What Does the Salesops Role Involve?

Anyone who has interacted with customers or held a position in sales careers is familiar with sales operations. Salesops (sales operations managers) are responsible for supporting salespeople and enabling them to sell efficiently and effectively. This ranges from automating routine tasks to reduce the sales team's workload, to implementing a comprehensive strategic plan for organizing sales.

What Are Sales Ops?

SalesOps refers to all members within a sales organization who support, enable, and drive sales teams to sell better, faster, and more efficiently. Essentially, Sales Ops aim to provide strategic direction and reduce friction in the sales process, with the ultimate goal of maximizing efficiency.

There is also increasing focus on how adopting technology and data analysis can further streamline sales processes to help salespeople stay ahead. However, Sales Ops are primarily responsible for establishing a sales system that uses data to guide strategy, best practices to lead training, and technology to promote success.

Improve your sales operations with Leexi

Why Are Sales Ops Important?

In every sales organization, the sales rep is the main point of contact for clients. But a sales operations team can help gather key account insights, ensure long-term customer success, and provide in-depth knowledge of your customer base. With this in mind, sales operations define the metrics that allow a sales organization to measure its success.

1. Quota attainment
2. Average win rate
3. Average sales cycle length
4. Average deal size
5. Lead response time
6. Forecast accuracy

Every sales organization has many dependencies, especially in larger and more complex companies and products. To keep everything running smoothly, the sales operations team manages all backend processes.

4 Ways to Develop Sales Operations

Ready to start building your company’s sales operations department? Use the four methods below to get started.

Define the Process

In short, the first step in developing a sales operations department is to define how your sales ops team will work. Then, continue by identifying their typical tasks, responsibilities, and how they will accomplish them. Doing so allows you to develop and optimize your compensation and incentive strategy, as well as sales reporting and sales tool management.

Choose the Right Key Performance Indicators

Once the overall sales operations process is confirmed, focus on selecting the key performance indicators you will use to evaluate your sales team's performance.

Train the Team

Once the sales operations team is in place, provide them with the necessary training to help them fulfill their responsibilities effectively. The right training will inspire, motivate, and encourage sales teams to meet challenges.

Provide Technological Tools

Finally, make sure the sales operations department has the right tools and technology to help them achieve their goals and drive the entire team’s success.

Develop Your Sales Operations Skills

Sales operations are about analyzing data to make strategic business decisions. They can be classified into four business objectives. A sales operations manager in the outreach phase will handle all these areas. A more mature company may have teams working on specific objectives.

Strategy

If you want to develop your sales operations skills to create new and impactful strategies, this team is for you. Analysts and sales operations managers in this function focus on optimizing sales processes and ensuring that sales technologies and methodologies are well suited.

Technology

If you’re a tech enthusiast who loves learning about platforms and complex integrations, this role is for you. Projects include choosing and customizing a CRM system, integrating apps and sales tools, overseeing data management and reporting, and automating tasks.

Operations

Want to take charge of training your account managers? The operations team function is the right place to learn. Here, you can work on developing product and sales training requirements, managing knowledge bases, and developing rules and tools for contracts and other financial documents.

Performance

If you like seeing results and helping sales teams get rewarded, you should focus on sales performance and incentives. This function supports the implementation of sales methodologies and best practices. Here, you can use your sales operations skills to get inside your reps’ heads by creating compensation and incentive plans.