Heads of Sales Ops made a curious decision back in 2008 during the depths of the Great Recession.  Facing a precarious budget situation, leaders had to decide how best to survive despite having limited tools to measure their function’s own effectiveness, which hampered efforts to make a business case for maintaining (let alone growing) resources.

Conventional wisdom might have assumed the best strategy for Sales Ops was to close ranks, specializing in core areas like process, tools, and data analysis.  The argument: with a comparative advantage in certain competencies, it’s better to focus on perfecting the few.

The natural follow-on question would then be: what responsibilities can I shed to allow focus on the right set of things?

At first glance, evidence seems to confirm this as the direction most companies chose.  The SEC recently surveyed close to 100 organizations on sales ops trends over the last three years.  Nearly 1 in 5 organizations report shedding former key responsibility areas like training, compensation, and forecasting.

Below the surface area, though, it’s clear that winning organizations chose a very different strategy, one that extends Sales Ops’ reach rather than closing ranks.   Read More »

In uncertain times (sound familiar?), information on what might happen next becomes king.  Early Monday morning, CFO’s all over the world sent urgent e-mails asking for updated forecasts in light of recent financial news.

Many responses were inaccurate, because they failed to adhere to a law of nature first observed centuries ago and that most of us learned in high school physics: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

Most sales organizations track sales reps’ actions. But few systematically track the customer’s reaction to those efforts, despite mounds of evidence that this data is key to deciphering actual purchase intent.

In fact, only 3 out of 20 of their regularly tracked metrics are even aimed at the customer.  Within that, just 6% of organizations measure customer responses at different stages of the sales cycle – most instead rely on a more passive (and less predictive) sense of customer sentiment like satisfaction.

Observing customer reactions strengthens forecasts because, definitionally, they are present tense – they reflect what is happening right now. Read More »

When you ask a Sales Ops exec for a word or phrase to describe their role in the sales organization, you generally get one of two answers: 1) change agent, or 2) creator (as in, “I produce things for the sales team to use).  The irony lies in the massive variability of organizational composition – it seems we organize teams schizophrenically.

Taken in this light, then, the identity crisis we’ve all experienced feels eminently solvable. If shifts in the B2B purchasing environment present an untenable situation, the obvious answer is to determine the root cause of these shifts and aim our creative change mechanisms in the right areas.

And yet when you ask sales ops leaders what exactly they’re examining these days, only 3 out of 20 of their regularly tracked metrics are aimed at the customer, precisely the root of the shifts.  How can we make adjustments if we’re blind to customer sentiment?   Read More »

Sales Ops in 2011 faces a number of situations that has the function questioning its very mission and purpose. This identity crisis is stemming from:

1)     Many groups spending the last 10 years becoming master project managers without any form of master strategic vision

2)     The cost of supporting a complex sale dramatically increasing, thereby changing the nature and scale of enablement required

3)     Perhaps now more than ever, a rep can absolutely nail the prescribed account strategy, and still lose the deal.  The perfectly refined playbook Sales Ops has nurtured for years increasingly feels insufficient for navigating the complex sales environment.

The first two problems are rooted in the same place: the strategic mission of most Sales Ops groups was never fully clarified.  The initial charter was most often a reactive response to some fire that needed putting out.  The sales force got bogged down in too much admin so the sales org brought in a few people from operations to run six sigma analyses.  Or goal was missed three quarters in a row – enter in a few finance people to work on forecasting – and, poof, you have a Sales Ops organization.

Over time, the group grew in direct proportion to new projects it was assigned – its scope and definition for success necessarily evolved.  This hodgepodge evolution pigeonholed the team as project managers.  Read More »

I’m beginning to worry we are unwittingly getting caught in an arms race with customers.  More than ever, it takes a village to sell effectively.  A member recently told us that lack of internal people resources forced them to outsource $25,000 worth of RFP support.  Now, it was for a $30 million deal – so if it closes in their favor, it’s obviously money well spent.  But multiply that by every deal you’re currently hunting – and you better make sure you’re hunting the right deals, huh?

Requirements for more consensus before deal closure coupled with endless customization requests naturally put stress on sales cycle lengths.  And the shift towards selling more complex solutions has always required more support involved in a given deal – at the customer organization, yes, but also internally. 

But that support used to seem easier to manage.  We could automate a lot of internal processes to make sure reps could maximize time in front of customers. We could coordinate a lot of internal coordination to help – separate service teams, centralized contract teams, legal, pricing, etc – and that was especially convenient because it was support we didn’t have to own (and, therefore, pay for).

Lately, though, the way customers are responding to our sales efforts – looking to dump any form of risk back on us – requires more people on our ledgers.  Read More »

Sales manager time is scarce.  Yet it seems all we do is add to their plate.  Be a world-class coach, seller, resource allocator, motivator, and communicator, we tell them.  Oh, and we can’t really predict why so many deals get stuck, so also be a great innovator.

But good sales innovation requires a certain amount of restraint.  Not only do the best managers know HOW to innovate, they know WHEN to. 

Here is what these managers recognize: not every deal gets stuck for unpredictable reasons.  Innovation is only necessary after the rep has exhausted all the options laid out in the established playbook.

Jumping directly into investigation mode whenever a rep cries “STUCK!” risks involving your managers in way too many deals.

And reps misidentify deals as “stuck” more often than you think, for the same reasons they struggle once a deal truly is stuck: reticence to ask hard questions with unclear answers.  Read More »

In baseball, the best managers manufacture runs out of seemingly thin air.  To be sure, scoring runs is a complex blend of effort from many different parts of the team and the larger organization. 

The general manager, for instance, can help by putting the best players on the field and investing in the development of young talent.  The players can execute better by taking more batting practice or studying different pitcher tendencies (insert joke here about performance-enhancing drugs).  The coaching staff can help by teaching new hitting techniques or putting together the perfectly balanced lineup.

But as Cubs fans know well, it’s all too common to see two or three stranded runners in one inning.  The inning starts out great – two singles and you’re sitting with runners on first and third, nobody out.  Double play here, strikeout there…inning over.

What do the best managers do?  They call the timely hit-and-run.  Or call for a well-placed bunt to move a runner into scoring position and out of double play danger.  They innovate on the fly – and produce runs that otherwise would have been left stranded.

Sales is no different.  Despite our best efforts, we find ourselves stranding lots of deals.  A member told me the other day “we’re great at getting baserunners to second base but we just can’t seem to get them home.”  Read More »

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Table stakes. You’ll hear it at nearly any poker table—it’s the minimum amount of buy-in required to simply have a seat and play. You’ll also hear it in the business world to describe the basic fundamentals needed to enter a market or execute a transaction. In the Sales world, we’ve discovered a set of table stakes skills that are often overlooked in sales managers.

And here’s the kicker of it…this set of table stakes is something you’re likely taking for granted, and here’s why: 25% of total sales manager effectiveness has very little to do with Sales.

We’re all familiar with other traditional assumptions that don’t apply in Sales. Compensation principles (what other functions have to create a President’s Club to ensure sufficient motivation?) and promotion patterns (a star frontline performer does not necessarily translate to a star manager) are just two examples.

Perhaps we’ve become so comfortable assuming Sales is different we forget to look for places where it’s actually not different. Take a look at the first graphic to the right:

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What this shows us is that the skills we traditionally assume managers have—the ability to listen and reliability—need to be elevated to “must have” status.

The second graphic to the right shows just how non-negotiable these skills are in sales managers. Without these fundamentals, these table stakes, your sales managers are leaving revenue on the table. Period.

We’ll be exploring these manager fundamentals this week in our upcoming webinar, but here are few considerations:
Read More »

Everything we’ve learned about changing customer demands over the last two years points to two undeniable facts:

1)     The overall sales experience must feel demonstrably different than your competition, and

2)     The opportunity to demonstrate that difference happens in a very short timeframe (most likely, the first 2-3 minutes of your first conversation with a customer).  In other words, to quote our friends at Corporate Visions, Inc., “your brand rests on the lips of your sales reps.”

The timeframe for sales experience differentiation is very short, but many support mechanisms were conceived as a means to achieve scale for a big direct sales force.  Think for a minute about the way your Sales Ops team is organized, its responsibilities, and the tools they create to support your biggest sales objectives.  Most likely, they are built to support an entire sales cycle.  The central organizing theory is very often the sales process itself.

But most sales processes aren’t very different from one another – in fact, many are off-the-shelf vendor solutions.  How well can that support the need for a highly differentiated conversation? Read More »

Most large sales organizations have teams working full-time trying to achieve a globally standardized sales process.  These teams develop all kinds of methodologies to attain the coveted “common language” – Six Sigma techniques to denote the smallest of errors, communication plans, voice of the customer studies, productivity audits, and training materials to name a few.

But how much of these efforts are a waste of time?

Portions of our most recent work show that sales process can be over-done, and the ROI of perfecting ‘the science of sales’ may be lower than ever: 

1)  Following a formal sales process actually has zero correlation to the success of a Challenger sales rep™, the dominant way to be a star performer in this environment.  In fact, it’s better to be agile. Standardizing activity can be a hindrance.

2)  Mere completion of scripted sales process activities doesn’t necessarily provide better pipeline visibility. Leading edge forecasters have found tracking customer reactions (rather than your actions) far more predictive. Read More »