We have a teenaged driver among our acquaintances who was recently “blindsided” when his car wouldn’t start.
The mechanic asked him, “Well, did you notice a screeching noise?”
He shrugged, “It’s always been a noisy car.”
“Wasn’t there a burning smell?”
“I just thought that was coming from outside.”
“OK. What about your check engine light. Was that on?”
“Oh yeah. That’s been on for like six months. But it kept driving fine, so I figured everything was okay!”
The Sales Ops Check Engine Light
This example is humorous, but something very similar happens to sales ops teams far more often than it should. They say they were “blindsided.” The pipeline suddenly slows. A segment dries up. The win rate tanks. Wallet share erodes. Forecasts miss.
By the time someone notices something is wrong, a whole lot of damage has been done. But in actuality, these shifts rarely happen overnight. The market doesn’t turn on a dime.
The organization just wasn’t paying attention.
Of course, unlike your car, your sales ops team doesn’t automatically come with pre-installed warning lights. In many cases, what feels like unpredictability is actually a lack of visibility.
Imagine how much better it would be to have a system that lights up when trouble is on the way.
Building Your Early Warning System
Believe it or not, it’s actually not that hard to set up a system that will surface meaningful signals weeks or months before your company feels the impact. It can highlight shifts in demand, competitive pressure, or customer defection long before they become visible on your bottom line.
What you need is a curated set of leading indicators that you monitor constantly. Those signals might include the following:
- Supply-side signals like movements in costs, supplier lead times, or upstream constraints that eventually cascade into pricing pressure, availability issues, or margin erosion
- Demand-side signals highlighting shifts in customers’ customers, market consumption patterns, or downstream activity that foreshadow changing demand before orders fluctuate
- Internal leading indicators, such as spikes in exceptions, slowed opportunity progression, changed deal mix, or sudden increases in win/loss volatility—all of which reveal friction or competitive intrusion
- Early-mover segment behavior—a subset of customer segments whose movements consistently predict what other segments will do weeks later
- Competitive intrusion signals, including micro-shifts in wallet share, product mix, or account-level buying patterns that indicate a competitor is gaining ground before revenue declines become visible
You don’t need a huge number of signals. A small, highly targeted group of indicators can quickly predict when you’re heading for a problem. Ideally, you can group them into a dashboard so that you can see at a glance how things stand.
The actual group of signals you need is going to vary a bit depending on your business, your customers, and your industry. We walk you through the steps in a couple of webinars:
- Making Sales Ops More Responsive explains how to boost your speed, flexibility, and agility without sacrificing quality and rigor. It helps you identify and make effective improvements while avoiding common missteps.
- The Fundamentals of Sales Intelligence takes a closer look at metrics. It helps you identify which signals are most valuable for your organization.
Don’t be the sales ops team that’s driving down the road with your check engine light on. Pay attention to your key indicators and take action proactively so that you can avoid costly reactive action later on.
Making Sales Ops More Responsive
How do we design our sales models, systems, and processes to maximize ongoing responsiveness, flexibility, and agility? And how do we do it without sacrificing rigor, diligence, and accuracy?
The Fundamentals of Sales Intelligence
In Sales Ops, it's easy to feel like decisions are made in a vacuum. But the reality is that there are many sources of intelligence you can leverage to help the sales team sell more effectively, now and in the future.
