The primary objective of sales operations should always be to make the life of sales EASY. Sometimes sales operations can get so bogged down in data and process they can lose sight of this. It needs to be easy for sales reps (who should be out in the field) and it needs to be easy for managers (who should self serve as much as possible). This short blog hopefully provides a few ideas on how to make sales easy.
A few examples of lost productivity:
- Multiple opportunities to track one deal
- Double-keyed data
- Opportunities to proposals/quotes
- Phone calls/E-mails to CRM
- Waiting on an operations team to produce a report
- Multiple tools with multiple logins
- Disjointed research activities from a variety of sources
- Shadow accounting of commissions calculations
A few examples of productivity initiatives:
- Automating e-mail tracking in your CRM (HubSpot, SalesforceIQ, Gmail/Outlook plugins)
- Digital content management at sales fingertips (SpringCM, Docushare)
- Continuous account and territory planning (Altify, Anaplan)
- Dynamic reports delivered through SFDC or other visualisation tools (Domo, Qlik, Tableau)
- Moving to platform CRM to ensure various add-ons and plugins are all based in one place
- An easily searchable database with reuseable content and questions for RFPs
- Increased alerting and automated routing
If you would like to have a discussion about how to improve sales productivity for your organisation, please contact Sales Ops Help.