Sales operations polarizing. People in sales either love or hate them. Planning determines tools, technologies, and strategies to optimize the sales process. But is it necessary?
The argument against sales operations is that they slow the sales process by introducing ineffective strategies and complex-to-learn tools. This happens to many sales teams.
However, a great sales operations team lowers costs, boosts productivity, and improves revenue. So, what does a great sales operations team look like? Let’s get started.
What Are Sales Operations?
To fully understand what makes a great sales operations team, we need to learn the fundamentals. In a nutshell, sales operations support your sales team in every capacity.
Sales leaders get consolidated data, advanced reporting, and analytics to support crucial decision-making. Reps get enablement tools that make selling more effective and productive.
Sales operations and data go hand-in-hand. Sales operations teams leverage data to help ensure sales teams hit KPIs, reach business goals, and iterate on winning strategies.
The Benefits of Sales Operations Planning
Sales operations support sales teams holistically. They can focus on sales support, like transactional data reporting or order form generation. Or, they can create entire sales strategies, including headcount planning, territory optimization, and quota selling.
If you make a mistake in sales operations, it could directly affect the sales process. For example, you can set quotas too high, cause attrition risk, or provide bad data to reps. But implemented properly, sales operations can bring the following benefits to any business:
A More Efficient Sales Process
Sales operations let sales reps do what they do best—sell. That means providing the tools that get rid of the bulk of the manual work that plagues the sales process.
Sales operations do this through what’s called “tech consolidation,” or integrating all sales tools to provide a seamless and efficient sales process. For example, you can combine customer relationship management (CRM) with an email marketing tool.
This means you don’t have to manually copy and paste lead info, notes, and other data entry tasks. Instead, reps can leverage lead data from the CRM and use it to personalize cold outreach and other outbound sales campaigns.
That’s exactly what Instantly can do for your business. Instantly CRM integrates natively with our email marketing tool so all your lead data and outreach are centralized in one app.
Instantly AI can also consolidate lead data to help reps focus on the hottest prospects, recommend email copy suggestions, and optimize outreach strategies for you.
Quickly Identify & Scale Best Strategies
The best way to grow revenue is by identifying what works for your business and scaling that strategy. Sales operations help you find these strategies and provide the tools for scaling.
But sales operations don’t just apply to macro strategies. They also apply to the individual. For example, you can zero in on a rep who’s been crushing quotas, then use data to find trends to determine how to replicate the strategy for the whole team.
If your business is primarily using cold outreach to find new clients, you can use A/B testing tools to find which email strategy works best. Instantly can help with that with just a few clicks.
Instantly lets you test multiple elements of your email. It will then find the best-performing version and send that to the rest of the leads on your campaign instead.
Advanced Sales Performance Reporting
You can’t grow your business if you’re not measuring performance. Sales operations transform data into actionable insights by looking into sales performance, trends, and key metrics.
These insights come in the form of sales performance reporting and forecasting. Insights from reports help sales leaders make data-driven decisions and course-correct goals.
Sales operations also look into potential bottlenecks in the sales process that can cause bigger issues if left unchecked. This creates a sales process that’s efficient, optimized, and scalable.
Developing Sales Lead Strategies
Sales operations lay the fundamentals for long-term sales strategies. This type of strategic planning can be categorized into the following:
- Territory: Ensures that sales reps are assigned to areas that bring the most revenue.
- Capacity: Helps scale operations sustainably. Is more manpower needed to hit goals?
- Quota: Sets realistic expectations for reps to hit based on forecast data and analytics.
- Compensation: Incentivize sales reps to hit goals and quotas and boost performance.
For outbound campaigns, the most sustainable and scalable sales lead planning strategy involves leveraging lead finder tools to prospects that match your ideal customer profiles.
That’s where Instantly B2B Lead Finder comes in. You can find leads using several advanced filters, demographics, and even technographics. All 280 million plus leads in our database are pre-verified. Once you’ve found your ideal leads, you can directly send them to a campaign.
Sales Operations Planning 101
Sales operations strategies can make or break a business. Remember, they act as a guideline toward business goals. To ensure everything goes to plan, consider the following best practices:
Create a Definitive Mission Statement
Every sales operations strategy needs a defined mission statement. This outlines the roadmap the team will follow. Ensure that it’s as clear and objective as possible.
Clearly defining a mission statement provides the sales team with a guide for developing sales strategies, decision-making, and organizational goals. Here is an example:
“Creating sustainable, holistic, and scalable strategies for sales teams that result in filled pipelines, better lead intelligence, and more profitable deals.”
Identify and Establish Scalable Processes
A big part of sales operations is helping sales teams find and scale the best-performing strategies. But, there’s a distinct difference between a winning strategy and a sustainable one.
For example, reports might show that running PPC campaigns had the best overall results when it comes to ROI. However, it might not be the most scalable strategy due to the cost.
Sales operations teams need to evaluate the best strategies to find one that can be scaled sustainably. It’s all about minimizing costs and maximizing profit.
Measure and Monitor KPIs and Sales Metrics
You can’t grow what you can’t measure. You must understand what KPIs and sales metrics to track to clearly show sales team performance.
Analyzing KPIs and sales metrics lets you evaluate sales performance and find potential issues and bottlenecks early. It also helps businesses strategize for scaling sales operations.
For example, analyzing revenue provides insight into when the perfect time is to hire new sales reps, what the most profitable customer acquisition vehicles are, and how to structure compensation for your sales team. You want to track metrics like deals closed, opportunities, or average customer value (ACV).
See all these metrics and more with Instantly CRM. It’s a must-have for sales teams that focus on cold outreach and outbound campaigns. We’ll talk about that more in a bit!
Collaborate with Marketing
Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. When both departments are aligned, you create better sales funnels and cohesive language between sales and marketing.
You don’t want to have marketing collateral have a disconnect with what a sales rep would pitch to a prospect. Although marketing reaches out to a wider audience, they can still use data and insights from sales to zero in on the ideal customers or build better buyer personas.
You want to eliminate as much friction as possible between the two departments. Consider allocating time when marketing heads can ask technical questions to sales leaders in person.
Motivate the Team to Increase Efficiency
Sales enablement doesn’t just come from the tools and strategies provided by sales operations. Your sales teams need to be motivated, incentivized, and given the proper resources and training necessary to thrive.
Consider 1 on 1 coaching, giving credit when credit is due, and recognizing your team’s success. The more you help your team, the higher the chances that the business succeeds. Give MVPs a shoutout. Help underperforming sales reps. Ensure that each step is actionable.
How to Leverage Instantly.ai For All Sales Operations Needs
Sales operations are its department. You have the director of sales operations, chief revenue officers, operations managers, analysts, and sales operations representatives.
Unfortunately, not every business can afford to hire an entire department. But thanks to advancements in technology, you can get close. Enter Instantly.ai, your one-stop-shop sales operations tool for all things outbound. Here’s how it works.
Sales Lead Planning With B2B Lead Finder
You want pipelines filled with quality leads with the highest chance of conversions. That means finding leads who get the most value out of your business.
You can find these leads with just a few clicks using Instantly B2B Lead Finder. Want to reach out to companies similar to your clients? Use the Lookalikes feature.
If you’re in SaaS, use the Technologies filter to find companies using specific tech stacks. The News filter that lets you see the latest update from a company, perfect for personalization.
You have a ton of different options for finding leads. All leads are pre-verified. You just have to reach out to leads with the perfect cold email copy.
To ensure pipelines are always filled, enable the Evergreen feature, which adds a specific number of leads to an existing campaign automatically based on your search criteria.
Managing Leads and Customers With Instantly CRM
As you scale, so does the number of leads in your pipelines. Sales teams need tools for managing growing lead volumes, tasks, and lead interactions across multiple channels.
Instantly CRM provides all of this, plus, several automation features that make daily tasks a whole lot easier for sales reps. All lead data from emails, SMS, LinkedIn, and calls are centralized for your entire team.
Sales reps get a holistic view of all leads—their company descriptions, competitors, pain points, and more. This arms reps with all the necessary lead information to help them angle unique selling propositions.
But where Instantly CRM truly shines is cold outreach. Lead data from the CRM can be used directly to personalize your cold email campaigns. No more generic templates. Instantly CRM’s AI sales assistant will help you craft the perfect email that resonates with their needs.
Instantly CRM also lets you use workflow automation using Custom Sales Flow. Sales reps can create trigger-based conditions using Sales Flow to identify the hottest leads with the most interest in your product or service. No more guessing.
The best part is you only need one subscription for your entire team. You don’t have to worry about any additional costs when scaling. Try Instantly CRM today.
Scaling Outreach with Intantly.ai
Cold email marketing is arguably the most sustainable and scalable growth vehicle. It can generate $36 of revenue per dollar spent. Once you’ve created the frameworks for cold email, all you need to scale are more domains and leads, and the right tool for scaling outreach.
That’s where Instantly.ai comes in. You can automate your entire sales cadence, personalize each email using dynamic variables, and A/B test multiple email variations to help find your best-performing email.
If you’re new to cold email, you can use Instantly’s AI Sequence Generator to create an entire campaign with a few clicks. It’ll ask you for key information about your company, prospects, and offerings. Then, create entire sequences complete with personalization and spintax.
Key Takeaways
Sales operations are essential to every business that wants to run as efficiently as possible. They support sales teams by providing tools, strategies, and insights that make the sales process as optimized as possible.
The right sales operations strategies help businesses reduce costs and maximize profits. As a quick refresher, here are five sales operations best practices to consider:
- Define a mission statement
- Establish scalable processes
- Identify KPIs and sales metrics
- Collaborate with marketing
- Motivate the team to increase efficiency
But, not every business can afford to hire a sales operations team. If you’re looking for a tool that covers all the fundamentals of sales operations at a fraction of the cost, look no further than Instantly.ai. Try Instantly today.
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