Sales Operations
Sales Operations is responsible for everything from lead management, sales strategy, and territory structuring and alignment to sales process optimization, compensation plans, sales automation, training, and data analytics and reporting.
What does sales operations do?
Sales Operations vs. Sales Enablement
Sales operations and sales enablement sound similar. Sales enablement is also working to improve sales productivity and boost revenue, so do you need both?
The short answer: Yes.
“I think of sales enablement as a component of sales ops,” says Ferrer. “Sales operations analyzes the data and makes decisions, and sales enablement helps roll out those decisions.”
For example, Ferrer explains, sales ops might determine your salespeople are moving too quickly through the discovery stage of the sales process — and hurting close rates. Consequently, sales enablement would create sales training to help reps run a better discovery.
It’s also worth noting that sales enablement is usually more active earlier in the buyer’s journey, concentrating its energy on training and prospect education. Meanwhile, sales operations deals more with the negotiation and closing stages, along with high-level things like territory design and sales compensation.
To make sure your sales ops and sales enablement teams are complementing — not conflicting with — each other, we recommend creating a clear division of labor. Each department should have separate goals, deliverables, and key metrics. (We talk more about the sales operations team structure below.)
Periodically, ask both teams to sit down and discuss their ongoing projects to ensure they’re not duplicating efforts.
Sales Operations Roles and Responsibilities
The broader purpose of sales operations is to enhance the effectiveness, productivity, and business impact of your sales team. To achieve this, though, your sales ops department has many roles and responsibilities.
1. Cross-Functional Collaboration
Sales operations acts as an advocate for your sales team by playing a key role in sales and operations planning (S&OP), a business management process where leadership teams meet to ensure each business function is aligned.
2. Sales Data Management
Sales operations measures and evaluates sales data to determine the effectiveness of a product, sales process, or campaign. By doing so, sales operations can verify the success of a product or service or choose to implement a new sales plan or process if the data is reflecting otherwise.
Sales ops also uses internal performance data, along with external market and competitor research, to craft sales strategy and achieve sales goals.
3. Sales Forecasting
By studying and understanding past data and performance trends, sales operations can forecast future sales and report on future goals and needs. This is important as sales forecasts allow sales teams to spot potential issues while there's still time to avoid or fix them.
For example, let's say your sales operations team uses the length of sales cycle forecasting model. If they've identified your average sales cycle to take four months, and a salesperson has been working an account for one month, sales ops would forecast that salesperson is 25% likely to win the deal.
4. Lead Generation
Sales Operations handles administrative tasks like lead generation and appointment bookings with leads and contacts. They take care of this so that salespeople can focus on selling.
One way that your sales operations would do this is by ensuring strong s ales and marketing alignment with an (SLA). An SLA helps answer questions and clarify communication around how sales teams can follow buyer personas, who on the sales team accepts marketing qualified leads, and where content like sales enablement lives.
5. Performance Management
Sales operations manages sales rep compensation plans and incentives. They also set rewards for superior performance and establish processes for acknowledging and resolving poor performance.
Moreover, sales operations may conduct regular sales performance reviews or coach sales managers on how to conduct proper reviews of their own. While your sales team works on growing your business, sales operations works on improving how you can do business better.
6. Sales Representative Support
Sales operations exists to make salespeople more efficient and impactful. They do this by providing leads, managing transactions, drawing up contracts, and providing training on time management skills.
Sales ops may also purchase tools to help ease the responsibilities of your sales team, such as HubSpot’s Sales CRM, Sales Hub.
7. Sales Strategy
Sales operations teams often use their data analysis and forecasting to establish a sales strategy and set future sales goals. The department is also responsible for building a sales process that improves conversions, shortens sales cycles, and maximizes sales wins.
8. Sales Team Communications
Sales operations is responsible for keeping the sales team aligned by reporting on sales and campaign results as well as communicating team news and sales wins.
The team may also do this by establishing communication channels, such as Slack or an internal wiki. Similarly, they may invest in a customer relationship management software (CRM) to help ease data and information sharing across your sales organization.
9. Sales Team Organization
Sales operations influences the structure and organization of the sales team to maximize its efficiency, impact, and performance.
For example, the sales ops team may notice some reps have strengths working with small business customers while others prefer to work with enterprise-level customers. Noticing this, sales ops may choose to reorganize the team so that every rep is working with the customers they prefer.
10. Technology Management
Sales operations oversees the implementation and use of technical tools and platforms, often in collaboration with the IT team, to make sales more efficient.
11. Territory Definition
Sales operations is responsible for defining and assigning various sales territories to salespeople. This is an important responsibility as territories often determine sales reps' prospect options, available commission, and even work hours.
Given that sales ops also establishes sales strategy and compensation plans, they should also be in charge of territories.
12. Training
To build a successful sales team, sales operations assumes the responsibility of training new and current employees. Sales ops may also develop sales mentoring programs to maintain a strong team and build camaraderie.
These roles and responsibilities cannot be achieved without an effective sales operations team structure. We talk about this next.
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