fullcast.io: Ultimate Unifier of Sales Operations

Dharmesh Singh, CEO & President

Fullcast.io was founded in 2016 by Dharmesh Singh and Bala Balabaskaran. After working together for more than a decade at Microsoft and Salesforce, and gaining experience on business and sales planning, the duo translated their expertise and built a platform that can be leveraged by mid-market companies to transform sales operations into growth opportunities by taking out the manual work that connects sales planning to sales execution. By combining the perfect blend of people, process, and cloud technology, fullcast.io provides a holistic solution to streamline and automate sales operations.

Following are the insights shared by Dharmesh Singh, CEO, fullcast.io as to how the company imparts their unique value propositions across sales initiatives of all shapes and sizes.

What are some of the trends that you expect to have an impact in the Sales Technology arena this year and how is fullcast.io planning to leverage these trends and evolve?

There is a lot of investment done in the marketing automation to augment the so-called “top of the funnel” of firms. Consequently, the amount of leads that the companies are getting today is higher than it was, say, five years ago. In addition, the transition to, and wide adoption of SaaS offerings have bought in a lot of specialization as to how sales is executed. Till a few years ago there was only an account executive, or an account manager; who owned the “sales territory” of an enterprise in question. Today, even for a ten thousand dollar deal, multiple personnel will be involved. This has led to an increased need for specialization in sales operations wherein specific tasks are assigned to respective sales personnel. In this changing landscape, we see sales operations as a strategic enabler of growth that CXO’s should be paying attention to if they want to compete. It is the glue that holds and coordinates activities across the spectrum of the customer interfacing roles.

When we think of companies like Microsoft, Google etc, we think of them as operational machines- they do it with a lot of automation. Companies aspiring to be world class will need to integrate planning with execution to be responsive to an always evolving go to market strategy. CXO will need to stop seeing Sales operations as a purely back office support function and a series of disjointed ad-hoc activities. Without the integration of planning to execution, you will get suboptimal resource utilization.

Our goal is to build a platform for fast-growing companies to integrate the planning to execution loop in sales and keep things aligned through configuration and enforcement of sales policies to stay agile.

Please walk us through your Sales Technology solutions on the basis of its methodology, features, and benefits involved?

Sales is dynamic, no matter where you are today, you will be doing things differently six months from now. We believe a dynamic solution needs a policy enforcement engine to enable an agile adaptable organization. Our solution is a platform that integrates sales go to market planning to sales execution. Traditionally, sales planning is excel driven and execution is CRM and the two systems don’t talk. Our platform delivers a software-defined operations solution where customers can define their go to market plan for teams, customer segments, Channel partner and products, configure sales policies and then with a click of a button push the policy changes into CRM to be enforced and connect the CRM to the planning app for customers to track plan versus actual in real time.

Our goal is to build a software-defined operations platform for sales operations teams which can help them plan, configure policies, enforce policies and track plan versus actual

Can you talk about the different roles that your singular platform can deliver?

We bring together alignment between CRO/VP of Sales, VP Sales Ops or Strategic Planning and Sales Ops Analysts. From a CRO’s perspective, we adopt a top-down approach; if Sales ops has to be strategic CRO’s will need the ability to track their entire customer interfacing teams effectiveness and they will need to ensure that all stakeholders have a shared view of the plan and how we are performing against it. They will need to see the plan versus actual with a lens of KPI. For instance, some customers might value sales margin as a decisive, performance evaluative factor while others would like to see their current sales numbers or the pipeline. Whatever the requirement may be, they get holistic insights through our system as they can see the plan they initially had when starting and how exactly it is materializing in real-time. Instead of having to work on siloed excel sheets and disjointed CRMs, they are working on a single app interface that unifies the former and latter.

VP sales Strategy and planning need insights into plan versus actual to do what-if analysis as they update GTM plan and answer board questions related to growth.

Sales Ops Analyst don’t need to spend time thinking about process and policies and writing one of custom code. We give them time back to focus on higher-valued add insights work by codifying best practice policy that will help them streamline their out of control tool stack and data problems.

What are some of the factors that put fullcast.io ahead of the competition?

We are the only system that integrates sales planning with execution. We have the ability to bring in all your planning data in one place and then give you access to best practice sales policies that help our customers to get ahead of the curve with respect to their peers by breaking down organization silos across customer facing roles. Having a policy defined approach makes us unique and we get to help our customers streamline their tools stack.

We are the only organization that views sales as a dynamic organization as opposed to a static operation and have built a platform that helps teams manage the dynamic nature of sales through a policy framework. Point solution tools work best for addressing static processes, but sales processes are inherently dynamic and are bound to evolve in tune with the growth of an organization. A policy-driven approach is imperative for a transparent and streamlined sales operation.

Could you share with us a client success story that you’ve had in the recent past?

An emerging brand that had already established a name in its industry vertical came to us in search of means to better manage their growing sales teams. As their business grew, more leads started coming in and consequently, and they didn’t have the infrastructure and policies to identify and categorize leads effectively. In other words, they had difficulty in “balancing their business territories” amongst sales reps. Their Salesforce platform was housing a lot of “dirty data” as accounts were being mapped for anyone who interacted with their websites without keeping a check on duplicate information, or previous log-in details, or if the interaction spurred from the same company. They had no policies in defining the context and constraints at which accounts should be created. Within 90 days we were able to automate their entire account hierarchy infrastructure and deliver a scalable platform that could accommodate sales reps as they joined the firm.

What is next significant step fullcast.io would be taking in the future?

We feel that we are uniquely positioned to build a first of its kind software defined sales operations as a category, and in the next 12 to 18 months we will continue to help customers operationalize their sales operations through a software-defined platform.