GTM Ops
Sales Operations
By Artium Koner, Founder & CEO · Updated
Sales operations is everything that keeps deals moving and reps selling instead of doing admin: lead routing, pipeline stages, forecasting, stuck-deal alerts, the SDR process, and the playbooks and data reps need. As part of our fractional GTM ops team, we build and run it in HubSpot, so every lead has an owner and every deal has a next step.
Sales ops usually lands on whoever is closest: a founder, a COO, a sales manager between calls. It works until volume grows. Then leads sit without an owner, deals stall without anyone noticing, SDRs prospect from spreadsheets, and the forecast becomes a guess. We move that work into the CRM, define the funnel once, and keep the pipeline moving as the team and the targets change.
This is part of what our fractional GTM ops team does. Ongoing work runs on reserved hours every month; bigger builds are scoped as projects.
What does sales ops cover?
The operations that sit between a lead arriving and a deal closing, and the forecast built on top of them.
- Lead ownership and routing, with alerts when a hot lead arrives
- Pipeline stages that mean the same thing to every rep, so deals move and stuck ones get flagged
- Forecasting: a live forecast with a committed and a realistic view
- The SDR process and workspace in HubSpot
- Outbound infrastructure: domains, inboxes, lists, enrichment and sequences
- Sales enablement: playbooks, collateral and the account context reps need before a call
- Demo booking and no-show recovery
- Seats, permissions and the admin nobody else wants
How do you keep deals moving and catch the stuck ones?
Every stage gets a definition and an expected time in it. Deals that sit too long are flagged to the owner and the manager in Slack, instead of waiting for the next pipeline review to be noticed. The same alerts cover hot leads and at-risk accounts, so the moments that move revenue reach someone who can act.
For a newly funded FinTech we traced where deals leaked after the first discovery call and fixed the process gaps behind it, so the pipeline stopped losing deals between stages.
Can the sales forecast be trusted?
Only if it is built on the pipeline rather than next to it. We give the forecast a committed and a realistic view, keep stale deals out of the commit, and separate new business, renewals and expansion so one does not distort the other.
For a growth-stage DevOps company we rebuilt the pipeline architecture, and the first-meeting win rate was measured for the first time: 18.5%. A number like that is what turns a forecast from an opinion into arithmetic.
Can SDR prospecting run in the CRM instead of spreadsheets?
Yes, and it should. For a digital media company that prospected from spreadsheets with no stages or history, we rebuilt outbound on HubSpot's Leads object and Sales Workspace, defined the full outreach funnel, and fixed inbound capture that had been silently broken.
For a Series A FinTech we implemented the SDR process end to end and wired the sales engagement tool into HubSpot so only interested contacts and meeting-bookers enter the CRM, keeping it clean.
How do you launch outbound without burning the main domain?
By building the infrastructure before the first email goes out. For a B2B SaaS company moving from paid inbound to outbound, we set up seven sending inboxes on a dedicated domain, then lists, enrichment, sequences and routing, so the main domain stayed protected.
What does sales enablement look like in practice?
Reps get what they need before and during a call without searching for it: the playbook for each stage, collateral that stays current, and the account context already in the record. For one client, a scoring model feeds a documented SDR playbook, so reps know which accounts to work first and how.
Calls feed the playbook back. For a growth-stage DevOps company we added AI call intelligence, so objections and competitor mentions from real calls show what the playbook needs next.
The stack we build this on
References
Client work behind this service
Projects that make this concrete
Common questions
Do you build the sales forecast?+
Yes. We build it in HubSpot on top of the pipeline stages, with a committed and a realistic view, and with renewals and expansion separated from new business. Your sales leader owns the number; we make sure it is calculated the same way every week.
Do you run outbound for us?+
We build and run the outbound infrastructure: domains, inboxes, lists, enrichment and sequences in HubSpot. Your reps or SDRs have the conversations.
Which sales engagement tools do you work with?+
HubSpot sequences, Apollo, Instantly and Smartlead, wired into HubSpot so only the contacts worth tracking enter the CRM.
Do we need more HubSpot seats?+
Fewer than you are likely being sold. We have right-sized a client to 28 seats and avoided an Enterprise upgrade they did not need.
Want this built for your team?
You will talk to the person who architects it, not an SDR.