Sales leaders have two avenues to increase performance: Adding individual headcount and improving organizational productivity. Adding headcount simply puts more quota-bearing “feet on the street” to sell the way you currently sell. Improving productivity, on the other hand, is about enabling the current salespeople to sell better.

Executing a performance improvement strategy demands dedicated resources focused on sales productivity. Current customer management strategies can be optimized to improve how the organization sells. Some may need to innovate around aspects of how their organization sells to take advantage of new markets segments or buying centers. Others will need to completely transform how they sell to regain competiveness.

Sales operations, sales effectiveness and sales readiness are just some of the terms used to define the sales resources dedicated to improving the performance and productivity of the sales organization. As organizations grow, the strategic importance and specialization of “sales ops” expands. 

In small sales organizations, the sales leader does everything, while multibillion-dollar sales organizations are supported by large and specialized sets of roles and functions to manage sales operations, sales training, sales enablement, and the supporting technology.

The productivity infrastructure for the sales organization comprises these elements. They are all interrelated and specialized to serve the strategy, competency, and knowledge needs that multiple sales roles require. They also represent critical alignment and collaboration points between the sales organization and Finance, HR, Marketing, and IT.

Every sales ops function is unique, based on the size of organizations it supports, the complexities of the products/solutions it sells and the historical progression of how and why sales ops has evolved. To some, the role remains an administrative function populated with financial analyst types who collect and process various data streams. Others view ops as a strategic investment, diverting budget into non-quota roles that target sales productivity.

The analysis of data from the MHI Research 2014 Sales Performance and Productivity study identifies three key areas of focus for the sales ops function:

1. Sales forecast and funnel process,
2. Metrics/reporting, and
3. Sales process design/execution.

Our research identifies sales ops as a strategic function whose core responsibilities are to manage sales performance, define customer management strategies, and align the technology strategy.

Join us on September 9, when we will share our research, data and perspectives on the current state of sales operations and what its future holds. Ops trends we are now tracking include:

• Converting data into intelligence
• Refining customer management strategies
• Driving adoption and change management initiatives
• Making sales technology matter

Balancing the tactical demands of maintaining existing sales productivity infrastructure with the strategic needs of  next-generation sales organizations is the central challenge facing sales operations today.

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