A lot of Sales Operations groups say they’re frustrated. They’re frustrated by how others in the organization view them. They’re frustrated by how they’re treated, how late they’re included, how little respect they receive, and how often they’re expected to clean up messes they had no hand in creating in the first place.
All of that frustration is certainly understandable.
After all, Sales Ops is still treated like a tactical help desk for the sales organization in many companies. Need a report? Ask Sales Ops. Need some CRM data cleaned up? Ask Sales Ops. Need the quota tracking updated, territories patched, dashboards reorg’d, process exceptions handled, or some recurring meeting fed with numbers no one will actually use anyway? No worries…just dump it on Sales Ops…that’s what they’re there for, right?
But here’s the Dutch Uncle talk that might be hard to hear:
The Sales Ops function isn’t just being defined and pigeonholed in this way by others. In too many cases, this is also how the Sales Ops team views itself.
Granted, this has gotten a lot better over the last decade. More Sales Ops teams now recognize that they can and should be much more than administrators, report builders, systems wranglers, and duct-tape technicians. And I’d like to think that we here at the SellingBrew Playbook have had at least a little something to do with the progress.
That said…the identity crisis persists.
There are still too many Sales Ops groups waiting for someone else in the company to urge them to pursue more strategic endeavors. They’re waiting for the mandate to expand their scope and broaden their purview. They’re waiting for the executive team to recognize and appreciate their full potential. And they’re waiting for the rest of the organization to stop treating them like a reactionary support function and start treating them like a strategic partner.
That’s a whole lot of waiting…for something that rarely shows up on its own.
A key reason Sales Ops is ideally positioned to be a more strategic contributor is because it can see the whole sales machine and not just the individual cogs.
Most people in the organization will only see the discrete elements involved in revenue production. They’ll see the individual sales reps, the discrete tactical activities, the individual process steps, the separate systems and tools, the individual campaigns, the various enablement assets, and so on. But Sales Ops can see how all these pieces work together…or don’t…whatever the case may be.
This “systems perspective” is a big deal because sales performance is never shaped by one isolated or discrete thing. It’s shaped by a bunch of interconnected things that all interact with one another…often in ways the rest of organization doesn’t fully understand or appreciate.
Leveraging this perspective, Sales Ops is also in an ideal position to diagnose the root causes behind performance issues and recommend systemic solutions.
Most people in the organization will treat the symptoms rather than the true root causes. They’ll see weak pipelines, poor forecast accuracy, slipping win rates, inconsistent execution, or messy customer data, and they’ll jump to the easiest or most obvious explanations…
Reps just need to work harder. Managers just need to pay closer attention. Sellers just need to follow the process. Everyone just needs yet another reminder to clean up their data in the CRM system.
Sometimes these explanations are right. But most often, they’re just convenient. And convenient explanations will rarely address the real underlying root-causes. So the symptoms just come back, again and again.
Because Sales Ops can see the interconnected system, it’s uniquely suited to push past the obvious and expedient explanations, figure out what’s actually causing the problems, and recommend systemic solutions that will alleviate the symptoms, once and for all.
Another reason Sales Ops is ideally positioned to be more strategic is because it can act as a bridge between the other functions that influence sales performance.
Sales does not control all the inputs that influence or determine how well it performs in the marketplace. Marketing influences demand quality and buyer perceptions. Product influences value realization and competitive differentiation. Fulfilment influences responsiveness. And Customer Success influences customer retention, expansion, and lifetime value.
Because Sales Ops sits close to Sales while also seeing how these other functional choices impact the performance of the overall sales machine, it can help connect the dots for everyone else. It can help the other functions understand how their decisions and actions are affecting sales execution…and help Sales understand which performance issues actually have root causes in other departments.
The bottom line is that a Sales Operations function…for many more reasons than I’ve covered in this article…does indeed have the potential to be a much more strategic contributor. And as a more strategic contributor, Sales Ops can indeed expect to command more respect, more inclusion, and more influence.
But here’s the thing: the team needs to see itself in this way first.
After all, when the Sales Ops team itself doesn’t really believe in or recognize its own strategic potential and value, how is it a surprise to anyone that the rest of the organization will struggle to see it, too?
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?
Crucial Sales Operations Concepts
What sets a great Sales Ops team apart often comes down the core concepts and principles they embrace. In this on-demand webinar, you'll learn about 15 fundamental concepts that every Sales Ops leader and practitioner needs to understand inside and out.
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?
