Sales is the heart of every business.
Products solve customer problems, but sales help ensure customers get the solution they need.
Since the 1970s, sales operations has helped organizations analyze data to provide actionable insights to sales professionals.
Now, sales operations is much broader and covers many activities.
The main goal?
Reach sales objectives, including revenue, sales, and growth targets.
In this guide, you’ll learn what sales operations is, why it’s an important part of your sales department, and how to implement effective sales operations strategies to reach your goals.
Table of Content:
- What is sales operations?
- Sales ops vs. sales enablement
- How is sales operations beneficial to organizations?
- What is the role of a sales operations team?
- 5 Best practices for sales operations
- What tools should sales operations teams use?
- How to measure the success of sales operations
- How Clari can elevate your sales operations
What is sales operations?
Sales operations, or sales ops, is the process of managing and implementing a sales plan. This includes:
- Setting goals and objectives
- Analyzing customer data
- Establishing new sales processes
- Managing resources and teams
- Generating leads
- Optimizing pipelines
- Automation and technology
- Reporting
Sales operations aims to maximize sales productivity and effectiveness to boost revenue.
An effective sales operation will reduce different friction points in your sales process so your reps consistently reach new heights, hit sales goals, and improve your top line.
Sales operations will manage everything your sales teams need to ensure they can implement sustainable business growth.
Sales ops vs. sales enablement
Sales operations and sales enablement are related sales terms, but they have clear differences:
- Sales enablement is a single component of sales operations.
- Sales operations analyzes data, makes decisions, and implements them.
- Sales enablement is the part that puts those ideas into action on the implementation side of things.
The question is, do you need both sales ops and sales enablement teams?
Absolutely.
Sales enablement is really one slice of the sales ops pie. While sales operations analyzes sales data to make informed decisions, sales enablement helps implement those decisions in real time.
For example, with sales operations, you might find that your sales reps are speeding through discovery calls too quickly, leading to lower close ratios.
Upon presenting these findings to the sales team, sales enablement would ensure new training is given to sales reps to improve discovery calls by helping them not rush through.
Another difference is that sales enablement is typically much more intense in the beginning stages of the buyer’s journey.
How?
With training and prospect education.
On the other hand, sales operations is more focused on the latter stages of the sales process to help with closing calls, negotiations, as well as broad activities like territory design.
How is sales operations beneficial to organizations?
A company won’t know where to go or what to do without sales operations. Sales operations is a compass that allows the sales ship to navigate to its destination.
Here are a few reasons why you need to implement sales operations in your business:
Data-driven decisions
Sales ops leans on data to drive decisions—teams look at what’s working to come up with a strategy to improve performance.
By focusing on a data-first approach, sales operations allows your organization to forego guessing games for a scientific approach to sales.
Improve revenue forecasting
With better accurate data, sales managers can better predict future revenue and plan accordingly. Sales operations ensures accurate data by leveraging the right tools.
With robust sales tools, sales leaders can predict future sales and revenue to give strategic insights to the rest of the sales team.
Increase total revenue
With better revenue forecasting, sales ops leaders can adjust their sales strategy to hit higher targets.
For example, if your sales ops is predicting a downturn in revenue next month, you can implement new activities to plan for a revenue boost ahead of time.
Improved sales processes
Sales ops gives you data with powerful insights to improve your business, both to grow your revenue and to improve your processes so you get more done in less time.
For example, with sales ops, you might find that you’re getting a ton of leads into your sales pipeline, but the time between entering and hopping on a call is taking longer than normal, causing leads to slip away.
In this scenario, you could instruct your sales reps to focus more on booking those calls quicker to improve their sales processes and close more deals.
Easier sales rep onboarding
With better sales processes, new sales reps can be onboarded quickly to start selling faster.
Sales ops can inform sales organizations with accurate training data that helps you improve your training (which dives into sales enablement). This means your new reps can get trained better to get up to speed faster and start closing deals.
What is the role of a sales operations team?
Curious exactly what functions a sales operations team does within an organization? Here are some of the most common roles of a sales ops team:
Data analysis and reporting
The core function of sales operations is to collect, analyze, and interpret sales data. Here are a few ways sales ops functions in data:
- Sales data management (collecting and organizing data).
- Technology management (analyze, oversee, and implement different sales tools).
- Forecasting revenue (analyzing and interpreting data to predict future revenue).
Management and training
While sales ops primarily focuses on data, it also provides management and development to the rest of the sales team:
- Cross-functional team collaboration (helps sales teams partner with marketing and customer service to work in unison).
- Performance management (regular performance reviews, reward creation, etc.).
- Administrative tasks (organizing teams, hiring, scheduling, etc.)
Pipeline growth
Sometimes, sales ops departments will also take a more proactive approach to fuel pipeline growth.
For example, sales ops may also be functioning in lead generation:
- Pipeline management
- Lead generation
- Appointment bookings
5 Best practices for sales operations
Here are some of the best practices for solidifying your sales operations:
1. Define clear goals and objectives
Your sales ops and greater sales team need to be on the same page. The best way to make this happen is to ensure you have the same vision.
This means aligning both teams by starting with your overall mission statement as a company.
After this, your teams should have a core objective with clear goals attached to it.
For example, your sales ops team may have a core objective to elevate sales by 20% this year. From there, you can break down the objective into clear goals.
If you hit $5 million in revenue last year, you’ll need to generate an additional $1 million to reach $6 million.
To achieve this, your sales ops team may want to:
- Increase total leads
- Increase calls books
- Increase close ratio
- Increase sales team size
- Generate more deals from current customers
2. Set up a strong leadership team
Once you set your objective and goals, it’s time to set up leadership.
You should appoint a head of sales operations and an accompanying leadership team. This person and team should lead all sales ops activities and functions.
4. Collaborate regularly with sales ops and sales teams
Once your leadership team is set up, you need to get the rest of the sales ops team and greater sales teams on board. Your sales ops leaders need to collaborate regularly with teams and provide training and ongoing support.
3. Create a centralized knowledge base
One crucial step to getting everyone on the same page in your sales department is to create protocols, training materials, and a knowledge base that everyone can reference and use as a resource to refer back to when needed.
Make sure you provide training on how to use the knowledge base itself as well. Provide initial training to ensure everyone is set up and ongoing reminders to make sure your team is leveraging the resources you provided.
5. Leverage the right technology
Your knowledge base will be one form of technology your sales ops and broader sales team will have access to. But it’s not the only one.
You need to ensure you equip your sales ops teams with supportive sales ops technology like a revenue intelligence platform.
With Clari, you get access to world-class revenue intelligence software to help you:
- Sales forecasting
- Sales engagement
- Revenue operations
- Data capture and insights
- Deal inspection and management
- Mutual action plans and deal rooms
- Conversation Intelligence for real-time insights on calls
What tools should sales operations teams use?
As mentioned above, you need to ensure you have the right technology to enable your sales team to thrive.
Why?
With the rise in sales technology in recent years—especially in SaaS—sales teams have to manage the complexities of different tools, integrate them, maintain workflow, and train sales reps to keep up with the tools.
That’s where sales ops bring organization to your sales department. Sales ops is responsible for managing your tech stack to ensure sales reps can focus on the prospect rather than managing technology.
Here are the main types of tools a sales ops team should have:
- Sales analytics
- Email marketing
- Sales forecasting
- Sales enablement
- Lead management
- Process automation
- Revenue intelligence
- Sales territory design
- Configure price quote (CPQ)
- Commission or payout software
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
How to measure the success of sales operations
If you want your sales ops to succeed, then you need to measure your progress.
Here’s a simple four-step process to measure the success of your sales operations:
1. Define sales goals
As mentioned earlier, a crucial best practice is to develop clearly defined objectives and goals for your sales ops team.
What’s your main objective? Increase overall sales? Increase profit? Improve retention?
Start with your overall objective for your sales teams and then move backward.
For example, some common sales ops goals are to:
- Optimize sales forecasting
- Improve sales productivity
- Enhance sales processes
- Improve sales enablement
2. Choose your sales operations KPIs
Now that you have set your common objectives and goals, it’s time to determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) to know if you’re on the right track.
You must ensure you’re setting up quantifiable indicators to measure how much you exceed (or fall short) your goals.
Here are a few key sales metrics to track:
- New leads
- Close ratios
- Pipeline velocity
- Conversion rates
- Quota attainment
- sales cycle length
- Sales rep performance
3. Implement a sales operations feedback loop
Next up, you need to ensure you’re creating a feedback loop to monitor sales performance for your sales ops team.
This means setting up a process to:
- Gather feedback
- Analyze feedback
- Act on feedback
Whose feedback do you need to gather?
Your sales team, sales leaders, customers, and other stakeholders.
A few ways you can gather feedback are:
- Polls
- Reports
- Surveys
- Reviews
- Interviews
Remember to collaborate frequently with your greater sales team to ensure you’re aligned on how you’re acting on feedback.
4. Benchmark your sales performance
Finally, it’s time to benchmark your progress and successes. Benchmarking your results is a great way to ensure you evolve as a sales ops team.
As time passes and you have more data, you’re setting your KPI results as a new low to overcome.
For example, let’s say you hit an average of 127 closed deals in each quarter last year.
Your new benchmark for closed deals is 127. Anything less than that would be considered moving backward, not forward. Once you set your benchmarks, you can aim for new heights as a team.
How Clari can elevate your sales operations
If you want to grow your business, then you need to make data-driven decisions.
Sales ops helps you collect, analyze, and interpret sales data to help you accelerate your revenue growth.
If you’re ready to take your business to new heights, then Clari is a great option.
Clari is a leading revenue intelligence platform that helps sales ops leaders and sales reps collect, analyze, and interpret accurate data to drive revenue.
With Clari, you can:
- Forecast flawlessly
- See revenue goals from every angle
- Unify your sales data to drive cross-department success
And more.
Ready to use a data-driven approach to reach new sales heights?