Sales Operation Manager

1. Cross-Functional Collaboration

Sales operations acts as an advocate for sales team by playing a key role in sales and operations planning (S&OP), a business management process where leadership teams meet to ensure each business function is aligned.

 2. Sales Data Management

Sales operations measures and evaluates sales data to determine the effectiveness of a product, sales process, or campaign. By doing so, sales operations can verify the success of a product or service or choose to implement a new sales plan or process if the data is reflecting otherwise.

 3. Sales Forecasting 

By studying and understanding past data and performance trends, sales operations can forecast future sales and report on future goals and needs. This is important as sales forecasts allow sales teams to spot potential issues while there's still time to avoid or fix them.

 4. Lead Generation

Sales Operations handles administrative tasks like lead generation and appointment bookings with leads and contacts. They take care of this so that salespeople can focus on selling. 

5. Performance Management

Sales operations manages sales rep compensation plans and incentives. They also set rewards for superior performance and establish processes for acknowledging and resolving poor performance. Moreover, sales operations may conduct regular sales performance reviews or coach sales managers on how to conduct proper reviews of their own. While your sales team works on growing your business, sales operations works on improving how you can do business better. 

6. Sales Representative Support

Sales operations exists to make salespeople more efficient and impactful. They do this by providing leads, managing transactions, drawing up contracts, and providing training on time management skills. Sales ops also purchase tools to help ease the responsibilities of your sales team, 

7. Sales Strategy

Sales operations teams often use their data analysis and forecasting to establisn a sales strategy and set future sales goals. The department is also responsible for building a sales process that improves conversions, shortens sales cycles, and maximizes sales wins.

 8. Sales Team Communications

Sales operations is responsible for keeping the sales team aligned by reporting on sales and campaign results as well as communicating team news and sales wins. The team may also do this by establishing communication channels through the technology to help ease data and information sharing across your sales organization. 

9. Sales Team Organization

Sales operations influences the structure and organization of the sales team to maximize its efficiency, impact, and performance. For example, the sales ops team may notice some reps have strengths working with small business customers while others prefer to work with enterprise-level customers. Noticing this, sales ops may choose to reorganize the team so that every rep is working with the customers they prefer. 

10. Technology Management

Sales operations oversees the implementation and use of technical tools and platforms, in collaboration with the IT team, to make sales more efficient. 

11. Territory Definition

Sales operations is responsible for defining and assigning various sales territories to salespeople. This is an important responsibility as territories often determine sales reps' prospect options, available commission, and even work hours. Given that sales ops also establishes sales strategy and compensation plans, they should also be in charge of territories. 

12. Training 

To build a successful sales team, sales operations assumes the responsibility of training new and current employees. Sales ops may also develop sales mentoring programs to maintain a strong team and build camaraderie. These roles and responsibilities cannot be achieved without an effective sales operations team structure. We talk about this next