Have you ever observed a beehive? No, knocking it off your eaves or a tree branch doesn’t count. Have you ever taken the time to watch what the bees are doing? Maybe even view the inside of a hive at a science museum or commercial honey operation?
To a casual observer, a beehive seems like chaos. Insects are flying in and out seemingly at random. On the inside, they are climbing over each other and doing who knows what. Maybe you can pick out the queen because she’s bigger than that, but otherwise, it’s hard to tell who is doing what.
But the bees (and scientists and beekeepers) understand exactly what is going on. They each have their roles to play. The queen lays the eggs. The drones mate with the queen. The workers do everything else—cleaning the cells, nursing the larvae, building the honeycomb, regulating the temperature, removing the dead, guarding the hive, and foraging for pollen, nectar, and water.
The hive functions very efficiently because each individual understands their role. And the things they are doing are perfectly aligned with the hive’s needs.
The Sales Ops Hive
A good sales ops team has some similarities with the hive.
To the uninitiated, it might seem like chaos. The team has half a dozen or more projects in the works. New requests are coming in from every direction. Priorities are shifting. Leadership wants insight.
But on high-performing teams, the daily work only seems like chaos. Each team member understands the role they must play. They intentionally step into the activities that are required.
What seems like constant, random motion is actually deliberate orchestration.
The roles that each sales ops team member plays are rarely formalized. In fact, the best teams keep things a little fluid intentionally so that each member can move wherever is necessary. However, each role is essential. In our research, we’ve documented seven:
- Analyst
- Investigator
- Strategist
- Influencer
- Engineer
- Conductor
- Learner
In addition, there are three roles often handled by the sales ops leader: politician, coach, and champion.
We dive into each of these roles in more detail in the Essential Sales Ops Roles webinar. It also discusses how your team might not have an individual person for each role at a given time. You might have three analysts and one person handling the other roles. You might have five investigators. Sometimes everyone might be in learner mode.
The key is that people are available within the team with the skills to do each role. And when it becomes necessary, they deliberately step into different modes.
What seems like complete chaos is actually sales ops seamlessly shifting among these roles.
The end result is that sales ops performs the tasks necessary for the organization: providing structure, solving problems, shaping strategy, enabling reps, and positioning the company for profitable growth.
If you’d like to learn more about how this works, check out the Essential Sales Ops Roles webinar. It provides more detail than we have space for here.
Closing Thought: Roles and Personal Growth
It’s also worth noting worker bees step through their roles at different stages in their development. Their hormones tell them what to do when.
When they first emerge, their first job is to clean and repair the cell where they lived as a larva. Then they venture just slightly farther away and nurse other nearby young. Over time, they range farther within the hive before they are eventually ready to take on the most dangerous task—foraging out in the world.
In the same way, your team members will probably shift from less complicated roles to more complex ones over time. Everyone might start out as a learner, then maybe shift into analyst mode. It’s worth considering who has the skills for each role and who might be ready for a new challenge. Just some food for thought to keep your team humming.
Essential Sales Ops Roles
While there's only one Sales Ops title on the business card, there are actually many different "jobs within the job." And it isn't easy to do the right jobs, at the right times, and in the right ways.
