Your business needs sales to drive revenue, but even the best salespeople can’t reach their full potential without a solid sales operations team and the right tools to support them. Our goal is to help you empower your sales operations team and give them the tools they need to support your salespeople so they can focus on what they do best: closing deals.

Sales Operations: A Brief Overview

Sales operations, frequently shortened to sales ops, refers to the unit, role, activities, and processes within your sales team or sales organization that supports, enables, and empowers your frontline sales reps so they can sell faster, better, and more efficiently.

Sales operations provides structure by effectively using data to drive strategy, craft best practices, and help you craft effective training guides. It also empowers your team so they can leverage technologies effectively. Unfortunately, many organizations continue to overlook this critical department, unwittingly hampering their sales reps and limiting their organization’s potential.  

Sales operations has a broad scope and a deep impact, affecting your team’s productivity and efficiency, and ultimately impacting your bottom line.  

The Key Functions of Sales Ops

Strategy

Originally, most sales operations departments consisted of small teams of analysts who conducted financial analyses, reported data trends, and forecasted sales. However, most modern sales operations teams have evolved and use more powerful data analysis and reporting to provide critical insights into:

1. Optimizing your sales process

2. Analyzing your performance metrics

3. Formulating incentives programs

4. Evaluating your sales team’s training needs

5. Assessing and adopting sales methodologies

6. Selecting enablement software and other technology tools

7. Assigning sales territories and forecasting growth

Operations

Sales operations professionals handle a variety of critical administrative and operational tasks, freeing up your sales superstars so they can focus on sales.

From an administrative perspective, your sales operations strategy should:

• Handle salesforce recruitment, onboarding, and training tasks
• Help you implement and manage compensation and incentive programs

• Determine how accounts and territories are allocated
• Facilitate communication and collaboration
• Mange contract lifecycles

Process and Performance

Your sales operations team can help you streamline your processes, speeding up your sales cycle, and supporting your sales teams so they can close more deals. As the old saying goes, what gets measured gets managed; a good sales operations team will help you:

1. Select key sales metrics to adopt

2. Train, develop, coach, and mentor your sales team

3. Optimize and implement your sales process, including:

1. Workflows

2. Sales activities

3. Lead generation

4. Conversion rates

4. Implement your sales frameworks and methodologies

5. Optimize your sales tools, knowledge base, and other assets:

1. CRM (customer relationship management)

2. Automation

3. Data analytics

4. Contract management

5. Forms and templates

6. Client engagement and outreach

Creating a Sales Operations Team that Suits Your Unique Business Needs & Goals

Sales operations is critical, but with so much to do, many organizations feel overwhelmed. As such, many organizations continue to take an ad-hoc approach, which may work for very small companies but doesn’t scale.

To help you get a handle on your sales ops, we sat down with Anthony Enrico, the VP of Worldwide Sales Operations at Emailage, in one of our recent Fireside Chats, and he had some excellent advice.

While no two businesses are completely alike, there are a few things all organizations should have in place. All organizations, regardless of size or vertical, should make sure they:

1. Clearly define who is reporting to who

2. Have processes in place that define the tasks, responsibilities, and deliverables for each role

3. Have a hiring rubric

4. Have a detailed list of all the tools and other technologies currently being used

5. Have a list outlining what tools and technologies are used to complete each job

Taking a holistic approach helps ensure nothing gets overlooked, but it also allows you and your team to break down large, potentially overwhelming goals into manageable tasks. By investing the time and energy into getting your processes right, you can set your team up for success and avoid headaches later on.

Make sure you take the time to determine how your sales team should be designed and determine the best ways to support your existing customers and attract new customers. You should also make sure that you adopt the best organizational structure for your needs and goals so that you can effectively engage with customers and create brand awareness.

One of your biggest goals should be supporting your sales team so they can spend their time effectively. By investing in a solid sales operations team, you can free up your sales reps for selling by offloading administrative and other important but not directly sales-related tasks onto your sales operations team. This allows you to optimize and maximize seller time, customer success time, and sales management time so your sales reps can focus on prospecting and nurturing customers instead of manually updating your CRM, conducting their own sales research, hunting for potential prospects, and sorting out which sales rep will handle which account and how territories are defined and allocated.

The goal of sales operations is to support your sales team, and the best way to do this is through effective leadership and taking a proactive approach, not waiting for the sales team to tell them what they need. Your sales operations team should be actively involved in a variety of leadership decisions, including:

1. Whether to hire more salespeople

2. Determining if there is more capacity in existing sales territories

3. Whether or not to hire more CSMs

4. Whether or not your current and projected revenue streams are sufficient

By taking the time to slow down and create a robust, comprehensive, and flexible plan, you can minimize or even avoid making mistakes that could have serious ramifications later on. After all, it is always better to avoid a mistake than have to go back and try and fix it later on. Even the best sales operations team can’t tell the future, but they can help you gain a holistic view of your organization, how different processes are interconnected, and what effect different decisions may have on your company’s future.

You can watch our full Fireside Chat video here.

How Can FullCast Help?  

FullCast is a dedicated platform for revenue operations designed to seamlessly connect strategy and operations while shortening the amount of time it takes to take your organization’s strategic go-to-market plan and help you act on it.

FullCast is designed to help your sales team hit the ground running by empowering your team and turning your salespeople into sales leaders by giving them the tools they need to succeed.  

For Sales Managers

• No more waiting: Our easy-to-use, self-service platform means you can move, add, and change accounts, territories, coverage, and quotas quickly and easily.
• Hit the ground running: You can set up your sales team with territories and quotas the day they start, minimizing downtime.

• Easily model the impact of changes: With FullCast, you can see the impact of territory moves, role changes, and quota changes on key KPIs without needing to wade through piles of spreadsheets.
• Easy to read productivity and performance metrics: Easily track teams, individuals, territories.

For Sales Strategists

• Segmentation and territory: Quickly and easily build complex territory and segmentation models using our AI engine.  
• Coverage models: Easily design your selling roles and coverage model, and push your models to Salesforce with the push of a button.  
• Quota and target planning: FullCast makes it easy to set up and collaborate on quota planning across your entire organization and set up MBOs and KSOs for your organization from a territory, team, and product perspective.
• Plan your workforce: Easily create a proposed organization chart and quickly compare your current and future states.  

Are you ready to empower your sales team? Book your FullCast demo today!

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