Understanding Sales Operations

A company’s operations team is responsible for everything from managing leads, selling strategy, and territory planning. Further, alignment to optimizing the customer experience, compensating employees, automating processes, and analyzing and reporting performance metrics leads to true cohesion. This post is an acting guide on efficient sales operations team structure!

Why Is Sales Operations Important?

A good way for a company to increase its revenue stream is by having an efficient and effective support system. By taking on the majority of administrative duties, a company frees up time so employees can focus on selling instead of pushing numbers.

How Do Sales Operations Work?

Sales Operations (or SalesOps) reduces the time and effort required for your sales team to close deals. It handles every aspect of your sales process, making your salespeople more effective and successful. Below are a few points of what SalesOps do:

• Utilize data for performance monitoring to draw conclusions regarding bottlenecks in the sales process.
• Support sales teams in finding new leads and prospects (both inbound and outbound).
• Implement sales techniques and best practices that optimize performance flow.

What Sets Sales Operations Apart From Sales Enablement?

Sales operations and sales management are two different aspects of a business. Sales operations focuses on improving sales productivity and boosting revenue streams, whereas sales enablement teams aim to enhance customer experience by providing better service and support. 

So, does your business require both? Sales operations analyze the data and make key decisions, while sales enablement helps roll out processes that make operations a breeze. In short, yes! 

Sales Operations Team Structure

Forming the right team is crucial because sales operations involve many intricate and vital tasks.

Overall, sales ops team competencies can be put in two buckets:

• Tactical and support
• Strategy and design

Tactical and support are the enablement teams while strategy and design falls into the operations aspect of a business.

Roles and Responsibilities of the Sales Operations Team

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Sales operations advocate for your sales team by playing a pivotal role in sales and operations planning (S&OP). Leadership teams meet in this business management process to ensure each business function is aligned.

Sales Data Management

To assess the success of a product, a sales strategy, or a marketing campaign, sales operations teams analyze and evaluate sales data.

Sales Forecasting

Sales operations managers are able to anticipate potential profits and assess needs and objectives by reviewing and analyzing historical data and performance trends. This is important because sales forecasts enable sales teams to identify possible problems or issues earlier to resolve them.

Lead Generation

The sales department handles administrative duties, including lead generation and scheduling appointments with prospects and contacts. They manage this so that salespeople can concentrate on closing deals.

Performance Management

The sales ops manager oversees the objectives and rewards for sales rep compensation. They also develop procedures for recognizing and addressing subpar performance and rewards for outstanding performance.

Sales Representative Support

Operational management exists to increase the effectiveness and impact of salespeople. To do this, they provide leads, monitor transactions, and draft contracts by the sales team.

Sales Strategy

Area sales teams frequently use data planning and analysis to build a sales model and establish targets for future growth. Additionally, the department develops a sales cycle that boosts conversions, reduces sales cycles, and increases sales wins.

Sales Team Communications

By updating on sale and campaign results and sharing team updates and sales successes, sales operations roles are in charge of maintaining the sales team on the same page.

Technology Management

In order to increase sales productivity, the IT team frequently works in conjunction with sales operations to monitor the adoption and use of sales technology platforms and software.

Defining & Planning Sales Territory

The sales director’s responsibility is determining and allocating different sales regions to representatives. This is a crucial duty in territory planning because these areas frequently dictate client options, available compensation, and even the work hours of sales agents.

Training

Sales operation leaders are responsible for educating new hires and existing staff members to create profitable sales representatives. To keep a strong team together and foster collaboration, sales operations may also create sales training opportunities, processes, and onboarding.

Sales Operations Metrics To Achieve Goals

The following are the standard SalesOps key metrics that are discussed below in detail:

Close Rates

There are two ways to improve your close rate:

• Generate more leads to close more deals
• Do a better job converting existing leads into sales

Sales Cycle Length

Sales cycles vary between various items, markets, and businesses. It may take a few weeks for some product lines, while it may take many months for others. When companies sell very simple-to-use products, their sales cycles are shorter.

Average Sale Value

It is computed by multiplying the accumulated revenue increase over a timeframe by the sales volume during that period.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The overall cost of your revenue, marketing, promotion, and advertising for a certain period of time may be added up, and your CAC can be computed by dividing the total by the number of new customers you acquired during that time. This differs from your funded CAC, which solely considers paid advertising costs and leaves out operational and labor expenses; it is referred to as your combined CAC.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

LTV is the amount of money you anticipate a customer will bring in during their relationship with your business. It is determined by dividing the per-user average revenue by the duration of the user’s stay.

Pipeline Quality

The sales pipeline performance metric represents the number of opportunities most likely to result in sales. A higher ratio indicates that you are locating and evaluating opportunities effectively.

Lead Momentum

The lead velocity rate calculates the increase in new, qualified leads over time. This measure can be used to anticipate revenues and business growth and offers insight into how quickly your sales performance and sales funnels are expanding.

Sales Methodology To Achieve Goals

The following are some effective ways to manage a successful sales operation team to achieve goals for the growth of an organization or business:

• Implementation of a proper CRM system.
• Establish strong leadership to achieve sales goals.
• Use the right sales tools and software to operate day-to-day tasks or sales activities.
• Create a culture and activities for excellence in work.
• Focus on customer satisfaction and retention.

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is Sales Ops?

Sales ops is a term used to describe any process related to managing sales teams. This process’s primary purpose is to maximize salespeople’s efficiency and help them generate maximum profits.

How do Sales Ops differ from Sales Management?

Sales management is concerned with the entire life cycle of a sale, whereas sales ops focus on the tactical aspects of selling, such as planning, execution, and closing.

Why should I use Sales Ops?

There are several reasons why you need to implement Sales Ops:

• It helps you improve the quality of your salespeople.
• It provides you with a clear picture of where your sales are going.
• It enables you to create a more efficient sales process.
• It helps you identify areas of improvement and make changes accordingly.
• It helps you understand what needs to change within your company to reach its goals.

Is Sales Ops only applicable to B2B companies?

Yes, Sales Ops is primarily focused on B2B businesses. However, many benefits are associated with implementing Sales Ops in B2C and B2B organizations.

Can Sales Ops be implemented without using a CRM tool?

No, Sales Ops cannot be implemented without using a good CRM tool. You need a robust CRM solution to track all the details about your prospects and customers.

Final Thoughts

A company’s operations team is responsible for everything from managing leads, selling strategy, and territory planning. A good way for a company to increase its revenue stream is by having efficient onboarding, training and organizational processes. Contact us at The Brooks Group to get even more support to build your team structure.