When you’re looking for a sales operations job, the job descriptions you see often start to run together. Everyone seems to be looking for the same set of skills:
- Proven work experience
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field
- Strong analytical reasoning
- Knowledge of Excel and MS Office
- Attention to detail
- Exceptional communication skills
A few might refer to particular tools, or if you’re really lucky, they might mention pipeline analytics or forecasting.
But anyone who’s worked in Sales Ops for more than five minutes knows the real work goes far beyond this list. The true value that a sales operations team offers comes not just from understanding the mechanics of the commercial engine, but from getting the organization to act on them.
A hiring reality check
If you’re hiring for a new position, what does your job description look like? Even more importantly, are you just checking the boxes for technical skills, or are you searching for the abilities that really matter?
You see, there are whole categories of Sales Ops skills that rarely show up in job descriptions. Without these skills, you and your team are unlikely to be successful.
In fact, no matter where you are in your career — whether you are looking for a position, trying to hire someone for your team, or just trying to grow in your current role — these are some of the most valuable skills.
And they almost never appear in a job description.
3 Underappreciated Sales Ops Skills
We go through a whole list of these valuable-but-rarely-requested skills in The Anatomy of a Successful B2B Sales Analyst. Here are three of our favorites:
- Influence without authority: Can you drive cross-functional decisions across sales, marketing, finance, enablement, and IT when you don’t control those teams directly? This is a core Sales Ops capability. It isn’t something most job descriptions call for — but it often separates the operators who shape go-to-market motion from the ones who just report on it.
- Diagnostic thinking: It’s easy to blame “low activity” or “bad leads” for performance gaps. The best Sales Ops pros dig deeper. They question segmentation and territories, examine stage definitions, investigate conversion quality and cycle time, and look for process friction — not just numeric anomalies. Moving past symptoms to root causes is rare — and exactly what most organizations need.
- Storytelling: No, not writing novels. It’s the ability to translate complex funnel and productivity analysis into clear, actionable recommendations that resonate with frontline managers and executives. A compelling narrative turns dashboards into decisions and drives adoption of better processes. Without it, even the smartest analysis struggles to gain traction.
Find more invisible skills
If these skills resonate with you — and you’re ready for more — we encourage you to go through The Anatomy of a Successful B2B Sales Analyst in detail. It can serve as a practical reference to ensure you’re developing the most essential “invisible” skills in yourself and in your team.
You should also check out Building the Right Sales Ops Habits, Being An Internal Sales Consultant, and Boosting the Sales Ops Team’s Influence. All three contain insights that can help you take your career to the next level and build an influential, high-impact team.
We’ve rarely seen a Sales Ops job description that fully reflects everything required to do the role well. And truthfully, it would be almost impossible to condense it all into a small posting. But we’d love to see more teams hiring for these underappreciated skills.
