Sales operations consist of a set of business processes and activities that are handled by sales operations professionals to ensure that all business protocols are followed thoroughly and the process is running smoothly.
Sales operations professionals streamline the sales process, administrate sales team’s activities, analyze trends, and forecast revenue.
In nutshell, your sales team remains functional because of sales ops professionals.
This article will teach you the real importance of sales operations and how to build a solid strategy around it.
What is the importance of sales operations for your business?
A sales report reveals that 85% of sales professionals agree that sales ops is becoming increasingly strategic.
With the help of sales operations, your sales reps can focus more on selling and you can utilize your bandwidth for creating better strategies.
What does the sales operations team do exactly?
Sales operations teams take care of these 5 essential things:
Administer the sales tasks
Manage leads and streamline sales process
Operate CRM and other automation tools
Develop strategies to achieve growth
Optimize the entire sales funnel
Obviously, these are crucial operations for any business and a dedicated team would add a lot of value. That’s the reason why 63.9% of organizations have a sales operations team.
If you look at the roles in detail, here’s how a functional sales operations team look like:
1. Sales operations rep
A sales operations rep’s main role is to administrate sales tasks, streamline sales processes, and manage leads.
2. Sales operations manager
A sales operations manager mainly looks over the tasks of sales ops reps. In addition, they are also responsible for optimizing the sales funnel, managing CRM and sales automation tools, work on developing strategies to achieve sales goals.
3. Director of sales operations
A sales operations manager works with the Chief Revenue Officer and overlooks the execution part of your sales operations strategies. A sales ops director coordinates with other executives, shares various ideas to optimize the existing sales process.
Sales operations vs. sales enablement: What’s the difference?
The sales operations team mainly focuses on building strategies, data analysis, and forecasting revenue. So, this team is connected with the upper-level management.
While sales enablement provides sales reps with sufficient resources such as automation tools, training, and company information to ensure a smooth work process.
Apart from these, here are some major differences between sales ops and sales enablement:
Sales operations
Sales enablement
Lead management and sales process optimization
The communication between sales teams.
Creating and managing sales compensation plans
Performance analysis
Developing sales strategies
Sales and content training
Sales analysis and forecasting
Tools to increase sales productivity
How to build a sales operations strategy?
A sales operation strategy requires various elements to make it a success, and I’m here to make that simpler for you!
With the following steps, you can easily build a solid sales operations strategy for your business.
1. Streamline your sales objectives
Decide upon what is your company’s objective, and then train your sales team with helpful tools and resources so that they can perform their assigned tasks efficiently.
2. Implement an effective lead qualification process
When the leads are not qualified properly, it hampers productivity and eventually prevents your reps from achieving their targets. Your strategy needs to create a process that can qualify high-intent leads so your reps can close more deals.
3. Utilize sales operation tools
Sales operational tools such as CRM software, communication tools, automation platform, data analysis software, content management systems can increase productivity and help in seamless execution of your sales process.
4. Identify and implement key metrics and KPIs
Key metrics and KPIs vary from business to business, like there will be a significant difference when we compare KPIs of B2B sales cycle with B2C.
So first, you need to identify the metrics that can be utilized to measure the success of your sales operations for your business.
You need to have two kinds of metrics – Top Performance Metrics and Top Efficiency Metrics.
Top performance metrics include win rate, sales quota achievement rate, pipeline value, deal size, and the accuracy of sales forecasting.
In top efficiency metrics, lead response time, selling time, length of the sales cycle, and pipeline efficiency are included.
Successfully manage your sales operations with Salesmate
A successful sales operation strategy needs an efficient and value-driven CRM.
Salesmate can take you closer to your goal, increase overall productivity, and help strengthen the business process.
Let’s see some of the values you’ll get from Salesmate to build effective sales operations.
Seamless communication and team collaboration
During the entire process of sales operations, you’ll be communicating with various team members and operational heads.
Let’s admit, when you don’t have a proper communication channel, it messes with productivity. Not just yours, but the entire team.
First of all, Salesmate has all the communication channels covered. You can communicate via emails, calls, texts, or videos with your customers and teammates.
Here are top values you’ll get when it comes to communication:
Built-in calling: Call anyone from anywhere using virtual phone numbers of 80+ countries
Smart emails: Sync your inbox and send emails quickly with pre-made templates
Shared team inbox: Collaborate with teams using a common inbox and mention teammates
Video communication: Connect globally face-to-face. Salesmate connects with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom
Manage deals and pipelines effectively
Capturing and managing deals has become easy with Salesmate. You can directly collect leads from the website using attractive web forms.
Moreover, predefined workflows enable you to auto-assign leads so that no deal falls through the crack.
With Salesmate, you can create as many pipelines as you want for various purposes to effectively achieve your sales goals.
Insightful reports
Salesmate reports provide actionable insights so you can see the deal win-loss rate, activity statistics, visualize past revenue trends, and so much more with pre-made report add-ons.
Moreover, the activity leaderboard enables you to keep a track of how your sales team is performing and provide helpful feedback to help them perform better.
All this, with so little efforts
Salesmate comes with top-notch automation functionalities that’ll reduce your manual work drastically! Workflows, Sequences, and Automation Journeys will help your engine work, even when you’re not working.
Dhara Thakkar is a seasoned marketer at Salesmate. She thrives on trying new organic strategies to improve traffic & conversions, and has in-depth knowledge on how search works. When she's not working, you will find her travelling or binge watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S
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Sales operations consist of a set of business processes and activities that are handled by sales operations professionals to ensure that all business protocols are followed thoroughly and the process is running smoothly.
Sales operations professionals streamline the sales process, administrate sales team’s activities, analyze trends, and forecast revenue.
In nutshell, your sales team remains functional because of sales ops professionals.
This article will teach you the real importance of sales operations and how to build a solid strategy around it.
What is the importance of sales operations for your business?
A sales report reveals that 85% of sales professionals agree that sales ops is becoming increasingly strategic.
With the help of sales operations, your sales reps can focus more on selling and you can utilize your bandwidth for creating better strategies.
What does the sales operations team do exactly?
Sales operations teams take care of these 5 essential things:
Obviously, these are crucial operations for any business and a dedicated team would add a lot of value. That’s the reason why 63.9% of organizations have a sales operations team.
If you look at the roles in detail, here’s how a functional sales operations team look like:
1. Sales operations rep
A sales operations rep’s main role is to administrate sales tasks, streamline sales processes, and manage leads.
2. Sales operations manager
A sales operations manager mainly looks over the tasks of sales ops reps. In addition, they are also responsible for optimizing the sales funnel, managing CRM and sales automation tools, work on developing strategies to achieve sales goals.
3. Director of sales operations
A sales operations manager works with the Chief Revenue Officer and overlooks the execution part of your sales operations strategies. A sales ops director coordinates with other executives, shares various ideas to optimize the existing sales process.
Sales operations vs. sales enablement: What’s the difference?
The sales operations team mainly focuses on building strategies, data analysis, and forecasting revenue. So, this team is connected with the upper-level management.
While sales enablement provides sales reps with sufficient resources such as automation tools, training, and company information to ensure a smooth work process.
Apart from these, here are some major differences between sales ops and sales enablement:
How to build a sales operations strategy?
A sales operation strategy requires various elements to make it a success, and I’m here to make that simpler for you!
With the following steps, you can easily build a solid sales operations strategy for your business.
1. Streamline your sales objectives
Decide upon what is your company’s objective, and then train your sales team with helpful tools and resources so that they can perform their assigned tasks efficiently.
2. Implement an effective lead qualification process
When the leads are not qualified properly, it hampers productivity and eventually prevents your reps from achieving their targets. Your strategy needs to create a process that can qualify high-intent leads so your reps can close more deals.
3. Utilize sales operation tools
Sales operational tools such as CRM software, communication tools, automation platform, data analysis software, content management systems can increase productivity and help in seamless execution of your sales process.
4. Identify and implement key metrics and KPIs
Key metrics and KPIs vary from business to business, like there will be a significant difference when we compare KPIs of B2B sales cycle with B2C.
So first, you need to identify the metrics that can be utilized to measure the success of your sales operations for your business.
You need to have two kinds of metrics – Top Performance Metrics and Top Efficiency Metrics.
Top performance metrics include win rate, sales quota achievement rate, pipeline value, deal size, and the accuracy of sales forecasting.
In top efficiency metrics, lead response time, selling time, length of the sales cycle, and pipeline efficiency are included.
Successfully manage your sales operations with Salesmate
A successful sales operation strategy needs an efficient and value-driven CRM.
Salesmate can take you closer to your goal, increase overall productivity, and help strengthen the business process.
Let’s see some of the values you’ll get from Salesmate to build effective sales operations.
Seamless communication and team collaboration
During the entire process of sales operations, you’ll be communicating with various team members and operational heads.
Let’s admit, when you don’t have a proper communication channel, it messes with productivity. Not just yours, but the entire team.
First of all, Salesmate has all the communication channels covered. You can communicate via emails, calls, texts, or videos with your customers and teammates.
Here are top values you’ll get when it comes to communication:
Manage deals and pipelines effectively
Capturing and managing deals has become easy with Salesmate. You can directly collect leads from the website using attractive web forms.
Moreover, predefined workflows enable you to auto-assign leads so that no deal falls through the crack.
With Salesmate, you can create as many pipelines as you want for various purposes to effectively achieve your sales goals.
Insightful reports
Salesmate reports provide actionable insights so you can see the deal win-loss rate, activity statistics, visualize past revenue trends, and so much more with pre-made report add-ons.
Moreover, the activity leaderboard enables you to keep a track of how your sales team is performing and provide helpful feedback to help them perform better.
All this, with so little efforts
Salesmate comes with top-notch automation functionalities that’ll reduce your manual work drastically! Workflows, Sequences, and Automation Journeys will help your engine work, even when you’re not working.
Dhara Thakkar
Dhara Thakkar is a seasoned marketer at Salesmate. She thrives on trying new organic strategies to improve traffic & conversions, and has in-depth knowledge on how search works. When she's not working, you will find her travelling or binge watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S