What is Sales Operations? A Complete Guide
Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.
We understand in the world of generating revenue, closing a deal with customers is more important than manually entering data into Salesforce, or sending an email to follow up with a lead. These examples of manual and repetitive administrative tasks usually get left behind as sales representatives are focusing on higher-priority tasks, like selling products and services to customers.
However, working in this unstructured way with an outdated Salesforce org can cause chaos and problems down the road in sales and operations planning. This is one of the reasons why many businesses employ a sales operations team. They can create efficient sales processes for coworkers that bypass these issues and drive revenue, taking business goals up to eleven.
Join us in the article below to learn about sales operations professionals, the software tools they use to support sales tasks, and how to optimize your business workflows.
Let’s get started!
What is Sales Operations?
It’s a team brought together to perform all the tasks and processes that support sales professionals. They are responsible for ensuring sales processes are working well in a business so sales representatives can focus on selling products and services.
Common tasks assigned to individuals in a sales operations team include:
Roles within Sales Operations
As businesses scale, they develop new teams to support functions. Understanding sales operations jobs can help you find the person responsible for the task you need help with. If you need to collaborate with an analyst, there is a chance you might end up talking to the process improvement specialist if you do not understand the roles in sales operations.
To help you find the right people faster, here is a short list of roles within a sales operation team:
- Sales Operations Manager: Responsible for creating and planning sales processes that align with company goals.
- Sales Operations Analyst: Works with sales data to pull out valuable insights for a business. These individuals track sales performance and trends in an industry.
- CRM Administrator: This individual is responsible for the CRM systems at a business. For example, they maintain high-quality data in Salesforce, and that the system runs smoothly for teams in a business.
- Sales Enablement Specialist: Works closely with the sales team, giving them access to training materials, sales tools, and other resources to work more efficiently at closing deals.
- Revenue Operations Specialist: Responsible for getting sales, marketing, and customer success teams on the same page regarding business goals. Their aim is to speed up processes collectively to grow revenue for a business.
How Does Sales Operations Improve A Sales Process
The purpose of sales operations is to make sales processes in a business more efficient. They do this by helping sales professionals stay focused on selling. For example, one way that sales operations make processes better is by enhancing lead scoring tasks. In this exercise, the sales operations team will analyze sales data and make a list of high-quality leads.
The sales team can view this report and focus efforts on leads who have higher chances of converting to customers. In this way, the sales operations team does the admin work while the sales team approaches the lead to convince them to become a customer.
It’s easy to see that both teams working together can streamline the business sales cycle. Here are four more ways in which sales operations can upgrade sales processes.
Create a More Efficient Sales Process
A sales process can be slow because there are a lot of administrative tasks representatives have to perform, such as:
This is where sales operations can come in, review the sales process, and refine it. For example, sales operations professionals can create standardized workflows, automate digital tasks that are repetitive, and support customer relationship management activities in Salesforce.
If you are a sales operations professional looking for clever ways to boost sales with document generation for quotes, invoices, proposals, and more in Salesforce, check out Titan Docs. Our no-code app has point-and-click tools to help you quickly generate any document from Salesforce to support sales teams with closing deals and automating processes.
By tackling these administrative burdens with helpful tools from Titan and Salesforce, the sales operations team provides more time to sales representatives to focus their efforts on selling products and services.
Identify Best Practices for Scaling
As a company scales to new locations, it will need to expand its sales team to accommodate the larger customer base. When this happens, the sales operations team can jump in and research the company’s best-performing sales strategies and create a standardized sales process.
The sales process should be easy-to-follow and repeatable, so a business can share this information with new hires and expect consistent positive results even though the company is increasing in size. Additionally, these sales frameworks and processes can be shared with the HR department, who can use them in onboarding programs to explain job roles and expectations to newly hired sales representatives.
Report on the Performance of the Sales Team
Another way that sales operations enhance sales processes is by tracking the following metrics:
This sales data can be generated into reports and analyzed to find out what is working well for the team. On the flip side, the sales team can also find out which areas they are struggling in. These issues can be discussed to create new strategies and goals for improvement.
Sales Planning
Since the sales operations team loves working with data, they can analyze it and come up with enhanced sales plans that include the following:
In this case, data analysis can be used to help sales and operation planning processes focus on the best opportunities for a business.
Important Tools for Sales Operations
So far, we have discussed how sales operations boost sales productivity. These teams cannot accurately and efficiently do their jobs without advanced tools and software. Let’s take a look at the most important tools sales operations teams are putting to use in 2024.
CRM Software
First up, sales operations teams need good CRM software. We can recommend Salesforce as a CRM platform. It’s world-leading software and has been reliably supporting sales, marketing, and customer service teams since 1999.
Sales operations teams can enjoy the benefits of Salesforce, which include:
When sales operations use Salesforce they can track the performance of sales, manage lead data, and provide insights to managers who make business decisions. As we learned earlier, all of these duties fall within the sales operations team, so subscribing to Salesforce is ideal for making these tasks easier.
For the latest information on Salesforce CRM pricing, please visit the official website.
Sales Enablement Tools
Businesses often hire a sales enablement specialist. This professional supports the sales team by providing them with essential training material that teaches them how to sell more effectively.
Sales enablement tools help sales enablement specialists by giving them content that details how to close deals faster. These tools are also consistent in teaching style, which is useful in training scenarios. Top sales enablement tools for 2024 are:
- HubSpot Sales Hub: Used to build better prospecting methods and support sales processes.
- Vidyard: Gives sales operations personalized video communication capabilities.
- Zendesk: Links with CRM systems to boost sales work and reporting tasks.
- Titan Web: Add a knowledge base to your portal and upload videos, blogs, training guides, and FAQs to give the sales team all the resources they need to close deals fast.
Forecasting and Pipeline Management
Sales operations teams need forecasting and pipeline management tools to support their tasks. Without these tools, analysts would spend a lot of time calculating potential revenue streams for a business. Luckily, they rely on forecasting tools to predict future sales correctly and reliably.
Then, with these calculations, along with identifying opportunities in the market, sales operations can divide resources among projects.
Next are the pipeline management tools that give teams a clear view of their sales pipeline. It is important to visualize a sales pipeline so that everyone can see where blockages occur. Then, teams can start to create plans to improve areas that need it so they can close deals faster. The top forecasting and pipeline management tools for 2024 are:
- Salesforce Sales Cloud: Integrates with Salesforce and has AI forecasting and pipeline management tools.
- Clari: Popular with B2B (business-to-business) sales operations teams thanks to predictive analytics and dynamic modeling tools.
- Gong.io: Provides AI tools that give predictive insights and can examine customer interactions.
Lead Management Tools
With lead management tools, sales operations teams can collect and analyze lead data faster. This is important because the sales operations team needs to identify high-potential leads for sales reps. Additionally, solid lead management tools give sales and operations teams ways to automate follow-ups with leads. Using software in this way, makes sure that business opportunities never fall through the cracks as they can in manual methods.
Lead management tools are also capable of giving sales operations teams information about how potential customers like to buy products and services. These details are essential for building strategies that help sales teams convert leads into customers. The top lead management tools for 2024 are:
- Salesforce Sales Cloud: Provides advanced tools to monitor lead interactions and manage sales pipelines.
- HubSpot: Free tools to access lead data, score them, and automatically assign them to a sales team.
- Zoho CRM: Gives sales operations teams omnichannel engagement capabilities to interact with leads via email messages, phone calls, or chat.
- Titan Forms: Create custom pre-filled forms with conditional logic and no code to collect lead data for Salesforce from a web page. Titan can edit bulk records, use grid views, and upload files to Salesforce.
Automation Tools
When you want to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks in a sales team, you need to automate workflows. Whether you need to help the sales team accurately enter data into Salesforce or consistently follow up on high-quality leads, automation tools can support sales operations teams with saving sales representatives time.
After creating a new and efficient sales process with automation tools, sales representatives can focus on selling products and services to leads and customers instead of performing mundane administrative tasks. The top automation tools for sales operations teams in 2024 are:
- Sales AI and Einstein Copilot: Artificial intelligence tools to enhance admin productivity, manage calls, and faster decision making.
- Flow Builder: For complex Salesforce business processes that need automation.
- Salesforce Sales Engagement: Built into Salesforce to help sales teams be more productive when working with customers. Provides automation tools for common tasks, such as sending emails or scheduling appointments.
- Titan Flow: Tools to build and streamline any business process using no-code in Salesforce. Titan Flow connects web projects to payment providers, cloud-based storage providers, Salesforce, and more.
Contract and Proposal Management
Although there are many other tools, the last ones we would like to discuss are contract and proposal management tools. They help sales operations teams with making and monitoring sales documents. A solid contract and proposal management tool would also help the sales operations team with document approval processes and compliance which is a common occurrence in sales deals.
By digitizing contract and proposal management processes, sales operations teams minimize delays for the sales teams and boost collaboration when it comes to document tasks. The contracts and proposals will also be consistent in quality because they were created with software tools based on a pre-approved template.
Working alongside these tools makes managing contracts or sales documents faster and reduces errors in them.
- DocuSign CLM: Automates contracts, tracks them, and ensures they are compliant. This tool is most suitable for organizations operating on enterprise levels.
- Conga Contracts: Automates contract workflows, generates documents, and has tools for analyzing data.
- Ironclad: An intuitive tool used for managing contracts and automating workflows.
- Titan CLM: Tools like redline, edit, and comment on contracts for easy collaboration while tracking it all in Salesforce using no code. Contract owners can approve or reject changes to make the best deals for an organization.
TITAN’s Suite of Apps for Salesforce Sales Teams
If you have been checking our tool recommendations above, you will notice that Titan has solutions for all your business use cases. Whether it’s creating forms for managing leads, document generation directly from Salesforce to build contracts and invoices, or adding electronic signatures to sales documents for lightning-fast approvals, Titan’s suite of tools can support your endeavors.
Our platform requires no coding skills, so yes, Salesforce admins can use Titan to build portals using intuitive drag-and-drop tools, too!
With Titan, sales operations teams can conquer code in projects, and build processes faster than before. For more information on taking Salesforce to the next level with our powerful platform that builds web projects and automates processes to close deals in seconds, contact us through one of our social media channels below.
See you soon!
Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the key pillars of sales operations?
- Sales Strategy
- Sales Process Optimization
- Performance Analysis
- Technology and Data Management
- Sales Enablement
What is another name for sales operations?
The closest term we could find was revenue operations. However, revenue operations are more than just sales operations. It encompasses sales, marketing, and customer success processes. Therefore, a revenue operations team is designed to improve revenue throughout all customer interactions.
What is the difference between sales and sales operations?
Sales teams perform the following activities:
- Selling products and services to customers.
- Making money for a business.
- Meeting and exceeding sales quotas.
On the other hand, sales operations teams support a sales team with the following duties:
- Enhancing sales processes.
- Managing sales data.
- Researching the best tools for sales data.
What are after sales operations?
When companies succeed with sales operations processes, they scale to revenue operations processes. The activities in revenue operations consider all money-generating teams in a business, such as:
- The Sales Team
- The Marketing Team
- The Customer Success Team
The revenue operations team monitors all areas of the customer journey and finds ways to improve sales at every opportunity.
