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Sales Operations

Exodigo: Territory Expansion Strategy

A complete sales operations framework for infrastructure tech expansion into a new U.S. state, balancing reactive support with proactive market intelligence.

Timeline 72-hour assignment
Role Strategy Pursuits Manager (Interview Project)
Company Exodigo (Infrastructure Tech)

The Challenge

Exodigo, an infrastructure technology company, needed a comprehensive sales operations strategy to support their expansion into a new U.S. state. The challenge was to design systems that would enable the sales team to successfully market and sell in unfamiliar territory while maintaining pipeline health and conversion quality.

The assignment required me to propose solutions across four critical areas: Sales Enablement Content, Analytics & Reporting, CRM Strategy, and Long-Term Growth Strategy.

Key Constraint

New territory with zero existing relationships or market intelligence

Success Criteria

Enable sales team to move from cold outreach to qualified pipeline to close quickly and efficiently

My Approach

Dual-Pronged Strategy: Reactive + Proactive

Rather than treating territory expansion as purely reactive (waiting for leads), I proposed a balanced approach that combines immediate sales team support with aggressive market intelligence gathering and a redesigned CRM & incentive structure that appropriately weights behaviors that align with a company's longer term health.

🎯

Reactive: Sales Team Support

  • AI aggregated POC data retrieval for active opportunities
  • UX-optimized CRM interfaces and iterative improvement of which fields are collected analog during outreach based on qualitative feedback from sales members
  • Micro-optimizations like Hubspot keyboard shortcut training, incentives tied to keystroke tracking over a short period
  • Automated alerts for stuck deals
☂️

Proactive: Market Intelligence & Flow Restructuring

  • Aggressive national data collection
  • Incentivized outreach campaigns
  • Real-time pipeline health dashboards
  • Relationship mapping & tracking

💡 Core Insight

Infrastructure projects have long sales cycles (12-24 months), high average contract values, and, intuitively, high CAC. This means any change to certin metrics such as time to close or proposal success rate can yield an outsized financial gain. In the sales flow for government funded bidding, there are many variations that, if sectioned into distinct funnels, would better guide sales members toward prioritizing the pipelines that best support the long term financial health and large scale positioning of the company. For example, optimizing for things like relationship quality and pre-approved vendor status yields far better ROI than optimizing for volume.

Incremental Funnel Weighting & Fractional Values

I proposed tracking a variety of parallel funnels with different stage weightings to reflect the reality that a number of binary decision trees meaningfully alter closure probability and inflection points.

The example here is pre-approved vendor relationships, which convert at dramatically higher rates but are often not established in time to bid because that groundwork prior to a new project coming to the table hasn't traditionally converted to direct short-term financial incentive for the regional sales member.

ABC Baseline Funnel ($700k TCV)

Prospecting $70k
Proposal $140k
Bid $350k
Contract $630k
Award $700k

ABC Pre-Approved Baseline Funnel ($700k TCV)

Prospecting $280k
Proposal $385k
Bid $490k
Contract $595k
Award $700k

Pre-Approved Vendor Funnel ($15k experienced value)

Initial Outreach 5k
Familiarity 8.5k
Request Made 12k
Request Approved 15k

Strategic Implication: The time investment to become a pre-approved vendor dramatically shortens the sales cycle and increases win probability in future bids. By attaching a financial incentive to this flow - in this case 15k - we better align a sales associate's incentives with the broader incentives of the company. Sales ops tracks funnels independently since they have different realized financial value weightings at each stage and a variety of timelines.

CRM Architecture & Relationship Intelligence

Key Features

  • AI-generated contact summaries
  • Email thread highlights
  • Personal detail tracking
  • Automated pipeline forecasting

I designed a CRM system that surfaces relationship intelligence automatically. For example, when a sales rep opens a contact record, they immediately see:

Overview Activities Notes
AI Generated Summary

Exodigo is on the pre-approved list for the MTA, making all of their projects high priority. The MTA currently has 3 major projects in the pipeline but this is the only one still in the bid process.

We have previously worked on MTA projects with Seeks & Mill Architecture and Halford Construction. We have completed 2 MTA projects, both within the past 7 years.

Phil Leeds has been MTA's POC for 11 years. Exodigo has exchanged 24 emails with Phil over the past 7 years.

Highlights from email threads:
  • 🏌️ Golfer
  • ⚾ Yankees fan
  • 👨‍👩‍👧 Wife named Nancy

This level of detail allows sales reps to personalize outreach without the traditional overhead of keeping personal notes or rereading previous emails.

Executive Dashboards & KPI Tracking

I proposed a HubSpot GUI dashboard design with real-time metrics across 6 key performance indicators, each color-coded by health status.

Dashboard Overview

17.4 /20
New Lead Gen
13.8 /20
Time Per Stage/Avg
16.4 /20
Margin
11.2 /20
Closure Time/Hrs
18.9 /20
Vendor Relations
9.5 /20
Forecast Variance
Pipeline Value Won $3.29M / $3.87M 85%

Each KPI has defined thresholds (0-20 scale) that trigger different alert levels, allowing leadership to identify bottlenecks at a glance. While the metrics themselves are merely an example set, I've chosen these to highlight the true strength of this dashboard system - letting the numbers, when read together, tell a story.

For example, the above dashboard shows a concerning status around both time each deal is spending in each stage and number of salesperson hours being spent on each deal before closure, however we see strong relationships with vendors in the region (there isn't a personality issue or mismanagement of relationships to slow deals), measured negotiation around margin (the salesperson isn't pushing so hard to maintaing high margin that they're freezing momentum), and great lead gen (new opportunities in the region are still coming in) BUT we see a very unhealthy forecast variance score. With all of this information, a team lead can come into a review expecting to hear a narrative that outlines a specific regional issue that was not accounted for but has halted projects previously in the pipeline, such as a political election shifting spending priorities. This gives for the sales team member and the team lead a shared language to lean on when considering next steps.

Deliverables

What I Created

📊

GUI Dashboard Mockups

6-KPI real-time tracking interface with health indicators that help build robust narratives to bridge the conversation gap between sales members and the team lead

📈

Executive Summary Template

Monthly reporting format with AI-generated narrative insights

🗂️

CRM Workflow Design

Contact intelligence system with automated relationship tracking

📚

Sales Enablement Library

Digital asset organization system + UX recommendations

🎯

Multi-Funnel Strategy

Parallel tracking for a variety of vendor paths to capture revenue traditionally lost on pursuing suboptimal bids

🤝

Market Intelligence Framework

Proactive outreach & data collection methodology

Key Learnings

Build to the Practical Experience

In markets with 12-24 month sales cycles and high contract values, optimizing for relationship depth and variance in practical success metrics by building an incentive structure and measurement process that rewards broader health indicators pays greater dividends than optimizing for lead volume.

Balance Speed with Quality

Sales teams need instant access to data (reactive) which in the short term is an analog process, but sustainable growth comes from building systematic market intelligence and robust automated and/or low friction systems (proactive). Both are vital.

Surfacing Intelligence

Any action a sales member has to perform inefficiently will be performed inefficiently 50x a day. There are quality of life improvements we can make for the team that will also meaningfully move the needle on output when viewed in aggregate. A CRM flow in 2025 should surface historic data intelligently to lower the burden of the sales team. AI summaries, email highlights, and personal details should be accessible without friction.

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