Sales Ops 2.0
How would you classify your Sales Operations group?
- Accountants
- Police
- Personal Trainers
I tend to see the sales ops group as a bellwether for how a prospective client wants to build their CRM or SFA program. Some prefer to use their investment to have better reporting on how the sales reps are doing against targets. Some others prefer to use their investment to monitor activity to ensure the right sales activities are taking place with accounts. And yet some others use their investment to find ways to improve sales rep performance. Is one better than another?
That is a loaded question.
It would be easy to propose that the personal trainer role is the better of the three, if for no other reason because it sounds more politically correct. But, I am not going to succumb to that trap. Sales performance is really important, but the other two have merit as well.
What I do think is the more critical consideration is whether you are limited to one of these roles in your sales ops group or whether it includes all three. I do strongly believe that all three are better than only one. Yes, but, what is the relationship between sales ops and SFA?
I recently heard Joe Galvin from SIRIUSDecisions use the term, “Salesforce Accounting”. In this case he was referring to the co-opting of the SFA system purely for the purpose of forecasting and measuring sales results. My experience is that when a sales ops group focuses on the accounting role, then SFA is designed as a tool to achieve their purpose. Taking this one step further, I think there are companies who also build “Salesforce Altercation” systems. This type of SFA serves as a tool to allow the sales ops group to play the police role to ensure that reps are conducting sales calls according to plan.
When the SFA or CRM system are designed for only these purposes, I believe it leads to “Salesforce Alienation”, causing the all too popular adoption problems that is far more common in the marketplace than we should tolerate. Then of course there are those companies who build “Salesforce Alignment” systems, which fit with the personal trainer role of sales ops groups.
So why don’t we all aspire to the salesforce alignment version of SFA? It sure appears by its name to be the right approach? It is a good approach. Helping drive sales rep performance is essential, but we also want to use SFA for purposes of financial management and to drive best practices. We should not be satisfied with only one. We should expect all three. We should expect all three from our SFA systems and our sales operations teams. We have room for accountants, police and personal trainers on the team, even if they all wrap up into that single person you have serving as your sales ops function.