Achievers - Sales Operations Team of the Year

Company: Achievers, Toronto, ON, Canada
Company Description: Achievers’ mission is to change the way the world works. Our Employee Success Platform is specifically designed to drive higher levels of employee engagement. It’s built to align everyone with business objectives and company values, driven by recognizing shared victories every day. It’s designed to make success a way of life.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Operations Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Achievers 

As a leading provider of employee engagement solutions, at Achievers we are on a mission to change the way the world works. Our belief in a culture of recognition inspires our employees to achieve excellence. As an organization, we strive to disrupt the employee engagement landscape through our core value, “Be Bold.” To execute this value we built out strategies to grow and increase efficiency in our sales organization, expanded our product portfolio and entered into new international markets.

Our Revenue Operations (RevOps) team aligned hiring and operational plans to keep pace and support growing demands growing from 7 to 17 team members. We scaled core global operational processes, enhanced critical data-driven review processes, modernized our technology stack and made significant investments to grow our enablement function.


Despite the emotional pressures of the pandemic, this new team bonded over virtual stand ups and team building exercises. In the last year, we have driven improvements across operations through updates to processes and systems, more in-depth insights and reimagining our enablement strategy. We laid the foundation for optimal growth and responsiveness in a progressive industry in need of disruptive tools that will facilitate meaningful work in our new normal.

Outline the team's achievements since July 1 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):

Scaling operational processes that are critical to the sales process became the most important strategy to support the demands for growth.

● Deal Desk function launched in January with a vision to support the contracting and negotiation process. In the first phase of the launch we successfully established Deal Desk processes and workflows to ensure prioritization was established and prospect deadlines were met.

● Commissions: With over 100 commissioned individuals, we prioritized automating commission calculations using software. In the first phase, we implemented CaptivateIQ, removing the need to create and store personalized commission statements.

Technology Stack modernization
-Achievers’ CRM platform, Salesforce, was redesigned and relaunched in October. We leveraged advanced automation to minimize administrative work for sales teams while increasing dataquality. For example, the steps required to create a new opportunity in Salesforce have been reduced by 88%, while data completeness and accuracy remains 100% automated.

Enhanced critical data-driven review processes
-With lengthy sales cycles, RevOps led an intensive project that created the foundation of our data-driven culture. We identified the most important sales activities and metrics that have a direct impact on driving success. This project resulted in the launch of our Results, Objectives, Activities framework, which includes dashboards and reports to promote the right behaviors.

Grew Enablement function
-The enablement team at Achievers needed to grow to support the company's overall growth. To support demand, we more than double our enablement team and accelerated our e-learning plans to create a consistent Global experience.

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the team's past performance (up to 250 words):

Scaling operational processes
-Deal Desk reduced the administrative burden on legal teams by centralizing order form generation and ultimately reduced the time in stage from Named Vendor of Choice to Contract Out for Signature from 74 days in Q3’19 to 55 days by the end of Q2’20.
-Commission Automation improved the accuracy of calculations and created a transparent process for adjustments and disputes.

Technology Stack modernization
-By removing all technical debt from our decade-old Salesforce Sales Cloud, we were able to quickly implement six new sales productivity tools, review and optimize integrations for all thirteen sales tools in our technology stack, and track tool effectiveness and usage with ease.

Enhanced critical data-driven review processes
-Through deep data analysis we updated our funnel targets from marketing qualified leads to closed deals throughout the whole deal pipeline. This data helped drive our 5-year company-wide plan. The team used performance against these benchmarks to drive meaningful discussions, which led to increases in attainment from sales accepted lead to new initial meetings (e.g. from 5% in July 2019 to 13.6% averaging across the tiers.)

Grew Enablement function
-Supporting pipeline generation, our enablement team rolled out a 5-week certification program for our Sales team globally. We also refreshed our outbound prospecting framework to pull on industry best practices. These events drove improvements in our coaching processes, including the launch of Chorus.ai, a conversation intelligence tool and coaching scorecard resulting in opportunity creation growing 40% from May – July year over year.