Sales Ops Strategy To Revenue Guide
Sales Ops Strategy To Revenue Guide
Sales Ops Strategy To Revenue Guide
Introduction
Strategy: Build From the Bookings Goal
Summary
Setting the Bookings Goal
Designing the Sales Process
Measurement: Pressure Test Your Sales Process
Summary
Measuring Sales Performance
Creating the Sales Process
Implementation: Propel Your Sales Team
Summary
Communication
Enablement
Conclusion
1 / Contents
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22
Introduction
Its easy for sales ops professionals to feel removed from their companys revenue growth.
After all, no one in a sales operations role is out closing business or making cold calls.
However, the reality is that sales operations teams should feel more tied to the goal than
individual reps do.
Reps only have power over their own deals. They can work to expand their pipeline, move
opportunities through it more quickly, or win a greater percentage of their deals. Sales
operations professionals are in the unique position to make the entire sales team better at
their jobs.
Sales Operations is moving beyond its traditional role of simple data analysis and report
building, and taking more responsibility for the strategic development of the sales team.
It bridges the gap between the executive team, whose focus is on the long term business
goals of the company, and the frontline reps, whose main concern is getting through their
day-to-day tasks and hitting quota.
The greatest challenge that sales operations teams face is translating the strategic
initiatives of the executive team into concrete steps that help individual reps to sell more
effectively every day.
This is not an easy task. There is always a divide between what the executive team wants to
achieve and what the sales team is actually equipped to do. Its up to the sales operations
team to plug the hole by setting realistic expectations with the executive team and creating
a process to get to the bookings goal.
This eBook lays out the three pillars of that system:
Measuring Performance
Sales operations professionals must master each of these three pillars solidify their role
within the sales team, take full ownership of the bookings goal, and put the VP, closers, and
every other member of the sales team in a position to succeed.
The following three sections will tell you exactly how to do that.
2 / Introduction
Section // 1
Summary
The cornerstone of sound sales strategy is the bookings goal. The sales operations team
must work with both the front line sales reps and the executive team to set a challenging
but realistic bookings goal, and then construct the process that will enable the sales team to
reach that goal.
The bookings goal and the sales process form the spine of every successful sales strategy.
The first section of this eBook highlights the core components of the perfect bookings goal,
and walks through the key steps of designing a consistent, scalable sales process.
4 / Strategy: Summary
2.
3.
4.
Calculate how many more reps are needed to get to the goal
By starting with a best case goal and then working from the bottom up, you get an objective
take on where the sales team stands and where you need to get to from the beginning.
If the predictions of the frontline reps match up with the executives, you are in good shape.
If not (as is typically the case), this exercise allows you to reset expectations and to put an
incremental plan in place to scale predictably and reach the goal consistently.
Once you have a functional bookings goal, the next step is to ensure consistency by creating
a scalable sales process.
Companies that have a structured sales process in place see 18% higher
revenue growth over companies without a formal sales process.
CRM systems (like Salesforce.com) are essential for creating a sales structure. Given the
amount of data the ops team needs to keep track of to actually make the sales team more
effective, you would be better off trying to build a space shuttle from duct tape than trying to
construct a sales process without a CRM system.
Your companys sales process is the road that every buyer follows which means that the
sales ops team must take these three steps to make it well marked, closely regulated, and as
smooth as possible:
Buyer
Seller
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The next two sections will dive into how to create measurable sales stages, streamline the
sales proceess, and translate the ideas on the drawing board into tangible sales practices.
Section // 2
Measurement: Pressure
Test Your Sales Process
Summary
Even with the perfect blueprint, the sales process can look very different in practice than
it did on paper. The trap that most companies fall into is rushing to implement their plans
without putting a consistent method for tracking performance in place.
This is the reason that most sales leaders also fail to identify gaps in their sales process,
have a hard time forecasting, and struggle to adopt new tools and workflows. The next
section takes you through the key points you need to understand to steer clear of this trap.
9 / Measurement: Summary
2.
3.
Sales cycle
4.
Opportunity pipeline
KPIs should act the same way as the gauges in a car each one provides a single data
point that tells you exactly what adjustments you need to make in order to keep the
process running smoothly. Taken together, KPIs guide the sales ops team by shining light
on the stages of the sales process that are most likely to hinder the progression of sales
opportunities.
This is the data that sales ops teams need in order to do their job. Without them, they are
left guessing at causes when the sales team falls short. Accurate data allow the sales ops
team to proactively identify specific problems and put solutions in place to solve them.
Each metric plays a different role in assessing the health of the sales team, but
stage-to-stage conversion rates are the most powerful for showing you if the sales process
is well matched to your buyers, helping you to identify and refine individual stages of the
process, and revealing pitfalls in the process that require your attention.
Because this one metric goes such a long way in diagnosing the effectiveness of the sales
process, the next section focuses on the concrete steps involved in calculating meaningful
conversion rates, and explains how to use them to help create an effective sales process.
Figure 1: If you try to compress the entire sales process into too few stages, you miss
important information about whats really slowing down opportunities. In this example, the
Qualifying stage is probably too broad. Opportunities with a single, high-level interaction
with the sales team are lumped in with opportunities that belong further down the funnel.
Figure 2: Sales processes with too many stages are difficult to follow and obscure
meaningful analysis by including repetitive data. This example shows a case in which the
stages before Qualifying dont match the process that the sales team actually follows,
which means that those stages should be separated from the process altogether.
The stages they use dont accurately reflect the buying process
2.
The activities they track dont correspond with action from buyers
3.
You can (and should) solve the first two problems by using your buyers journey to ensure
that you only track sales activities that have a direct impact on a prospects decision making
process. The third problem is one that every sales operations team faces, and it can only be
solved by fostering internal relationships with the producers on the sales team.
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Sales reps will ignore anything that doesnt directly help them win deals, especially
something as mundane as entering data in a CRM or spreadsheet. Its up to the sales ops
team to connect the dots between adherence to the process and more closed won deals.
That is where communication and sales enablement, the last two steps in translating
strategy to revenue, come into play.
Section // 3
Implementation: Propel
the Sales Team
Summary
You have your blueprint in hand and a data-driven method for tracking performance in place
youre finally ready to make the leap to turn strategic plans into new business.
There are two core pieces that go into this final leap: data-driven communication and
sales enablement. The final section of this eBook explains how these two components
add muscle to the sales process and make it powerful, actionable, and most importantly,
sustainable.
Communication
Enablement
17 / Implementation: Summary
Communication
Clear lines of communication are the wires that convert strategy into actionable sales
processes, and those lines begin and end with hard data. The challenge facing sales
operations teams is to make sure the data matches up on both sides of the line. The
solution is to be religious about maintaining a single database as the point of truth for the
entire company.
Lack of visibility damages the company in two ways. The first is that it makes it impossible
to assess the sales teams performance objectively, and therefore hampers efforts to make
individual reps more productive. The second is that unreliable data force managers to track
performance on their own, and ultimately make subjective judgment calls about what works
and what doesnt.
Both of these problems drive a wedge between the leadership and the front line that is
responsible for adopting new workflows and executing. The result is that all the efforts
of the sales operations team calculating a functional bookings goal, mapping the sales
process to buying behavior, creating a method for tracking performance are wasted
because disconnects arise that separate the realities on the ground from the executive suite.
When there is a single, reliable source of data that is used as the basis for all operational
and strategic decisions, its easy to chart a course of action and make adjustments based
on the results. Conflicting data sources lead to disagreement, both vertically and within each
level of the company, about which initiatives are most effective, and what steps need to be
taken next.
Executives are more willing to approve expenses and concede to organizational changes
when they have trustworthy data to base their decisions on. Sales reps and managers are
more diligent about recording activities and reporting results when the data is directly tied to
their compensation and the enablement tools they receive.
18 / Implementation: Communication
Communication
The key takeaway here is to always tie data maintenance to results. This is the only way to
ensure that your database stays reliable, and to positively reinforce adherence to the sales
process.
However, even with clear, objective data in hand, you still have to create accountability
in order to put solutions into action. The most effective structure for creating that
accountability is old-fashioned, face to face meetings dedicated to putting resources in
place that will iron out kinks in the sales process.
A weekly closed loop meeting that pulls sales managers, the sales VP, members of the
sales operations team, and the marketing VP into the same room is the most effective
structure for identifying and communicating needs across the organization.
The sales ops team should be the organizers of these meetings. They need to be ready with
reports about the health of the sales team, have an agenda on hand to discuss the most
problematic obstacles the sales team faces, and most importantly, be ready to mediate
discussions between members of other departments.
The frequency of these meetings is important when there are longer intervals between
each meeting, its more likely that data entry errors will go uncaught, cracks will form in
between stages in the process, and problems with the sales process as a whole will go
unaddressed.
Reliable sales data shed light on the immediate needs of the sales team, and closed loop
meetings act as a forum to coordinate the response to them. These are the two components
of a communications strategy that will enable you to implement and maintain an effective
sales process.
With a well designed, measurable sales process in place and clear lines of communication
set up, the last step to execute on a sales strategy is to put tools and workflows in place that
will ensure long term success for your sales team.
19 / Implementation: Communication
Enablement
The point at which strategy turns into concrete projects that directly impact the top line is
broadly known as sales enablement. There are a lot of different tools and services that fall
under this umbrella click-to-dial software, analytics, lead scoring, leaderboards, marketing
content everything in sales except the selling.
Its instructive to look at several different definitions of sales enablement in order to carve
out the role that sales operations teams play in it. The official definition from Forrester
Research is:
20 / Implementation: Enablement
Enablement
Thats why its important to build up to the point of being ready for sales enablement if
you dont have a strategic plan in place with a functional bookings goal and a systematic
process tailored to meet it, your sales enablement initiatives will be misaligned and doomed
to failure.
When you have done the legwork involved in creating a viable sales process, its much easier
to break sales enablement into incremental, actionable steps. In fact, the internal sales
enablement process looks a lot like the sales process itself:
1.
2.
3.
4.
If you have a well-defined, clearly documented sales process, you can easily identify the
sales teams needs (both present and future), speed up the evaluation of new tools, argue
your case for the team that has to approve the cost, and keep an eye on how well the
solution is benefitting the sales team as a whole.
In short, by building the sales teams needs into the wider company goals and creating a
framework to keep track of them, you facilitate the jump between strategy and revenue
generation.
21 / Implementation: Enablement
Conclusion
Many sales teams act like a body with a dysfunctional nervous system the head and
the hands can operate on their own, but no signals pass between the two. The best sales
operations professionals glue the entire organization together by tying the needs of frontline
sales reps to the interests of the executive team, and guide the actions of both by supplying
them with the tools and the data they need, exactly when they need them.
Average sales operations teams can perform effective post mortems on past sales
performance and tell their leadership what went wrong. Good sales operations teams can
perform analysis on the current trajectory of their sales team and warn them about what
could go wrong.
The best sales operations teams combine historical data, current trends, and insights
from the rest of the sales team to not only predict what will happen, but create a strategy to
ensure that the bookings goal is always in reach.
Which brings us back around to our original point: the sales operations team holds more
responsibility for hitting the bookings goal than anyone else in the company.
Sales teams that succeed today do so because they have support from operations teams
that enable them to create sound strategies, arm their reps with the tools and training they
need to win deals, and conduct the flow of useful information up and down the entire chain
of command.
The best part is that theres no reason that average sales operations teams cant become
great. In fact, you now know exactly what it takes to get there. If your company is falling
behind its goals, step up, draw up a plan, put it into action, and get your team back on track.
22 / Conclusion