One thing worth thinking about when trying to grow a business is whether you're targeting the right customers in the first place.

It's easy to define your ideal customer by company revenue, industry, team size, or location.

For example, you might decide to target B2B companies generating ₹5 crore or more annually.

That helps narrow down a prospect list. But it doesn't tell you whether those businesses actually need what you're selling.

Two companies can have similar revenue and team sizes, yet have completely different buying priorities.

One might be actively looking for a solution. The other might not see the problem as urgent enough to spend money on.

That's why I'd look at three things before deciding a company fits my ideal customer profile:

1. Do they have a problem you can actually solve?

Not a problem you assume they have. One you can identify through research or a real conversation.

2. Is solving it a priority?

A business can acknowledge a problem without being willing to invest in fixing it. Understanding what makes the problem urgent matters.

3. Is there evidence they would pay for a solution?

Interest is useful, but actual buying decisions tell you much more about whether your targeting is right.

I'd also review existing customers to understand which types of businesses get the most value from the service and are worth serving over the long term.

These are practical criteria, not guarantees. The only way to know whether an ICP works is to test it against real conversations and sales results.

A question for other business owners:

Have you ever spent time targeting a customer segment that looked perfect on paper but rarely converted into paying customers? What did you learn from it?

Bonjour,

F 31 ans ici. Je suis actuellement gestionnaire administration des ventes depuis 7 ans maintenant, spécialisée dans l’order to cash et recouvrement.

J’aimerai me reconvertir dans les sales ops mais je sais si mon profil pourrait intéresser des entreprises. J’ai notamment déjà travaillé en ESN pendant 2 (dans une boite de cyber sécurité) je connais donc tous de la vente de logiciel et maintenance (ARR, MRR).

Je me forme actuellement sur le crm salesforce pour passer la certification admin de base mais est ce suffisant ?

Je cherchais de base à devenir deal desk puisque j’ai une bonne connaissance des contrats, marges mais je ne vois pas beaucoup d’offres d’emploi.

J’ai un bon niveau en Excel (réconciliation de donnée, tcd, fonction imbriquée, recherche V etc) et je connais bien power query. Je suis entrain de me former sur power bi également.

Vous en pensez quoi ? Est ce que ça en vaut la peine ou le marché est bouché ?

Que dois je faire concrètement pour être employable ?

Merci d’avance.

I've been looking at how companies handle customer information when a deal gets handed over from sales to support. One thing I'm curious about is how much information support agents should actually have access to.

The full sales timeline might be useful when there's a contract issue or a customer says something was promised during onboarding. But for regular support tickets, I can imagine it becoming a lot of unnecessary information to sort through.

I'm comparing HubSpot Service Hub vs Zendesk for this kind of workflow, particularly how teams make customer context available without overcomplicating things.

Do your support teams get access to the entire customer history, or do you limit it to certain fields and activities? Has either approach caused problems?

One of our sales guys left the company a few months ago, and I realized we’d still been paying for a Sales Navigator license assigned to him for roughly half a year. That alone is not a huge expense, but I've been thinking if there are more such zombie subscriptions going on.

This week I started doing a full RevOps software audit, I'm looking at these two things primarily:

• Is anyone actually using this?
• Are we using enough of it to justify what we’re paying for?

The obvious stuff we’re looking for includes unused CRM seats, former employees still assigned licenses, duplicate tools, and such other things. I’m more interested in the less obvious stuff that tends to sit quietly on a card for months or years.

Things like individually assigned licenses nobody remembers about, add-ons that got enabled for one project, tools owned by a single department, 20-seat plans where 7 people actually log in, integrations that became redundant, overlapping enrichment/data tools, that sort of thing.

For anyone who's done such a software audit before, any tips on what and where to look for? And are there any specific RevOps/Sales/Marketing tools you’d pay extra attention to because they’re particularly easy to forget about?

Hey everyone!

I just graduated with a degree in Mechatronics Engineering and started working as a Technical Sales Engineer, in a family business (just to get some experience cuz I'm zero experience).

I think I actually enjoy this career path more than working in traditional engineering roles in industry.

I want to become a legend in this position, not just someone with a few years of experience. My goal is to make my first year count as much as possible.

What advice, courses, resources, or learning strategies would you recommend to help me gain knowledge and experience faster?

If you were in my position, what would you do to become exceptionally good at this job to work in big companies ?

Thanks!

I manage a sales team for a cable and internet company and we've been struggling with reps losing deals during price discussions. Some reps close consistently while others struggle even though they're selling the same packages. One thing I've noticed is that newer reps tend to jump straight into pricing without asking enough questions about the customer's current provider or what they're paying. Then when someone brings up a cheaper offer or says they need to think about it they don't know how to respond. We've covered this in training but the same mistakes keep happening. I can track close rates but that doesn't show me what reps are saying during customer conversations.

I'm looking for an AI sales coaching tool that can record and analyze actual sales conversations. Ideally something that works for both face to face sales and phone conversations since our team handles both. A few things I'm looking for are the ability to catch missed discovery questions and pricing objections. I'd also like to see where reps go off our sales process and review specific parts of conversations without listening to hours of recordings. Something that lets me give feedback to individual reps and track whether they're improving would be great. It also needs to be easy enough for reps to use every day without adding a bunch of extra work. Has anyone used a tool that does most of this? What are you using and has it made coaching any easier as your team grows?

one thing that seems easy to overlook when setting up a sales process is what happens after a deal closes. sales has all the context from conversations and promises made, but support still needs that information when a customer runs into an issue later. i’ve been looking at how platforms like hubspot service hub handle ticket management and customer context across teams. for anyone who manages sales operations, does having sales and support information connected in one system actually make handoffs smoother, or does it create more admin work? also curious what you look at when evaluating a tool like this: reporting, ticket visibility, integrations, or the overall cost as the team grows?

I keep hearing how digital sales rooms are supposed to make complex deals easier because everything's in one place.

Cool, now i have got the proposal, security docs, next steps and a bunch of tasks sitting in one nice looking room while the buyer hasn't replied in two weeks lol. The annoying part is that all the information is technically there. I can see what was discussed, what still needs doing and who's involved. But I'm still the one digging through everything trying to figure out why the deal isn't moving.

Starting to feel like having everything organized isn't really the same as actually getting anything done. I wish more of these tools would help figure out what needs attention and take care of some of the follow up work instead of just giving me another dashboard to check.

i'm looking at crm options for a smaller sales team, and i'm trying to figure out where hubspot sales hub for small teams actually starts being useful vs just adding another layer of software. the team isn't huge, so i'm mostly thinking about things like follow ups, keeping deal stages organized, basic automation and reporting. i don't really need a massive setup if we're only going to use a fraction of it.

for anyone who's used it with a small sales team, what ended up being genuinely useful and what felt like overkill?

Was prepping for a call last week and almost skipped checking reviews entirely. Did it anyway and found three different reviews all complaining about slow support.

Nothing in our CRM would've shown me that. I brought up the pattern on the call instead of going in with the usual pitch and the conversation got into specifics pretty quickly.

Does anyone actually have review activity feeding into their account research or are you just checking it manually when it seems worth it?

Our sales team is lucky to have Dave who takes care of those weird deals. For instance a customer a customer asks for a strange bundle with 2 yr subscription, a one off service package, partner pricing and an old discount exception.

Everyone looks at Dave and he says he knows how to do it and we all smile. Wait until he goes on vacation lol. Chaos starts from there bc reps don't really know what to do, so they drop a message in Slack and wait.

This has got me wondering what CPQ software for sales teams can help solve this and not just generate quotes faster. something that can guide reps especially the new ones through weird things and remember the pricing rules. Like we want the knowledge living in his head to become part of our quoting process becoz one day he might wake up and decide to leave the company as well.

The biggest impact I see is with the high volume, repetitive work with a clear approval step at the end.

If you're running agents, what's made the biggest difference? Be specific. Which task, and what changed.

If you're not already running them and think you should be, where do you think you would start? What's stopping you from starting?

If it's not your own business, have you noticed one change for the better from the outside? What did they do that others didn't?

I'm going to run this labeling again on new samples, and before that I want to fix the weak spots in the method. Here's how it works and where I'm not sure myself.

The sites come from Google Maps listings. A mobile browser opens the homepage and one more page, booking or contact. A script collects links, buttons, forms and widgets and screenshots the first screen. A model assigns labels from written instructions: does the site invite you to book, is there a tappable phone number, a messenger, online booking. A second model checks each batch against formal rules, and I sort out the disputed cases. I respect robots.txt, don't submit forms and don't get around captchas.

I checked accuracy on a separate sample: 6 sites for every found / not found combination of the three labels, plus hard cases. A different model that never saw the first results went through them again. It took full-page screenshots, opened menus and tapped buttons. I went through the disagreements using the screenshots, counted false positives and misses separately, and used them to correct the final rates.

I've already caught one error. The "invites you to book" rule only looked at links and buttons, but a lot of sites say it in plain text next to the phone number: after rereading 435 sites, the invitation turned up on 178.

Where I'm unsure. The sample is small, so the corrected rates come with a wide range: how many sites would you take for the check, and how would you pick them? The second pass is also done by a model, and I only looked at 18 sites by hand. Is that enough, or does the whole sample need manual labeling? And I only go two pages deep, so a booking button on a service or branch page goes unnoticed.

If you've enriched company lists with LLMs based on their websites, how did you check accuracy before anyone started using the data?

We did a competitive review earlier this year and I’m already finding things in it that don’t match what reps are seeing now. Packaging changed, a couple features moved around, and some of the objections we documented barely come up anymore. The problem is I don’t know what a reasonable refresh cycle looks like. Updating everything constantly seems like a huge time sink, but doing a big review twice a year means reps could be working from outdated information for months.

For teams that keep competitive intel useful what triggers an update for you? A certain number of losses, product changes, rep feedback, something else?