As the Editor in Chief of the SellingBrew Playbook, I read a lot of articles, whitepapers, and research reports. Thanks to my mother…a school teacher…I’ve been a voracious reader and avid learner since I was a wee lad. So I have to admit that all of this reading really doesn’t seem like work and I enjoy it quite a bit.
Until I run across something that irritates me…
The other morning I read an article that stated…unequivocally…that “there are no secrets” in the realm of Sales Operations. This fine piece of scholarship (I say sarcastically) then went on to explain how Sales Ops teams around the world are all “doing the same things in the same ways”.
Seriously? Now, I don’t know what this author’s motivations are…or what cave they’ve been living in…but these statements are not just false; they’re absurd.
First of all, Sales Operations is not like Accounting…
While Accounting has been a fixture in corporate org. charts for more than a century, Sales Ops is a relative newcomer on the scene. And unlike Accounting, there’ve been very few well-established rules or generally-accepted practices to guide the ongoing development of burgeoning Sales Ops functions.
So for the most part, Sales Ops teams have had to figure things out for themselves through trial and error. And as a result, there are massive differences in what they do and how they do it. From structure and scope to mindset and strategic focus, even direct competitors in the same industries will have Sales Ops functions that look and act very differently.
And as our research has shown time and again, many of these big differences in practice are producing huge differences in performance.
As for the assertion that “there are no secrets” in Sales Ops, the leading teams aren’t exactly issuing press releases every time they push best practice to another level or take an innovative new approach. And I can tell you that it’s definitely not easy to extract, compile, and curate the research and best practices we share through the SellingBrew Playbook.
That said, the best evidence for the existence of “secrets” might be the fact that the author of the article in question actually believes that every Sales Ops team is doing the same things in the same ways.
Clearly, the truth is being kept secret from him!
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