Our 10 Favorite Ways Sales Operations Improves Sales Performance Metrics

How Sales Ops Improves Sales Performance Metrics

How much time do you, or your Sales teams, spend on revenue-generating tasks today? Data from the Skaled survey of 600 Sales professionals indicates that Sales teams are only spending about 33% of their time actually selling!

For a ten-person Sales team, that’s about 240 hrs/month NOT prospecting, meeting, or closing.

Do those numbers surprise you as much as they surprised us? Sales performance sets the tone for the rest of the company. If quotas aren’t met, new clients aren’t onboarded, account growth is affected, and revenue is impacted from all sides.

So how are we going to improve these sales performance metrics?

Once you’ve put together the most important aspects of a Sales Operations team, McKinsey & Company also indicate that the domino effect creates a chain reaction to improve the perhaps most important metric, Sales ROI.

Sales IS the heartbeat of any growth-focused company. Sales Operations puts the program together that improves close rates by handling all non-selling processes and tasks within the sales process to reduce friction and help Sales close more deals faster.

Below are 10 of our favorite ways that Sales Operations improves sales performance metrics, including closing deals.

1. Hiring, Onboarding, and Ramping Talent

One of the most essential tasks a high-performing Sales team has is bringing on high-quality talent to drive business.

While you’ll hopefully have a recruiter (formally or informally) sending people your way, it is considered best practice to have job descriptions that match your operating OKRs/KPIs. Your Sales Operations team is likely best prepared to author those job descriptions. You can, and in fact, it’s excellent, when you have some existing Sales team members interview candidates, but your Sales Operations team can improve sales performance by focusing primarily on skill gaps.

It’s important to have a deep understanding of the real needs to get the best growth team in place.

Once you have acceptance for an offer, the real work begins because your new talent will need to learn YOUR sales process, technology, and communication styles. Your new hires will also have to learn your solutions, how to demo if applicable, and value props.

A well-built Sales team focused on the right objectives and supported by the best talent trained on solutions/messaging will drive better Sales performance outcomes.

Related Content: How to Onboard and Ramp Up Your Sales Team Faster

2. Product Training

Remember that time when you onboarded, spent time with the SMEs and the Product/Marketing team to learn in great depth how the solutions integrate and the key messaging?

No? We get that a lot.

Why does proper training not happen, company after company? Because it’s left to “someone” to do. It’s someone’s job, or it’s everyone’s job, and then it’s really no one’s job.

We’ve seen product training often fall to client program trainers or deployment teams who, frankly, have a very different focus than someone who needs to understand why someone would buy the platform or your service.

One of the very best ways that Sales Operations can improve sales performance metrics is assuring and executing training that requires assessing competency level, followed by field training for reinforcement.

Sales Operations is intimately familiar with your sales process, technology, and messaging and their KPIs are interrelated. Therefore, they’re the best people for the job.

3. Evaluate Technology and Deploy at Scale

Are you part of a Sales organization distributed across a region, country, or the world?

The Sales Operations team can improve performance, even during a pandemic, by evaluating the technology to support your growth and performance KPIs.

CRM, Chat, Reporting, Task Automation, and general communications management can greatly improve managers and frontline sales experience, but more importantly, their productivity.

If you think your SDRs or sales executives lack urgency or are falling short on activities, it could be your technology choices slowing them down. Sales Operations can review your tech stack and can help identify opportunities to improve communication flow.

But deploying new tools or overhauling old ones is no small feat and absolutely should not be in the hands of your sellers even if you’re a smaller organization.

Sales Operations are the experts in sales tech setup, deployment, and training.

4. Set Up and Maintain the CRM

Why is a CRM important and deserves its own highlight outside of just “sales tech”?

Client communications, notes, meetings, deals/contracts, sometimes support tickets/issues, and pro-active engagement are all tracked within a CRM.

Sounds great, but…

… garbage in, garbage out, right?

Example: How many Saint Joseph Hospitals are there? St. Joseph, St. Joseph’s, Saint Joseph, Saint Joes, etc. Inaccurate data on the wrong account can cause embarrassing mistakes.

The Sales Operations team can improve performance and avoid embarrassment by ensuring that the CRM data is clean with a data dictionary, formatting requirements, and routine maintenance.

The clean information in the CRM allows the teams using it to work more quickly and accurately, making sure deals and notes are associated with correct accounts. A CRM is foundationally important, but it’s not your reps’ job to build it or be the data gatekeeper.

5. Set Meaningful Performance-Driven KPIs

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” – Peter Drucker.

We don’t know anyone who likes getting to the last day of the quarter and thinking, “How’d we do?” Do you?

Unhealthy sales organizations mistake activity for progress. Example: each rep will make 100 cold calls this week.

What does that activity tell you?

On a good day with honest reps, it will tell you how phone service works best, but that number isn’t driving revenue. If it isn’t even driving appointments, then it doesn’t drive the results you need. Your Sales Operations team can focus your teams on the activities that drive sales performance. We think a better metric is how many Sales Qualified Leads turned into a meeting. How many prospects moved past the Discovery stage?

Think outcomes, not activities, when setting meaningful performance-driven KPIs.

6. Track KPIs – Report Progress

You want your sales team selling. Leave the reports and insights to Sales Operations. Not only does Sales Operations improves sales performance, but they’re also the group that tracks sales performance metrics.

Sales Ops can track how each rep is performing and how the team as a whole is performing. Real-time dashboards and reporting can provide meaningful insights with routine frequency.

Every Sales team knows they can’t run successfully without these reports. But creating, monitoring, and translating report data is very time-consuming, and many teams have to prioritize selling activities over-reporting.

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to wait until the last day of the quarter to know if you hit quota? Wouldn’t it be great if you knew exactly where the team stood every week and thus be able to identify gaps with enough time to make changes?

7. Market Intelligence Research

How do you know what quota targets to set per SDR or region?

How do you know who your ideal client is?

Can you sell in California the way you sell in Mississippi?

Without market intelligence, your sellers will flounder trying to identify, target, and make appointments with the right customers. What’s worse is that your competition probably has sophisticated market intelligence already.

How do we know that? The Sales Intelligence Market is a $2B (yes, BILLION!) business today and rapidly growing for good reason. A few we listed above.

8. Contracts

While “standard” across a company, client contracts sometimes need moving parts like SOWs and exhibits or executive approved discounts.

There are always discrete details required along with dotting the i’s and getting it lawyer-ready for review on your side. Then the contract is sent to the client, and the redlining process begins.

Who is responsible in your organization today for working with client services on SOWs, or product on SKUs/pricing, tracking deals to closure/signature, particularly when there are redlines?

Managing contracts may not seem like an obvious sales performance metric that Sales Operations handles. Some technologies can help, but when dates/times matter for revenue recognition and quarter quota inclusion, someone needs to own deal ink even with technology. The Sales Operations team could and should be leveraged for tracking deals through the minutiae of the signature process freeing up your sales reps.

You can tie this one back to technology because automated electronic signature solutions often allow the redlining process to happen within it. Think DocuSign as an example, which can be a GREAT time saver for everyone involved.

9. Lead Management and Your ICP

You already know this: not all leads are good leads.

If you pushed the sale of every person who shows interest, your company would end up with a high rate of churn and low loyalty (net promoter) scores. Not all prospects make great clients. How do you sort that out and still deliver on your quota?

An excellent method to get started is creating SLAs between Sales and Marketing on goals, lead generation, Sales follow-up, and conversions targeting your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). You may have heard one or two people call it Smarketing.

Related Content: The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Sales Follow-Up & Conversion

Since the ideal client profile is a hypothetical description of a client, it’s vital that you’re generating leads and you’re reaching out to the right customers. 70% of Sales companies with fewer than 50 new opportunities per month do not meet their revenue goals.

Sales Operations can improve Sales Performance by ensuring SDRs have qualified leads that turn into great customers.

10. Everyone’s Favorite………….COMPENSATION AND INCENTIVE PLANS!

Because money matters.

According to the Society of Human Resource Management, “Pay for performance requires extensive planning, monitoring and reevaluation over time. Rewarding high performers, and ignoring or punishing low performers, correlates strongly to enhancing sales incentive compensation plans.”

82% of SDRs rate compensation, bonuses, incentives, and cash recognition as their primary motivator. It’s why they’re so good at what they do – there is money to be made!

Can you think of a more important task of the Sales Operations team when driving Sales performance to set compensation that drives SDR and Sales motivation, retention, and longevity?

If your organization is going to implement new compensation, Altavi suggests a system for creating change around compensation plans:

1. Frequent, visible evaluations of Sales Performance
2. SDRs understanding the compensation structure immediately
3. Technology to assist/drive real-time effectiveness

Be the Company Where the Best Sales People Want to Work

The best salespeople love to spend their time selling and not wasting it on non-revenue generating tasks.

We know these processes and tasks are also essential to sales performance metrics, but they’re not the duties of a salesperson and they cause a tremendous burden.

If you want to be a best-in-class sales team and the place where the best salespeople want to work, contact Skaled to review your people, processes, and technology, We’ll create a clear roadmap to increase sales performance by 10-20%.