What is Sales Operations? A Complete Guide.

When J. Patrick Kelly invented sales operations at Xerox in the 1970s, he described it as “all the nasty number things you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force.”

Fast forward to today and sales ops has gone from doing number things to doing all the things. Eighty-five per cent of sales professionals agree that sales ops is more and more strategic, according to our “State of Sales” research report. Once the unsung hero, now sales ops is stepping into the spotlight — responsible for bringing data and technology to every corner of the sales process, so sales can do more with less.

It’s a lot. But help is on the way. Below we share how sales operations can thrive — not just survive — as its responsibilities grow. You’ll discover the secrets of a great sales ops team and how to build one yourself with sales team productivity tools.

Sales operations uses systems and technology to ensure that sales teams reach their targets. Sales ops grounds this work in data — how many reps to hire, where to place them for the best coverage and how to incentivise them to hit targets. The goals? Efficiency, excellence and optimising the sales process every day.

The keyword of the day is efficiency — deepening business impact without spending more time and money. Sales ops makes possible this by supporting both sales leaders and sales reps with optimised technology that drives strategy and more productive work. Sales leaders get tools — like performance dashboards and automated forecasting — that support planning and key decisions. Sales reps get tools — like enablement and AI-powered recommendations — that make it easier and faster to sell.

The result is big, juicy revenue. In fact, companies with world-class sales operations teams see a leap of 20% to 30% in sales productivity, according to McKinsey.

It’s all about taming the wild, wild west of sales. Imagine that dusty scene where sales reps argue over accounts, drown in administrative tasks, shoot from the hip in every sales conversation and improvise about what to do next. Meanwhile, sales leaders can’t find the data they need to set confident targets — and find pipeline blockages that put these targets risk.

With sales operations, improvisation gives way to data-proven action, improving the return on time and energy investment across the sales team. In the section below, we share how.

At a high level, sales operations works to create predictable revenue by streamlining the sales process with best practices and automation. Then, sales ops leads analyse data from sales teams to uncover insights and create reports that help guide sales strategy.

The average sales rep spends just one-third of their time selling. The vision of sales operations is to take manual work off of the sales rep’s plate, so they can focus all their time on selling. For example, weaving automation into customer relationship management (CRM) software can take care of data entry like logging sales calls. Artificial intelligence (AI) can also help sales reps pinpoint the hottest prospects in a mountain of leads so they can keep in touch to the most important ones.

Sales ops teams spend a lot of their time identifying what is and isn’t working in the sales process. When they see trends or behaviours that result in more efficient selling, they can turn into these best practices for the entire sales team, shortening the sales cycle.

For example, you might zero in on a rep who’s crushing their quota and determine that it’s because of a specific outreach cadence — the order and timing of steps that the sales rep goes through to move prospects through the sales pipeline. Sales ops would then bake that sequence into the overall sales process to improve team performance and help new hires hit quota faster.

You can’t grow what you don’t know. Sales ops goes from data to insights, building the information centre that sales teams depend on to make critical decisions. They create assessments of likely sales performance, like forecasts. They also report on metrics — everything from the big picture of business health (like revenue) all the way down to deep-dive metrics on sales activity (like the number of customer objections that were missed).

Sales operations then flags problem areas and recommends next steps, so sales leaders can course-correct to hit targets.Account-based salespeople focus on a specific sector or set of customers and prospects, creating personalised sales strategies for each one. Above all, relationships are important to account-based sales. That’s because they often involve high-value products and services which take time to sell.

One example of account-based sales is pharmaceutical sales. As an illustration, pharmaceutical reps focus on a specific high-value practice. They may, for example, sell blood pressure drugs to a few highly-reviewed cardiologist practices in a specific metro area.

Account-based selling demands sellers be both product and account experts. As a product expert, you can provide crucial information, answer questions, field objections and ease uncertainty for your accounts’ decision-makers. As an account expert, you become a trusted source to your client, which can lead to a lasting business relationship.

Sales ops works with sales leaders to lay out the vision and strategy for the next several years. Then, they work to achieve it one year at a time. They do this through strategic planning, which falls into four buckets:

• Territory planning makes sure the right reps are assigned to the right territories to hit targets.
• Capacity planning determines whether to hire more people to hit sales goals and if so, how many.
• Quota planning sets expectations for sales rep performance, based on forecast targets.
• Compensation planning incentivises the right behaviours for sales reps to hit their goals.

Sales operations teams can be as small as one person or encompass dozens of experts. To structure your team for success, start by bringing in a generalist who can handle core sales ops functions, especially sales process improvements and technology management. Then add new roles as you grow, from leadership who can scale the team to specialists like data analysts.

Let’s look at key roles that frame a successful sales ops team:

• Vice president or director of sales operations: This role leads the department and partners with other leaders like the chief revenue officer and vice president of sales. They create higher-level strategies that drive efficiency, productivity and top-line growth across the company.
• Sales operations manager: This role turns executive direction into reality using day-to-day processes and tools. They also focus on bringing the best out of their people by defining and implementing best practices.
• Sales operations representative: This role is entry level and handles day-to-day tasks like tracking the progress of goals, entering data, updating reports and providing administrative support for sales reps.
• Sales operations analyst: This role leans on CRM software and other data sources to make recommendations for improvements and to create performance reports.

Ready to find talent? There’s plenty to be had. A quick LinkedIn search shows more than 3.3 million people with job titles for “sales operations.” But the best talent might actually be in your backyard. Start by looking internally at your sales reps in case any want to make the switch or at analysts in other domains (like data scientists or HR operations).

Sales operations tools begin with a CRM, which allows teams to manage the pipeline from a single source of truth. Sales ops may also rely on other purpose-built tools - like those that offer intelligent lead insights or sales planning capabilities. These tools can be built right into the CRM (what we do at Salesforce) or they can be integrated as stand-alone solutions.

Let's take a look at the most important tools for a sales ops team.

A CRM offers reps, managers and leaders a single place to track deals in the sales pipeline and view reports on sales performance. It’s also where features like workflow automation and AI-driven deal insights can be used to improve selling efficiency and close rates.

Here are important CRM features in more detail:

• Revenue intelligence uses AI to guide sellers to next steps (“This customer is ready for an upsell,” for example) and identifies red flags in the sales process, like a customer objection that was missed.
• Process automation reduces manual work and streamlines painful business processes. For example, automating finance approvals like deal discounts can help sales close deals faster.
• Dashboards and reports make it easier for sales ops to build reports without help from IT. This includes sales forecasting reports and sales dashboards that track team performance and key metrics.

“Our manual processes stopped working as we grew. The analysis alone was taking over our days. So we deepened our investment in technology. It helps us do more with what we have.”
Erin Sanor, Sales Operations Manager, Outset Medical

A June 2022 Salesforce survey found that half of reps expect to primarily sell virtually moving forward, but only 29% say they're receiving the training they need. Sales enablement tools can help you onboard new reps faster with tools for coaching, step-by-step sales process guidance and content and resources to help sellers move deals forward.

A great sales territory plan can make your team more productive. It assigns the right reps to the right territories to make sure all your target markets are covered. Sales ops is responsible for making sure that territories are logical for the sales rep’s travel and balanced across the team so everyone has a fair shot at hitting their numbers.

Learn how territory planning can help you design balanced territories in hours, not months.

Watch the demo and discover how to assess territory coverage, model possible scenarios and deploy with ease.

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To measure the success of sales ops, use sales reporting tools that show you the most important information at a glance — for example, the amount of revenue earned per rep and the speed of the sales cycle. When these are built into the CRM, you can dig in and take action on the fly.

Here are the most important metrics to watch out for:

• Average quarterly revenue per rep: This metric describes how efficient a sales team is. To calculate the average revenue per sales rep, divide your total quarterly revenue by the number of sales reps.
• Average selling time of a sales rep: This metric is a marker for productivity. It measures how much time your sales rep spends selling versus non-selling tasks like logging call notes. A CRM can help to calculate this metric by classifying and measuring customer-facing tasks on a sales rep’s calendar.
• Forecast accuracy: This is a critical metric that shows how well you tracked to the forecast you set. To calculate forecast accuracy, determine the percentage difference between your predicted revenue and actual revenue.
• Average sales cycle length: This is the length of time that passes between when a sales rep opens up a line of communication with a prospect and when they finally close the deal. A CRM can track this for you.
• Win rate: This refers to how many customer deals you close. It’s a marker for how successful your sales enablement is: Effective onboarding and training means reps are likely to close deals faster. Calculate win rate by dividing the number of closed/won deals by the total number of opportunities in your pipeline.

Learn more about the return of investment of Sales Ops