Why is it important to hire a Sales Ops function at a sales organization?

As a Sales Operations Leader at Anodot Ltd., I came to realize that Sales Operations leaders are hired and act as an advocate for the sales team by playing a key role in sales and operations planning (S&OP) to ensure each business function is aligned.

WHO ARE WE? Sales Operations leaders usually are considered as “supporting” sales function only, but in fact, it’s a critical and increasingly strategic function in an organization. Sales Operations leaders bring a system to selling. Through strategically implemented training, software tools, and engagement techniques, Sales Operations leaders enable sales reps to focus more on selling in order to drive business results. This often overlooked and sometimes under-appreciated department uses data to drive strategy, best practices to guide training, and technology to hack success.

THE PROBLEM: Sales Operations responsibilities are progressing in several organizations, but many companies — including startups — often struggle with effective selling and how to best employ sales operations. Problems include a lack of clarity in mission, goals, and responsibilities, overlap with other teams and departments, or the wrong people in the wrong places. However, there are ways companies can overcome these challenges.

The evolving field of Sales Operations covers a diverse set of roles and responsibilities to reduce friction in the sales process, and to increase sales productivity, revenues, and profits. With that support, sales reps can continue selling, while Sales Operations leaders make them as effective as possible through processes like data analysis, lead management, hiring and training, process optimization, communication and reporting, and increasingly, sales and revenue strategy (not only tactics).

THE DEFINITION: Sales Operations refer to the unit, role, activities, and processes within a sales organization that support, enable, and drive front line sales teams to sell better, faster and more efficiently.

Sales Operations leaders often described as “a force multiplier” and “the critical link between the development and the execution of the sales strategy and go-to-market (GTM) strategy” (Sirius Decision).

In order to build a successful sales plan to help the sales team, any organization, even a startup company, must hire a Sales Operations leader to support its sales team for a few reasons:

Strategy & processes are crucial for success. Your sales team is great at selling, but that doesn’t mean they can establish new sales strategies or put processes in place. A good sales strategy can be the difference between success and failure of a company. Therefore, Sales Operations has become a more powerful data analysis and reporting unit that can provide critical insights into the following areas:

• Sales Process Optimization & Assessment and Adoption of Sales Methodologies- to make sure sales reps are populating required data fields and following up with qualified leads at the appropriate times. This way Sales Operations leaders ensure that the sales reps are accountable and follow a formal sales process.
• Performance Metrics Analyses- Sales Operations leaders use sales systems to build dashboards and reports to give management much-needed visibility into team and individual seller performance metrics. This allows leaders, managers, and salespeople to make informed decisions for improving results.
• Formulation of Incentives Program & Evaluation of Sales Team Training Needs- Sales Operations leaders usually put together an effective onboarding program, train new talent on a company’s various sales processes, and educate on new hires on your specific market
• Sales Territory Assignment and Growth Forecasting- Sales Operations leaders help manage and define sales territories, adjusting territory mapping to account for customer base growth and new sales reps, to administer systems that are used for managing sales data. This results in healthier data as the company expands.

Data-driven decisions. Sales Operations leaders assist in revenue forecasting so sales leaders can divide their resources where they are most needed. However, the data analyzed by them covers much more than just forecasting. It includes metrics about all aspects of the sales team, funnel and sales reps’ individual performance. By studying and understanding the organization’s past data and performance trends, Sales Operations can build a forecast plan for future sales and report to management on future goals or needs. In other words, having this data enables leadership to make more data-driven decisions. This would be near-impossible if sales operations weren’t in place.

The modern sales organization creates a huge amount of data. Today, sales teams harness the power of big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to improve performance and future proof profitability. But because tool complexity can distract sellers, Sales Operations leaders should own the stack. Here’s what they should own regarding the tech stack:

1. Defragmentation & Integration of Technology Tools
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform & Data Analytics Software (Salesforce.com)
3. Business Intelligence Services
4. Communication and Conferencing Tools
5. Content Sharing and Management
6. Contract Lifecycle Management
7. Email Automation to manage leads cadences
8. Performance Management Software

By using such tools, Sales Operations leaders can measure and evaluate the organization’s sales data to determine the effectiveness of a product, sales process, or even a marketing campaign. By doing so, Sales Operations leaders can verify a product’s or a service’s success, they can choose to implement a new sales process or suggest alternative sales plan if the data is reflecting otherwise. Additionally, Sales Operations leaders also use internal performance data, along with external market and competitor research, to build a sales strategy and achieve sales goals.

This is the first out of a series of articles that were written to emphasize why the Sales Operations function is essential to a sales organization, in regular, and to a successful sales process, in particular. This series of articles will explain why it is important to hire a Sales Operations expert to build sales strategies & key metrics, to measure performance by using technology, to manage and cope with daily challenges and conflicts, how they use best practices or provide outside-the-box solutions, to better understand the difference (or not) between sales ops vs. sales enablement and more.