You may not think about your sales operations team first when you think about your organization’s successes and failures when it comes to closing deals and retaining customers. Maybe you should — Sales ops provides the bedrock foundation for sales.
Does “support” or “operations” sound bland? The reality couldn’t be more different. Sales ops brings structure to the world of sales — their efforts remove friction, and give salespeople more time to connect with prospects, lead demos, and land deals.
More than that, sales ops builds out processes and workflows that set up salespeople for success. These data-driven process- and people-oriented strategies make the difference between a sales team that’s functional, and one that flourishes.
Here are three important ways that your sales ops team helps to drive efficiency and, in turn, boost revenue.
Invest in the Right Technology
When it comes to tools, products, and services, your organization has a lot of options — tons, really. And each one of these tech solutions promises to be a turbocharger, working wonders to save time.
It’s true that technology makes an impact to your sales team’s productivity. With the right tech solutions, sales reps can reduce time spent on administrative work (searching for contact information, for instance, or finding a just-right piece of marketing material for a prospective customer). Remember what we said about friction? One of the jobs of sales ops is to reduce the number of tasks that take salespeople away from selling. But, ironically, determining the very tools to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks can take up, well, a significant amount of time.
That’s where sales ops can help, by taking on the daunting responsibility of wading through all the solutions available, and determining the very best tools for the sales team. Not only does sales ops vet and research technology solutions, but they also help train your sales team, encourage adoption, and get the chosen platforms smoothly integrated into the reps’ workflow.
Increase Visibility
Beyond the top level of metrics — I’m talking here about quotas and close rates — sales department metrics can be somewhat hazy. Who’s digging into these numbers? It can be worth investigating the below-the-surface metrics — and that’s part of what sales ops does.
The team looks at the deals that don’t land — and digs into why. They build reports for upper management, glean insights from the information and, ultimately, help shape the overall sales strategy.
Bottom line: Your sales ops team will do a deep dive into your process and the performances of the team (and individual sales team members), identifying areas where they shine (and spots that could stand to improve). By digging below the top level to the nitty-gritty details, sales ops helps make valuable recommendations that can benefit not just the sales team, but the entire business.
Evaluate, Iterate, Dominate
Being stuck in a loop is usually a bad thing, but the circle of evaluate-iterate-dominate is a good place to be. Evaluating your work—and the work of your sales team—can help you find opportunities. Iterating through various revenue-focused programs, tools, and technology can steer you toward the best strategy for your company. The end goal, of course, is to dominate — but that doesn’t come without some legwork. And your sales ops team is primed to execute that invaluable process of digging into processes and testing out new strategies.
