SellingBrew

Insights & Tips

Already a subscriber? Login

Become a subscriber and unlock an information arsenal focused on making your sales operation more effective.

3 Keys to Building a Successful Sales Operations Team

If you want to learn how to do anything well, it’s a good idea to copy the example of experts. So if you want to build a successful sales operations team, it’s a good idea to learn from other practitioners who have done just that.

Scott Kolar is the vice president of sales operations for LexisNexis Risk Solutions. He has built a large, diverse, and very successful sales operations team that meets the needs of four different business units within the company. In an interview with MindBrew Editor-in-Chief Rafe VanDenBerg, Scott talked about what it takes to be successful in sales operations.

For any sales operations team, there are three critical keys to success:

1. Hire the Right People.
Sometimes it’s hard to find job candidates with the specific set of skills and attitude you might need. But finding the right people is critical. Rather than hiring a marginal candidate, sales operations should cover vacancies as best they can with existing staff until they find a good candidate to hire.

2. Encourage the Drive to “Win.”
Part of finding the right people is finding people with a drive to win. Sales operations folks may not be on the front lines winning sales the way the actual sales team is, but it is just as important for operations to have that competitive spirit.

3. Collaborate regularly with your other stakeholders
In order to be effective, sales operations has to work with people from a lot of other departments, not just sales. They need buy-in from legal, HR, product, marketing, and other groups. Sales operations can’t control what these other groups do or don’t do, but they do need their help if they are going to be successful.

One way to improve collaboration with these stakeholders is by scheduling regular meetings with them. At first the meetings may seem a little awkward, but don’t give up. Over time, these meetings can help foster more communication and better relationships with the other groups.

In his interview Scott offered a lot of tips like these, as well as providing more detail about how sales operations has helped LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Check out the full interview to learn more.

Get Immediate Access To Everything In The SellingBrew Playbook

Related Resources

  • How to Improve Your Sales Pipeline Analysis

    Pipeline analytics is great for reporting on current performance, but it can do so much more. This guide outlines 12 strategies for improving deal probability, velocity and value across every salesperson in your sales operation.

    View This Guide
  • Using Peer Pressure To Improve Your Margins

    Fixing poor pricing and discounting practices can seem futile. And playing bad cop isn't much fun. This tutorial shows you how to build a "system of influence" that gets your salespeople to police their own pricing and discounting behaviors.

    View This Tutorial
  • Generating More Sales from Existing Customers

    Many B2B companies struggle to identify untapped sales opportunities and maximize revenue from the customers they've already acquired. In this four-part recorded training session, learn what leading sales operations are doing differently to grow share-of-wallet with existing customers.

    View This Webinar
  • Isolating the Impacts of Price, Volume, Cost and Mix

    Using this straightforward tool, you can finally put an end to the second guessing and skepticism by isolating and quantifying the contributions of price, volume, cost and mix to period-over-period revenue and margin differences.

    View This Tool