How This Sales Operations Manager Turned a Data Quality Challenge into a Record-Breaking SaaS Launch

This is one of the very interesting, and I think an example that I would like to highlight, which I'm really proud of, actually, Brandon, uh, and it's in continuation with the SAS launch that we had in 2021. So, um, as I said, the project had the highest visibility, both from leadership team and, uh, the investors or the board of directors as well. And my responsibility was to manage the overall data quality. Of the project, uh, I was working side by side with the CFO of the company who had this vision of converting Erix from DAS to SAS, and, uh, the, the project involved basically going back in history 10 years back, reviewing 2,000+, uh, contracts that we had with the, with, you know, various customers for all these 3 verticals. And, uh, asking myself questions such as, uh, who was the customer, what did we offer, whether the product that was offered was a recurring revenue product or one-time revenue product, so categorize those broadly so that we would come up with. Uh, you know, the opening and opening ARR balance for 2021. So as we open the door for business in 2021 as a staff company, we know how we, where or at what number we are starting, and then, you know, basically that number will influence the targets for the sales owners, uh, what should be the growth that company should be achieving in this year, and, you know, uh, the critical decisions around that as well. So, I was handling this project single-handedly, uh, when it comes to the data quality side, and I definitely needed help from, or uh, you know, had to cross collaborate with the, uh, finance, legal, uh, engineering team at times to understand or to kind of connect the, uh, connect the missing pieces of the, of the puzzle because not all the. Historical information was available on Salesforce. Uh, so, um, I think, uh, that, that, that particular project went on for 8 to 10 months, uh, requiring me to put in 14 to 16 hours of my, uh, work day, uh, you know, uh, so it challenged me both mentally and physically. When I say mentally. the reason being, uh, a lot of the things were not known to me. I learned it on the, on the fly based on my discussions, brainstorming with the, you know, the experts in the, in the company, as well as going outside in the external resources like LinkedIn, sales operations group, or, uh, talking with the companies, uh, who are going through this type of transformation by. Themselves. So the lack that, that gathering that knowledge and translating that to a map to Indrix's requirement was 11 of the key, uh, key, uh, challenges at that point in time, and, uh, physically, because, yes, uh, I was doing this along with the daytime job that I, I was supposed to do of, you know, managing this, working with the sales team. And, uh, you know, regular, uh, managing processes, technology stack, and all the other operations that I do. So, yeah, um, part of, uh, fast forward a couple of months, I want to say that, uh, we did launch on time. We were able to identify top key metrics, uh, that now, uh, we do track. So the way we do sales forecasting now has completely changed, and I also got Ace Award for my input and, uh, and quality, uh, quality output and as well as cost effectiveness, uh, for this particular project.

Sure, so when it came to historical data, um, not all information was available in Salesforce, right? So if you go back in history to 10 years or 8 years, uh, you, the, the data in Salesforce may not be clearly defined, so we don't know whether the. Customer is which is the customer or whether they are a direct customer or a customer through a reseller or a partner. We didn't know. I didn't know what, uh, what products we had offered, having changed the product names and price books several times since then. Uh, it was really not clear in terms of what was the product offered and whether that product was part of subscription versus one time, you know, so it's more like a NRE or a setup fee kind of a revenue versus a recurring revenue, which is what will contribute to the ARR reporting, right, going forward, um, um, so missing information for sure, missing information or incomplete information. Uh, having wrong data was also at times, and also, um, automation around that, uh, this, uh, uh, going through 2,000+ records line by line and basically reviewing the contract, reviewing the billings information. From finance from all three different systems, um, and then mapping those numbers in Salesforce, uh, was a very tedious task. If there was no automation done, this would have taken even longer time, uh, for a one or a two person team. Uh, you know, and then it could have impacted the timeline, which was definitely not in, uh, you know, the, the a trade-off that we wanted to do. So, those were a couple of challenges, high level challenges that I faced during the, during the process here.

Mm, I definitely learned a lot about myself, I would say, um, uh, how, how result driven I am. Um, when I take ownership about a project about any project, I definitely, uh, mm. You know, make sure to go above and beyond and deliver those results, um, but at the same time, I learned a lot about the, the concept itself, SAS methodology, um, and, um, you know, what is important for, from investors' point of view versus the internal users' point of view. So how the leadership team thinks strategically when it comes to making decisions like. You know, transitioning from, uh, transitioning into a different business model, that was a very huge learning. And also in this, uh, I, I also learned about my, my, I think people people management skills, uh, when it comes to interpersonal communication, cross cross collaboration, I, I think, uh, it basically challenged me a lot. Uh, in terms of, you know, interacting with multiple people, getting the information from them, uh, on time with quality feedback, and, um, so all that was definitely part of a big learning for me throughout the process.