In this post, I want to focus on the Sales Executive. Your Head of Sales is tasked with Sales Strategy, Organizational Design, and investment as well as Talent management, the Demand engine, Sales Execution, and Sales productivity. To meet these goals RevOps plays a key role.
Sales (pre-sales/acquisition)
Sales operations are everything that happens in your CRM and sales engagement platforms to enable your sales team to communicate effectively with clients and control their sales process.
Like marketing operations, it lives behind the scenes, supporting your sales team’s execution of strategy and objectives.
Now, what is the role of Revenue Operations rather than the siloed Sales Ops role?
The primary role is to direct the company’s sales force effectiveness and manage the functions that are essential to the sales team’s production. The role is designed to provide harmony across all the revenue channels, you will provide much of the administrative and operational management of the Sales team, Sellers ‘sell’, Managers ‘manage’. Your role will encompass, territory planning, reporting, quota setting and management, sales process optimization, sales training, sales program implementation, sales compensation design and administration, and recruiting and selection of sales force talent.
As RevOps you are not the chief of staff to the VP of Sales, you are the partner that provides a service to Sales. You should coordinate and collaborate on strategy with the revenue funnel as your driving motivator. This is a formulation of short-term and long-term goals using data-driven insight. You are looking to create higher predictability of performance and results, ongoing analysis of territory allocation, and account assignment plan. As well as an assessment of go-to-market strategies and methodologies. Below is a list of workflows, topics, and metrics you should manage
Sales Planning: You will drive a cross-organizational sales planning process that reinforces alignment between sales, marketing, and product. Here are six questions you should answer.
- The Sales Structure Design is?
- Our Sales Roles are?
- The Territory Plan is?
- Quota Assignment is based on?
- Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR’s) process reviews?
- In our Sales Management Cadence, we discuss?
As part of your support to Sales, the RevOps team will have documented and enforce;
- Corporate goals
- Go-To-Market Architecture
- Routes-To-Market
- Sales Structure Design
- Sales Role Definition Coverage Modeling
- Account and Territory Planning
- Quota development and allocation
- Rules of Engagement
As part of the Sales Planning process, you will measure, marketing operations, and sales operations alignment. The Sales account assignment methods, sales plan attainment, and sales and marketing expense ratios (CAC).
Sales Productivity Analysis: RevOps will also assess the variety of sales roles to ensure that they are allocating time in an optimal way to drive the maximum results. This would be a Relative Productivity Framework.
You are focused on Key Performance Indicators for:
- Core vs. non-core selling time
- Sales capacity analysis
- Sales technology impact
- Pipeline
- Enablement
- Demand
- Average deal size
- Average sales cycle by account type
- Average sales cycle length
- The conversion rate of MQLs from qualified opportunity to close
- Count and duration of touches from marketing to sales
- Formal sales forecast management process
- Percent new logos closed from marketing-generated lead
Sales Processes and Infrastructure: RevOps will develop, deploy, and manage sales processes and technology that reduce administrative time, improve data quality, and streamline customer engagement. This is the Attribute-Based Sales Process
As part of this, you need to established a Technology Assessment on a reoccurring basis with Sales Process Design as the driving factor and include what the current End-User Adoption is, prior to increasing automation and adoption of technology. You need to review in no specific order the following:
- The Sales quota reporting frequency
- What stages do we follow for Sales (your sales and forecasting process)
- What are the components of an effective Sales technology stack?
- How much time does a sales rep spend on core selling activities?
- The average number of buyer interactions per sales rep per won deal
- Effectiveness competency and staffing of key sales processes
- Marketing operations and sales operations alignment
- Opportunity types used in a sales force automation platform
- Proposal timeframe and revision count
- Sales annual performance review process
The Tech Stack is vital to harmonize all teams across the revenue funnel. RevOps will be tasked to develop, deploy, and manage sales processes and technology that reduce administrative time, improve data quality, and streamline customer engagement.
- Sales Force Automation
- Lead management
- Account and territory planning
- Sales process design and governance
- Opportunity management
- Sales Force Automation Configure, price, quote
- Contract lifecycle management
- Planning and Performance Management tools
- Sales Analytics
- Contract Lifecycle Management
- Project Management
- Sales Compensation Management
- Gamification and Incentive management
Sales Reporting, Analysis, and Intelligence: Provide the disciplined collection of data and application of analysis that provides guidance and direction to sales reps, managers, and leaders. What is the Aligned Measurement Framework? Do you have a Metrics definition, are these measurements aligned, and what is your Sales Intelligence Program Design? Do you report on history only? Are you measuring predictive analytics? What is the current analytics adoption and value to your Head of Sales? In your analysis be sure to focus on.
- Forecast management
- Sales performance management
- Pipeline metrics
- Reporting and dashboards
- Aligned measurement
- Data governance
Incentive Design and Management: In a previous post I spoke about how to create a compensation plan (you can view this here) RevOps will design and manage a sales incentive program that aligns to and drive the topline goals and objectives. This is your Aligned Measurement Framework.
The framework should include Sales compensation planning and design, with an ongoing compensation health assessment. You will be responsible for compensation implementation and communication, as well as sales compensation management.
You will provide the sales incentive performance measurement program and monitor attainment level for accelerators, including team average attainment against sales target. You manage the payment frequency of commission and any payout tiers in the compensation plan.
Part of this also will include Sales Enablement. RevOps will be supporting Sales Talent acquisition, and support Sales onboarding. This includes ongoing learning and development, internal Sales communications with a functional design and development program for Sales teams.
RevOps will enable alignment with Marketing Sales and Customer success to focus on their primary goals by assuming the operational and technical aspects of the revenue funnel. Now Marketing can focus more time on generating leads, Sales on closing deals, and Customer Success expanding accounts and reducing churn.
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