At Dreamforce '13, Data.com held a networking roundtable where Sales Ops leaders met and shared best practices. For 90 minutes, over 200 Sales Ops professionals traded tips on how to be more successful.  Here are some of their best tips for you.

1. Ride along with your sales reps 

To truly understand what your sales team's day is like, the challenges they face in the field, and how Sales Ops can help them be more strategic, try spending a day in their shoes.  Do a ride along with them to truly see the world through their eyes.  Quarterly ride alongs led the Sales Ops team at one major software company to prioritize a mobile CRM solution above all other initiatives and CRM satisfaction has gone up significantly.

2. Survey your sales team 

Create and publish a short survey to all members of your sales team.  Your sales team will be grateful that you're listening and you will have data to prioritize and justify your initiatives. Consider questions such as:

• Where do you get your prospect data today?
• What one thing would make Salesforce more valuable to you?
• What practices have you seen in other sales organizations that you wish we had here?

The answers will help you determine where to focus your limited resources.

3. Look for opportunities to automate

Costly manual processes are the source of errors, resource drain, and frustrated sales reps.  Identify two to three opportunities to automate so Sales Ops can focus on more strategic activities.  When selecting candidates for automation, select the processes that occur frequently and impact the widest number of people for maximum impact. 

4. Reduce fields

Look through all the form fields that reps are expected to enter on accounts, contacts and opportunities.  If these fields are not being reported, eliminate them. For instance, eliminate any field that hasn't been reported in at least three months.  Reducing unnecessary fields will increase the amount of data your sales team is willing to enter. 

5. Get executive sponsorship

The key to successful Sales Ops initiatives is identifying an executive sponsor for any major change. Sponsors can come from any part of the organization, including Finance, Marketing, or even your CEO.  Identify the person who feels the most pain from the initiative not being done and enlist their assistance in providing sponsorship.  Executive sponsorship was a key factor in nearly every successful initiative.