be 100% better if you handle initial communications personally or together with colleagues, rather than relying on texts from ChatGPT.
4. Your team is your investment. You can personally manage a team of up to 10 people; beyond that, you won’t have enough energy to maintain the number of inquiries and confidently make decisions in the long run.
5. You should always study market materials independently and enrich your knowledge. The street, friends, and clients are just some of the possible sources of information.
6. You can acquire your first clients through outreach within 3-12 months, depending on the quality of process execution.
7. Your first hired sales manager can relieve you of 50% of your workload, which you should compensate for by growing current clients and building a referral channel.

This list can be expanded indefinitely because more than 20 typical problems bring people to us for consulting. The main issue everyone faces isn’t launching lead generation but analyzing what was done wrong. Many lack the time, experience, or understanding for this.