Sales Operations is a division within a business that is charged with ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the company's sales. Sales Operations supports the company's sales team by creating, evaluating and optimizing data sets and sales applications. Through strategically implemented training, software tools and engagement techniques, sales ops enables sales reps to focus more on selling in order to drive business results.
Sales operations have been in existence since the 1970's, but its role has changed drastically over the last 5 decades. Once mainly number crunchers, sales ops professionals are now charged with handling an array of behind-the-scenes activities and tasks. The mandate is very clear - Free the sales team to focus on selling and equip them to sell as efficiently as possible.
Perhaps more than anything else, sales operations brings a system to selling.
What is Sales Operations?
Sales operations is a force multiplier and the critical link between the development and the execution of the sales strategy and go-to-market strategy. Basically, this boils down to helping increase the productivity or effectiveness of the sales team.
What does Sales Operations do?
Sales ops can handle a range of tactical and strategic responsibilities like:
- Hiring and training
- Territory structuring and alignment
- Compensation / Incentive plans
- Lead management
- Process optimization
- Sales technology and methodology evaluation
- Data modeling, analytics, and reporting
What impact does Sales Operations have?
Here are some specific ways sales operations can impact sales productivity:
- Active CRM ownership and optimization
- Tools integration
- Better reporting & dashboards
- Process improvement
- Best practice collection, inventory and sharing
- Comfortability with customers directly
Because sales ops handles both tactical and strategic activities, it’s helpful for team members to be technically adept, Operationally strong, collaborative in nature and skilled at project management.
Increasingly, a lot of organizations (irrespective of their sizes) across industries are outsourcing their Sales Operations to third party companies like Channelplay.
Why Outsource Sales Operations?
There are inherent benefits of outsourcing the sales operations like:
- Lower cost & risk
- Saves time
- Scale up quickly
- Access to high calibre sales people
- Internal headcount restrictions
- Internal financial restrictions
- No headache of managing resource life-cycle
- Bypass operational issues like attrition management
Because of its broad scope and deep impact on both top line (productivity) and bottom line (efficiency) performance, the sales ops department has become a strategic and indispensable component of an organization.
.png "contact us")
