When I was a consultant, one of the first things I always tried to do at the beginning of a new client engagement was a strategic assessment. The point wasn’t to gauge whether the client’s current processes were as efficient or as well-executed as they could be. No, the point of this strategic assessment was to figure out whether or not the client was doing the right things in the first place.
My rationale was very simple. In my experience, doing the right things…even in a suboptimal way…almost always outperforms doing the wrong things perfectly. It’s like that old football coach said:
“Do the right things and the score takes care of itself.”
In Sales Operations, the pressure for “flawless execution” and “maximum efficiency” has unfortunately led a lot of teams to focus heavily on tactical improvements. They strive for ever-faster reporting and quicker RFP turnarounds. They pursue rock-solid and always-up-to-date CRM data. They define sales processes down the last detail and implement playbooks for every possible sales situation or scenario.
But if you’re tracking the wrong things, streamlining the wrong workflows, or automating the wrong processes, all of these tactical improvements only help you make the wrong moves even faster. And while all of the tactical effort might look productive, it rarely shows up in the results.
When the gains aren’t manifesting as planned, the immediate instinct is to double down and just “do it even better.” It’s a sort of tactical perfectionism. But the real leverage usually isn’t found in better execution of existing processes and procedures. Very often, the biggest gains will actually come from changing what we’re executing, rather than improving how well we’re executing it.
That’s why leading Sales Ops functions will periodically conduct strategic capability assessments. Not as some onerous exercise in self-flagellation, but as an ongoing, strategic gut-check.
These assessments are designed to reveal whether your current mix of people, processes, and practices are actually aligned with what the business is trying to accomplish. They help you distinguish between the operational noise and the true performance drivers.
And most importantly, these assessments force you to confront the possibility that the things your team is currently doing “really well” might not be the things that can make the most difference or have the biggest impact on results.
Conducting a useful strategic assessment doesn’t require an army of consultants. It just requires a bit of structure and enough humility to be reasonably objective. While we can help provide some structure through our downloadable Sales Capability Self-Assessment, you’ll need to provide the humility and objectivity.
It’s also useful to approach this kind of work with a consultant’s mindset, rather than a practitioner’s mindset. In other words, don’t assess your operation with an eye toward what’s already working or what’s currently sucking up your time and attention. Instead, assess your operation from an arms’ length to uncover the strategic “green field” opportunities you might be missing altogether.
Once you identify the strategic capability gaps, the next step is to prioritize. You can’t fix everything at once, so start with the areas that can produce measurable impacts in the near-term. These could be things like:
- Working with Marketing to get more compelling and differentiated sales messaging into the marketplace.
- Improving the onboarding processes and procedures to reduce the “time-to-productivity” for new salespeople.
- Sourcing, securing, and providing ongoing negotiation training to improve close-rates and realized prices.
- Using purchase-pattern analysis to identify and quantify whitespace opportunities in existing accounts.
Again, thinking like a consultant, you’ll want to pick a few high-value improvements, scope them to fit your available resources, and then work to drive small, demonstrable wins in fairly short order. These early wins then create the credible evidence and proof-points that will help you sell others on going even further and tackling even more strategic improvements.
In fact, when other stakeholders and decision-makers see that your strategic pursuits are generating tangible gains, the demand for even more of the “right things” will tend to grow on its own.
The bottom line is that doing things right really only matters when you’re doing the right things. And while it might sound a bit clichéd or even corny, when you consistently focus on the right things, the score really does take care of itself.
Assessing Your Sales Operation
How do you know how your sales capabilities really stack up? How can you tell? In this on-demand webinar, learn how to leverage "3 P" assessments to figure out where you're at and where you need to improve.
Aligning Sales Ops to Business Strategy
How do you ensure that your sales operation and the overall business strategy are properly aligned? And what do you do when there's a disconnect?
From Tactical to Strategic Sales Ops
Some teams are so mired in tactical grunt work and daily firefights that they never make progress on strategic pursuits. How have other Sales Ops teams transitioned into more strategic functions? What steps did they take?
Being An Internal Sales Consultant
For sales operations functions, frustration and conflict would seem to be inevitable. But learn how an "internal consultant" mindset and approach can make driving improvements much easier...and far less frustrating.
