I’ve always liked the Harry Truman line: “It’s amazing what you can get done when you don’t need to take the credit.”
On the surface, it sounds like one of those quaint leadership platitudes that gets trotted out at offsite workshops and kickoff meetings. But once you’ve spent enough time trying to push operational insights and process improvements into skeptical and politically-charged commercial environments, the quote tends to land a bit differently.
It feels a lot less naïve…and a lot more practical.
In Sales Ops, being right is not the same thing as being accepted. You can have the sales analyses dialed in. Your pipeline diagnostics can be airtight. Your findings and recommendations around process, prioritization, or resource allocation can be completely sound. You can walk into the room with something that is both accurate and objectively better for the business.
And yet, you can still find yourself embroiled in a debate with people who seem to only have doubts because of where they think it’s all coming from. To now quote from the movie, The Big Lebowski, “Yeah…well…that’s like…just your opinion, man.”
Which brings me to a concept we discuss in both the Building Sales Ops’ Credibility with Sales and Delivering No-Brainer Sales Guidance training sessions…namely, the idea of being more thoughtful and strategic about managing the perceived sources of your insights and recommendations.
Of course, you and your team did the work. You defined the questions, formulated the hypotheses, and performed the diagnostics. You pulled the data together. You cleaned it up, structured it, and analyzed it. You pressure-tested the findings, vetted the conclusions, modeled the implications, and translated everything into a prioritized and actionable set of recommendations.
And yes, you and your team absolutely deserve a great deal of credit for all of your effort, diligence, and judgment.
All that being true, however…
If the goal is to get the broader organization to actually embrace and adopt the recommendations, positioning Sales Ops as the primary source of the information can create unnecessary resistance. Like it or not, Sales Ops is often seen as a step removed from the field. And that perception alone can trigger second-guessing before anyone even engages with the substance being presented.
But as we highlight in the training sessions, you can short-circuit much of this by attributing your findings and recommendations to more unassailable sources…
With sales teams, this often means pointing to their peers. When reps see that other reps…people dealing with the same accounts, the same objections, the same realities…are achieving better outcomes by prioritizing certain deals, engaging opportunities differently, or following specific process steps, it’s perceived very differently. It’s no longer “Sales Ops thinks we should do X, Y, and Z.” Instead, it’s more like “this is what’s actually working in the field.”
Customers and segments are another credible source. After all, it’s really hard to argue with actual in-market buying behaviors. As such, framing findings and recommendations as reflections of customer- and segment-level differences and behavioral patterns removes a lot of the perceived subjectivity.
Even competitors…when used with care and caution…can provide more credible context, as a signal or indicator of how the market is moving or being shaped. Framing findings or recommendations in terms of what competitors are doing or how the competitive landscape is shifting tends to be more compelling and credible than when perceived as merely being the Sales Ops team’s conclusions.
In this way, the Sales Ops team isn’t telling salespeople what they should do. No, other salespeople are telling salespeople what they should do. The Sales Ops team is just bringing these things to the surface.
In this way, Sales Ops isn’t just spewing their opinions on marketplace dynamics. No, customers and segments are weighing-in for themselves, through their actions and behaviors. Sales Ops is just making these dynamics visible and actionable.
And in this way, the Sales Ops group isn’t pontificating about the future. No, the competitive landscape is shifting and reacting in telling ways. And Sales Ops is just extending the trends and projecting the likely outcomes.
To be clear, this isn’t about playing attribution games or trying to mislead anyone. After all, we’re not creating these things out of thin air—most of our findings, conclusions, and recommendations really are emanating from these types of primary sources.
We’re simply recognizing that reality…and being more deliberate about calling it out…to improve how our messages are being perceived and received by others.
P.S. While it should go without saying, I’ll say it anyway: Appealing to AI as the authority is not a winning strategy. A skeptical sales leader is not likely to be swayed or impressed with “because the AI says so.” Not yet, anyway.
Author’s Note: It’s taken me nearly 30 years, but I’ve finally been able to quote Harry S. Truman and The Big Lebowski in the same article. I’d like to thank everyone who’s helped make this moment possible.
