Many companies know that sales operations is important to the success of their sales force. What’s less clear at times is what, exactly, sales ops is.
As a new core function, sales ops exists in something of a gray area. Its responsibilities and purview can vary from firm to firm, as can leaders’ expectations of what and how it should contribute. Fundamentally, sales ops works behind the scenes to help frontline sales teams sell better, faster, and more efficiently. Beyond that, says Mark Kovac, global leader of the B2B Commercial Excellence group at Boston-based consulting firm Bain & Company, “I would challenge you to find any common definition of the sales ops function anywhere, across consulting firms, across companies, across anybody who works with sales.” Add to this the all-too-common problem that sales ops tends to be understaffed and under-resourced, and it should be no surprise when executives don’t understand the function’s value—and hesitate to commit more resources to it.
Yet sales ops can be a source of significant value, both within the sales department and outside it. By supporting reps in their day-to-day work, sales ops teams can help them spend less time on low-value tasks and more time with customers. By analyzing data on behaviors and buying patterns, they can map the key steps in the customer journey. By collaborating with departments such as marketing and product, they can break down data silos and contribute to a single, unified view of the customer. And by providing analytics-backed insights on trends and opportunities, they can become a strategic partner to sales leaders, assisting them in data-driven decision making.
All of these tasks point to another crucial area that top sales ops teams are focusing on, one with implications for the entire company: customer experience (CX).
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