Built the core commercial infrastructure—from onboarding and compensation to CRM, reporting and sales process—to turn early sales activity into a functioning, repeatable sales organization.
STAGE
MARKET
ROLE
PERIOD
Pre-series A
Kenya
Head of Revenue Operations
2022
01
Situation
Boya had early sales activity and a strong product, but the commercial infrastructure around it was still being built. Core elements like onboarding, compensation, CRM discipline, reporting and management visibility were either missing or inconsistent
02 Challenge
The immediate need was not simply to generate more sales. It was to turn a small, founder-led sales effort into a functioning sales organization that could grow without becoming harder to manage.
That meant putting structure around how sellers were hired, onboarded, compensated, managed and measured—without creating unnecessary process for a still-early-stage business.
03 Diagnose
The problem was less about individual seller performance than the absence of a shared commercial operating system. There was no single place to see what was happening across the pipeline, limited consistency in how the team worked, and too much information lived in people’s heads rather than in repeatable processes.The priority was therefore to build the minimum infrastructure required for the team to operate consistently and for management to see what was actually happening.
04 What I changed
I built the core commercial infrastructure around the sales team, including:
a compensation model tied to the behaviors and outcomes the business wanted
a defined sales process and clearer expectations for sellers
HubSpot configuration and CRM discipline
management reporting and pipeline visibility
dashboards designed around the questions leadership actually needed answered
clearer operating rhythms for reviewing performance and resolving issues
The goal was not to create a complicated RevOps function. It was to give a growing commercial team enough structure to peform.
05 What worked
Single Source of TruthCRM adoption as the system of record
Predictable pipelineVisibility from first meeting to close
Faster decisions Executives had the data to act confidence
Scalable foundation Process and systems ready for growth
06 What didn't/ friction
Not everything became standardized immediately. In an early-stage company, priorities shift quickly and processes that look sensible on paper do not always survive contact with the day-to-day reality of the business.
Some of the work therefore required iteration:deciding what genuinely needed structure, what could remain flexible, and where additional process would create more friction than value.CRM discipline was also not something that could be solved through configuration alone. Adoption depended on whether the system was useful to the people expected to use it.
07 What I'd do differently
I would spend even more time upfront defining the smallest possible set of commercial behaviors and data points the business actually needed.Early-stage organizations can easily over-engineer their systems in an attempt to look more mature. I would now be even more aggressive about separating what is essential for visibility and execution from what can wait until the organization is larger.I would also build adoption into the design earlier, rather than treating process design and change management as separate activities.
08
Framework/ Takeway
The goal was not to replicate the infrastructure of a mature sales organization. It was to create enough structure that the business can grow without losing visibility or consistency.
