Same exact gap shows up in sales hiring. Self-report is basically always going to be flattering. Nobody's going to tell you in an interview that they fold under pressure. We built IncaZing around exactly this — instead of asking people to self-report, we put them into real scenarios and watch what they actually do versus what they claim they’d do. The gap between the two is usually what's built as training modules, decision reports and hiring decisions.
Out of curiosity, what was the structure for your bible and what would you add or take out to improve it in retrospect? -
We started painting the picture of what each one of us needed to have access to, view, edit etc by sales roles.
BDRs, SDR,s AE's, Sales Managers, Directors, C levels, partners, and Board members.
It included everything from views, dashboards, fields that can be edited, forced objective filters instead of subjective answers (Easier to draw metrics/dashboards etc)
This was the core starting point.
Once this was drawn, we wanted to see how far we were with the existing workflows. The gap was too large, we couldn't even achieve 20% from the picture we painted and had to built almost 80% of the fields. The simplest way was to built the flows by reading the data from the existing fields, and not by deleting the fields/data. I strongly recommend that you take a backup on Hubspot before making large corrections. This allows you to restore if things go south. Hope this structure helps.
How large was your team for the 8 week turnaround? How was work distributed amongst the team members? - We were 170 folks in total when this activity happened. The teams ranged between 2 folks to 56 folks across 9 different teams in multiple roles starting from BDR to CEOs.
How did you handle issues that surfaced during the rebuild phase? - There were no major issues as such. We learnt that during the first few days, major issues occur when you delete a field or replace a field. Remember, this will disrupt the entire workflow the teams were used to all these years. I strongly recommend you manually create fields and start replacing like-to-like fields, so both old fields and new fields co-exist.
Once the entire org is happy with the workflow and everything is working as expected and you've given your team to adopt the changes, just delete the old fields and migrate fully after 8 weeks or so.
• How did you define success and set KPIs for the RevOps team? - Success metric was defined based on the quality of data, timeline, adherence and reporting quality. • What timeline did you establish for the cleanup and rebuild effort? - Across 170 sales folks, it was a decent 8 week roll out in phases. L1 thru L4 depending on complexity. Weekly leadership cadence is non-negotiable. Adherence was a new norm. Top down approach. And then roll out was pretty easy to the entire team once leadership agreed upon the bible. • What metrics did you use to track progress (data quality, adoption, reporting accuracy, integration health, etc.)? - Everything essentials for BAU, the non-urgent ones, the ones that had to be recreated or built from ground up were pushed for Phase 2 after the initial 8 weeks. • Did you tackle the work in phases, and if so, how did you prioritize them? - we took the bible seriously. Classifed what was essential, what was optional. That was a great starting point. With Hubspot, leaving the fields already used will certainly help. Just replace with newer, lesser fields on CRM. Never, ever delete fields or data on CRM. This is the first step for the mess to happen. • How did you balance foundational cleanup work against ongoing business requests and stakeholder expectations? - Simple, we did not touch anything that was BAU, we started replacing them with more meaningful fields that are bare essentials. Hope this helps
We did this exercise a few months ago. The way we did it was to first create a bible of what's what. Get the entire leadership to agree on it. No more exceptions after that. Changes were done in phases. Leadership was expected to adhere to the changes, Revops flagged any non-adherence in a weekly cadence leadership meeting, corrections were made real-time before moving to the next phase. We did the whole exercise and took us under 8 weeks for the whole revamp. We stuck to the bible, no revisions, just adherence in phases. But creating that master bible took us about 4 long-haul meetings, once it was well worth the effort for the one-time fix. All the best 🙂
Count me in - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashok-ambanee/
Hi everyone - IncaZing goes live tomorrow. It’s for sales professionals, sales teams and hiring teams who want to look beyond surface-level sales development. Not another badge. Not another framework dump. Not another course that sounds good but disappears in real sales situations. The focus is simple: Role-readiness. Sharper judgement. Better sales decisions. The human layer behind sales performance. If you’re a sales professional, it helps you see what your next move really requires. If you lead a sales team, it helps you understand where readiness and execution may need work. If you hire salespeople, it helps you look beyond interview polish before making the call. Drop by and take a look.
Testing Prospeo free plan wouldn't hurt though. Its a great replacement for all the other tools you shortlisted
Agree. Data is easier now. The harder part is still judgement. Teams can know what changed with a competitor and still not know what reps should do differently in the live sales conversation. That’s usually where the gap shows up for me.
This is a strong question. I’d look less at whether they can name the tools and more at whether they can explain trade-offs. For example: Why this workflow? Why this sequence? What breaks if volume doubles? What would they simplify if the team had no ops maturity? How do they decide what not to automate? Paid projects help, but the real signal is not just the output. It is how they diagnose, prioritise, explain constraints and recover when the build is messy. That usually shows more than a resume or polished interview answer.
Hey everyone, Ashok here. I’ve spent most of my career inside B2B sales — closing deals, building pipeline, hiring AEs/BDRs, managing teams, and seeing what actually happens when salespeople move from theory to the real seat. Over time, one thing kept bothering me. Sales training and certifications keep getting better packaged, but the same gaps keep showing up. A rep knows the script, but freezes when there’s silence. A candidate sounds great in the interview, but struggles when the role has ambiguity. A strong AE becomes a manager, but keeps rescuing deals instead of developing people. A team gets trained, but performance still depends heavily on confidence, judgement, pressure handling and role fit. That’s the space I’ve started building in. I’m building IncaZing — not as another sales course or badge, but as a way to look at role-readiness, role-context fit and the human signals behind sales performance. We’re opening this week, and I’m trying to speak to more sales leaders, founders and sales professionals who have seen these gaps closely. Curious to hear from this group: Where do you think sales training usually breaks first? Knowledge? Behaviour? Confidence? Judgement? Role fit? Or something else entirely?
