Much has been written about how critical a healthy Sales Operations team is to Sales Success (McKinsey’s analysis is exemplary here). However, Sales Operations positions are, for many companies, still treated as a secondary priority vs. “feet on the street”. Our contention is that Sales Operations positions are just as important as field sales positions and failure to understand this is a pitfall for both the Sales VP and the CEO.
The rationale for this behavior is relatively simple but somewhat short-sighted: ‘I need to make the quarter and I have a better chance with field personnel than a “back-office” person’. But an inadequate Sales Operations function creates significant problems for Sales Success:
- Degraded Deal Velocity because the Funnel Management process hasn’t been adequately defined
- Retention issues due to poor onboarding and access to sales resources
- Sales territories not optimally aligned to attack the Target Market
- Comp issues consuming Executive time and potentially demoralizing the sales force
- Poor understanding of trends affecting the business due to inadequate analytics
This most serious effect of all this is that the Sales VP becomes inundated (personally taking on sales operations activities) , ineffective and in many cases will soon be gone(average Sales VP tenure is less than two years). The upshot is that Sales VP churn is a serious impediment to scaling for growth.
What to do?
- Embrace the fact that to be able to scale, a company needs a sales infrastructure that supports growth. This is especially true when the company has reached a critical mass of sales personnel (usually starting at ten sales people)
- Sales Operations needs to be part of the Capacity Planning Process – unfortunately, in many cases it is not. From our experience, there should be one Sales Ops person for every 10-15 sales personnel. This rule of thumb may vary depending on the nature of the business and sales operations coverage from other departments
- The Sales VP must convince the CEO of the significance of the Sales Operations function as essential to scale the company for success.
To be able to scale for growth, the Sales VP and CEO must think longer term, resisting the impulse to hire feet on the street at the expense of an under-resourced sales infrastructure.