Keeping a pulse on customer needs takes time and effort. That is why Sales Operations must find new ways to gain customer insights that uncover new opportunities.
Sales Operations distills customer insights by capturing the voice of the customer with advanced technologies in addition to direct research with customers and channel partners. As a result, the organization can influence the company’s competitive position and future product lines by building vertical expertise directly into Sales Ops.
Sales Operations must find new ways to gain customer insights that uncover new opportunities.
Turning Opportunities into Action
Identify the opportunity
The Sales Ops organization is responsible for identifying the most attractive markets to build the foundation for a clear sales strategy. Using appropriate data and analytics, Sales Ops identifies account opportunities by sector, region, district and territory.
Convert the opportunity into a strategy
Enable reps for success
Sales Ops also identifies the training and enablement tools necessary for the rep to be successful. Solutions can include a variety of data, services and support that include populating CRM systems, identifying high-impact case studies, collaborating on professional marketing collateral pieces, creating a list of customer references, collecting customer insights from social media, and maintaining a list of go-to solution experts.
Reps can increase their productivity while lowering organizational costs with a clear strategy and the tools to expand product lines, channels and markets.
Aligning Tasks and Resources
While training and enablement tools help reps with the initial win, Sales Ops should continue to provide support, following a robust sales strategy and an eye on rep productivity. Focusing on high-value activities, including customer-facing activities and relationship building, Sales Ops can facilitate shifting low-value tasks like billing issues or order status to appropriate staff.
Sales Operations can improve seller productivity by:
- Creating libraries of successful proposals and presentations
- Identifying where and when equipment is coming off lease
- Creating pre-proposal discovery templates
- Spotting accounts with the highest propensity to buy
- Alerting Sellers to new opportunities and risks
- Connecting sellers with in-house experts to leverage their expertise
- Highlighting changes in key management positions
- Filtering Marketing leads to ensure sellers only pursue openings with reasonable odds of closing
Customer Messaging, Resources and Enablement Tools
Sales Ops ensures that reps continue to get the information and support they need to fulfill the overall sales strategy through messaging, resources and tools.
Customer messaging
Reps need to know who they are talking to and how to craft the best message to ensure interest. These messages frequently fall into three categories:
- Price sensitive
- Product and features
- Process disruption
Disruptive ideas and messaging are critical to differentiation. Sales Ops can find and leverage these disruptive factors by dedicating resources to researching customers and developing sales collateral that captures the imagination and interest of the customer.
Resources
Sales Ops can increase seller productivity by connecting them with valuable company resources that include:- Data Specialists who spot industry or customer trends and opportunities
- Renewal Specialists who get sellers out of routine transactions to focus on opportunities
- Inside Sales resources who create and qualify leads and handle remote customers, saving outside sellers valuable time
Tools
Sellers now require digital resources, technology and support to serve customers and can include:- Digital enablement resources ensure that sellers remain connected to the company with advanced platforms, analytics, training and digital tools
- Playbooks will articulate the steps, resources and timing needed to execute complex sales processes
- Cases, references and up-to-date product and solution documentation are valuable for upselling and cross-selling opportunities
Successful Sales ops provide real and sustainable competitive differentiation. By combining analysis, support and tools, Sales Ops helps leverage company strengths, bridge internal barriers, and deliver knowledge-based, insightful value to customers.
Seizing Growth Opportunities
Markets are highly competitive and changing fast. However, sales Ops leaders understand that a clear value proposition, backed by sales expertise and extensive corporate resources, wins and keeps accounts. For more information on how to grow your sales operations organization, contact us.
About Alexander Group
Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.