From the course: Sales Operations
What is sales operations?
- I'm often asked, what's the secret to building an awesome sales organization? Well, there's the people, of course, you gotta have great people. And there's also leadership, and there's the go-to-market strategy. But there's also a critical part of the sales team that you might not have considered. These are the folks responsible for all the metrics of your business, who expand the capacity of sales leadership and make revenue happen faster. Yep, you guessed it! This team is called sales operations. And they're the ones that are gonna help you turn your vision of success into reality. Now, sales operations is a fairly new concept. So don't feel bad if you really have no idea what the sales operations team actually does. In the most basic sense, sales operations is a team of people who help drive and execute your go-to-market strategy. And there are four parts of what sales operations does and in many ways, the same person plays four different roles on your team. First, you should think about your SOPs leader as your chief operation officer of your sales team. This is the person helping you run all the various non-quota carrying parts of the sales team. Aligning them to a common mission and helping drive the goals of your sales organization. I like to say I want my sales leader focused on leadership and hitting their number and I want my sales ops team leaders to take care of everything else. Second, your SOPs lead is your sales strategy partner. Yes, SOPs leaders need strong quantitative skills but you also need someone who understands the unique go-to-market challenges you're facing and can execute solutions to fix them. The third role of sales operations is chief of staff. The chief of staff manages team meetings, executes special projects, and really represents sales interests to the rest of the company. And last but not least, the fourth job of your sales ops leader is to be a sales person. You see, you want your SOPs partner to wake up in the morning and be thinking about how the sales team can hit its number. Because of this, I strongly encourage that you give your SOPs leadership's team quotas and put them on a variable comp plan to align them to the sales organization. I know it's controversial, but do it. Okay, so those are the four jobs that a SOPs team plays. And I can already guess what your next question will be. How do I find and hire people to work on my SOPs team? Look, hiring amazing people is definitely a key success criteria to building your SOPs team. And you need a diverse set of individuals who exhibit a great blend of both qualitative and quantitative skills. I like to look for job competencies such as analytics, communication, strategic analysis, and collaboration. And in terms of experience, I want people who have done management consulting, or sometimes I want them to have a level of business or industry that is really relevant to the functional experiences of my company. And of course, you want people who are gonna be comfortable executing within your culture and in line with your values. So, the secret to building a great sales organization? Build a great sales operations team. The sales operations team is the foundation to help you execute your good market strategy and ultimately achieve your vision.
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