Sales Operations Lead: David Gauld of Cloudreach

David Gauld, Sales Operations Lead at Cloudreach, jumped onto the Sales Operation Demystified Podcast and shared his journey into Sales Ops. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here

Connect with David Gauld and Cloudreach here:

• David Gauld 
• Cloudreach

Tools Mentioned:

• DiscoverOrg
• Salesforce
• Pardot
• SalesLoft
• FreeAgent

Key Takeaways

David’s journey into sales ops

While most journeys we see are based upon people studying and learning Sales Ops, David’s journey is based solely on experience-based learning. He believes that his time at FreeAgent taught him everything there was about Sales Operations. If we want to find a concrete beginning to David’s journey in this field, he had been selling things way before getting a formal contract with FreeAgent. It was a side job that he had. David then got signed up to a contract with FreeAgent for around 18 months, after which he got a job there. He then grew the sales ops office there, and FreeAgent grew as a company. David admits that this unorthodox journey worked because of the sales ops industry’s nature at that time. It was much looser than it is at the moment. 

David’s team at Cloudreach 

David’s team at Cloudreach has been a massive upgrade in size and procedure from FreeAgent. It is a clear step up in terms of the operating tier moving a truly global organization. Where FreeAgent had organically brought in its tooling as need arose over time, and he was supporting a total of ~18 sales individuals with 2 dedicated people in the sales ops team. Cloudreach, on the other hand, has ~70 quota carriers to support, a pre-existing robust tech stack and 4 dedicated sales ops colleagues.

The effect of coronavirus on the team

Sales ops is an exciting story. When asked about the effects the pandemic causes on the team by their leader, many suggest that it was a pretty tough experience. Managing the entire pipeline while running a team remotely can undoubtedly be a very daunting task. Others suggest that they had already been running remote partially before the pandemic hit. 

However, David gave a very intriguing response. He revealed that the sales ops team at Cloudreach had already been running entirely remotely. It is an organization that supports remote teams online. There are employees present worldwide who work from their homes and work alongside everyone else. For David, it was very normal to deal with everything through his computer screen. He already had plans for how to do things. That is why it was no problem at all for David and his team when the pandemic hit, in professional terms, at least. On the personal side, however, David does believe that it is imperative to make sure that every employee is taking care of himself/herself. These are challenging times for everyone, and it is crucial to make sure that every employee only takes on work that he/she can manage and not overburden themselves. This is the only thing David has to worry about, specifically while everything else remains the same. 

The effect of coronavirus on David’s forecasting 

Ideally, in David’s opinions, the team’s performance should not be hampered. Ideally, it should all be smooth sailing. However, inconsistencies are what creates the problem. At Cloudreach, every rep sends its forecast every day. The way it can be assured that they are accurate in their projections is by making them confident enough to know what is being asked of them. This is something that needs to be taken care of in remote environments. So, in this case, they have not made sweeping changes to their model. However, what they have done is that they have committed to making consistent changes in how they support their employees. They are trying to refine the communication techniques to produce better and more consistent results. 

James’s biggest influence

• Simon Sinek – Optimist and Author at Simon Sinek Inc.

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