If someone asked us, “what is the most demanding and fastest-growing role in sales?” we would say sales operations. But the only way to make the most of this role is to structure it properly. It is because sales operations lie at the core of every sales process, from meeting to coaching, lead generation, prospect handling, and closing leads.
As sales Ops lies at the core of your sales department, it is essential to get it right.
Sales experts often present formulas for the ideal structure and approach to sales operations. Contrary to convention, we aim to guide you by highlighting what you should avoid in the management of your sales operations.
But first, we will clear up the basics.
What is sales operations?
The focus and aim of your sales Ops is to enhance the efficiency and output of your sales teams.
While this is quite a broad definition of sales operations, the actual definition is subjective from one organization to another. Generally, your sales ops team works to support and enable sales teams to sell better, faster, and more efficiently.
In a nutshell, the sales operations team serves the following functions:
- Sales process development and reinforcement.
- Strategic planning.
- Sales training.
- Setting up and managing the CRM.
Beyond these functions, a sales officer ensures that there is a unified direction for your sales teams so that customers can have a consistent sales experience throughout their journey.
Sales Operations Don’ts
Don’t create a disconnect between metrics and strategy.
The more seamless your sales processes are, the better they are. Gauging performance using metrics is great, but your salespeople should always remind themselves of why they are using these metrics in the first place. Use every metric with an end goal in mind; otherwise, you may lose yourself in the maze of metrics and never achieve any result.
Streamline the connection between metrics and strategy. Keep your salespeople focused on the overarching strategy of the organization.
Don’t forget your KPIs.
Ask yourself why you created a fully-functional sales operations team in your organization. It is because you could see your in-house sales team performing well. Do you think you can tangibly improve the performance of your sales teams without measuring their KPIs?
Hence, you cannot miss out on the key performance indicators. You need to track the KPIs so you can respond to your immediate business needs. Additionally, the KPIs must be tracked regularly because an untracked KPI will not fetch you anything.
One more thing to remember about KPIs is that they are three-dimensional. They gauge your past performance, assess the current, and indicate how your future performance would be based on the current sales operations strategy. Insights from these KPIs help you improve and tweak to yield valuable results.
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Don’t rely on stale data.
Data is the lifeblood for your sales operations team. Having data in abundance can lead your team to rely on stale data along with freshly retrieved data. The key lies in finding those golden needles in those huge haystacks. And it is a bit challenging to do so.
You should pick up data that is super-relevant to your sales teams. For example, you do not need to know the entire day’s schedule of your prospects; you just need to focus on what is relevant to your business. Extract data that helps you measure your salespeople’s performance and overview your customers’ journey.
Don’t let prejudice about attribution blind you.
Personal biases and prejudices not only exist in our personal lives; they are also present in sales and marketing. Let us tell you how.
While attribution models help you fill in the gaps on why and how a prospect turned into a customer, you cannot blindly trust whatever the model has to tell you. Instead of being prejudiced by the attribution, you must rely on your human instinct to interpret and act on the model along with the data it is built upon.
Wrapping Up
By avoiding what not to do with your sales operations, you have already won half the battle. You are soon going to dominate the industry with the performance of your sales teams. While we have given you a comprehensive list of don’ts when it comes to managing your sales operations, you need to understand that sales operations are an evolving function. It is complex, yet it adds enough value to the business table.
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