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Sales Operations Celebrated
January 25, 2007
Power Your Sales Force with the right support from HQ
By David Cichelli
If you are like most sales executives, it's easy for you to name your best salespeople. Great salespeople drive great sales results, but a great sales department is more than just having a few big hitters. Great sales organizations are built on well-tuned and aligned sales management systems. Whether you have a small or large sales force, you need superior sales operations support to be successful.
Sales operations are a set of functional activities that support the sales organization. In small companies, these functions are often shared among individuals. Larger sales forces need a dedicated department to provide professional and continuous sales operations support. For mega sales entities, sales operations becomes a major resource, often with its own vice president directing the efforts of sales operations specialists. Sales operations functions fall into six groupings:
Measurement and reporting: Keeping score is a fundamental sales operations task. Sales managers needs sales reports, budgets and sales projections. More advanced programs can create sales dashboards to provide continuous tracking of results, which need to be shown to every level of field management. Web-based reporting simplifies this task.
Talent assets: Hiring and keeping the best people requires well-defined systems to recruit, train and develop top sales talent. More complex sales forces need career path management and succession planning.
Accountability management: Assigning sales ownership and rewarding results ensures accountability of efforts. Accountability management includes systems for quota allocation and management, sales crediting, territory/account assignment and changes, and sales compensation.
Communication: Creating successful customer messages requires engaged partnership with product management. Business development efforts such as sales campaigns and trade shows help create leads for sellers.
Provisioning: Using technology to its fullest potential provides the sales force with at a finger's touch access to sales force automation, customer relationship management, mobile communications, customer service solutions, expense management and issue reporting.
Strategy planning and deployment: Ensuring sales force alignment between customer needs and product divisions' ambitions requires serious investments. Multi-dimensional buyer segment analysis creates opportunities to re-examine sales channels, organization structure, job design, headcount allocation and annual forecasting.
To congratulate a great sales department, acknowledge and reward the great sellers, but celebrate the behind-the-scene sales operations solutions that make it all possible.
David Cichelli is the senior vice president of The Alexander Group in Scottsdale, Ariz. He can be reached at edit@salesandmarketing.com.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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