The background hero of a successful sales organization is Sales Operations with a focus on four strategies.  An article by  Bertil Chappuis  and Brian Selby of McKinsey & Co.  titled “Looking beyond technology to drive sales operations” provides great guidance.




​The 4 strategies:
1.       Enabling your sales team
2.       Take a leadership role
3.       Create centralized organizations for core functions
4.       Set a high bar for talent
 
Focus on enabling your sales team
Through sales enablement, operations can simplify processes to reduce the non-value added efforts and improve sales team effectiveness. Some examples include simplification of bid approval requirements, CRM streamlining, systematizing compensation/goal planning and account planning reengineering. Sales operations must spearhead many sales impacting process activities.
 
Take a leadership role
Sales operations team successes derive through their effective influence on the sales organization. Operations owns leading the sales planning, pipeline, forecast, and business reviews.   The Sales Operations leader should be the COO and key business partner to sales management. They are uniquely positioned to holding the sales team accountable for delivery on their commitments.
 
Create centralized organization for core functions
When experiencing global business expansion, companies often scale through decentralization through lower cost countries.  Many deal cycle processes are operationally managed in disparate ways.  While costs are managed, sales support grows inefficiently and less than optimal.  To address, consolidating operations support should lead to a corresponding reduction of head count while reducing duplicating efforts, process confusion and better operations accountability.   
 
Set a high bar for talent
Typically, sales operations are seen as overhead. As a result, staffing levels are low while they simultaneously handle continuous improvement and running the business.  Teams comprise heavily of junior analysts who excel in reporting/modeling but weak in change management and influence capabilities.  A more balanced and experienced team is required with a high potential leader.   Incorporate some key rotations from the sales team.   An exceptional sales operations team must include outstanding talent and maintain a pipeline of effective performers. 
 
In summary, raise the bar of the sales operations team. Match expectations with appropriate staffing and investment decisions in this team.

One of the keys to a successful company is a knowledgeable productive sales organization. 
Behind every great sales team are the unsung heroes. 

There is an organization the Sales team needs in their back pockets, an effective Sales Operations team.
 
A 9/11/15 article by Peter Helmer in Business2Community.com titled “Why an Effective Sales Operations Team is the Key to Sales Success” lays out quite clearly but succinctly the six areas of focus.

• Sales Strategy
• Sales Tools
• Sales Programs
• Sales Processes
• Sales Analytics and Measurements
• Sales Training

These areas are quite broad and impactful to the sales organization. The skill sets required are growing in sophistication in both breadth and depth.  I have found that efforts for Processes are often under-vested arms of Sales Operations.  Process is defined as “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.” 

These need to be not just intuitive, but defined, methodical, tested, and simple as possible to follow.   If not,  you are rewarded with lost sales, productivity problems, sales team frustrations, and make shift actions taken outside the process just to make things happen. The latter is especially troubling because it contributes to a downward spiral of process credibility and chaos. 
 
The solution is to adequately invest in trained resources whose day time jobs are to define and create effective processes with detailed documentation, change management and adoption training.    Process development outputs cannot just be a few PowerPoints, Word Docs and a mass email notification.   People will do the right thing if they are aware, understand the benefits, and properly trained.  Invest upfront on the fundamentals, and increase the likelihood of yielding dividends from an efficient sales team.