What is Sales Ops? Definition, salary, missions

What is Sales Ops?

The Sales Ops business

The Sales Ops is in charge of improving sales processes in order to support the growth of a company. He or she intervenes on various subjects to improve the way in which the company sells its products and services:

• Identify key accounts to be prospected, like a profile Lead Generation or Growth ;
• Automate various actions through workflows - the prospecting (sequence personalization tool, lead scoring, follow-up emails)
• Optimize the customer appointment - for example, have all salespeople adopt a single method of qualifying needs (such as MEDDIC, BEBEDC);‍
• Improve the reporting - creation of dashboards or even improvement of sales forecasts (Sales forecasts) especially for scale-ups;
• Harmonize commercial practices - number of appointments required to close a sale, email templates;‍
• Help with recruitment sales forces - for example setting up a better process for sourcing applications.

At Akimbo, our Scale consultancy offer allows companies to benefit, for example, from the expertise of our Sales Ops for all these missions mentioned above.

Sales Ops missions vary a lot depending on the company. In general, Sales Ops is hired in a company in the SaaS (B2B), e-commerce (B2C) environment, or in highly digitized companies. It is often said that you need 1 Sales Ops for 10 salespeople.

In the team Operations, we also sometimes find Customer Success Ops who act directly at the level of customer support, and Marketing Ops who set up the processes for the marketing team (ex: content creation loop).

Sales Ops is rather attached to the Sales department but overall, when the company develops, an Ops team is created to improve all processes.

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How do I become Sales Ops today?

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Those who have natural affinities with the CRM management They then often become Sales Ops. There are generally three ways to become Sales Ops, knowing that there are no officially training courses or schools on the market to train for this job.

To get started, it is possible to:

• Start with a position in Growth Marketing after a business or engineering school. Why not one End of studies internship or a first CDI;‍
• To already be Sales with a real analytical affinity and a desire to evolve. Numbers and Excel don't have to scare you:)
• Coming from the middle of guidance Or of the Finances and demonstrate a real affinity for Sales - for example through training such as those ofAkimbo !

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The processes implemented by Sales Ops

An example of a Sales Ops process in 2022

The context: a component of Sales Ops missions is often oriented Lead gen and consists of distributing potential customer accounts (Leads) to salespeople, so that they can prospect them. This distribution is generally done on a weekly basis via CRM (for example on Salesforce or Hubspot).

The process: It's up to Sales Ops to distribute the right contacts to the right salespeople. In other words: who will recover which account.

Organize this distribution equitably is time consuming. It is therefore possible to improve the distribution of accounts by creating a new process from the CRM:

• Sales Ops will create a rule that automatically categorizes accounts in the CRM so that they match certain criteria (Lead scoring);
• It will implement a data enrichment tool (e.g. Segment, Clearbit), then used on the lead database (CRM) to fill in the missing information;
• Another automatic rule will take into account the territories assigned to each Sales and the affinities with respect to certain sectors to assign proprietors to the accounts;
• On will create a CRM field which asks Sales to refresh account data on a recurring basis. In fact, accounts need to be refreshed approximately every 3 months (are they still part of our segmentation? Should we contact them again?);
• A workflow will divide the accounts into rosters assigned to Sales every Monday morning.

Setting up this process makes it possible to no longer have to refresh this data manually, which means a lot of time savings for Sales and for the rest of the team. This process also makes it possible to achieve better conversion rates.

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An example of a Sales Ops process that didn't work

The problem: When BDRs create a business opportunity, they must make the switch to an Account Executive who takes over to do the product demo. However, this distribution of opportunities is generally unequal since BDRs will generally choose the Account Executives who close the most, because they are also financially motivated to close. Smart, but not optimal.

The solution: The system Round Robin allows you to randomly select an AE according to its availability. So when a BDR selects the process Round Robin, he immediately chooses the AE available to do the demo. This process is unfortunately unusual because BDRs are interested in converting their opportunities, and therefore naturally turn to the most efficient AEs and Sales.

Automatable and processable tasks

Sourcing and therefore commercial data collection is one of the most automated tasks in successful companies: by using the right tools, the time savings are incredible. PhantomBuster helps a lot with this, like Zapier.

Likewise, the performance reporting Sales representatives can generally be automated from the CRM: it is possible to know the number of calls taken by a sales representative during the week, the number of appointments booked and the number of opportunities created. Collecting all this data by hand would be too long and ineffective, especially when the company has several dozen Sales!

It is up to Sales Ops to take charge of these issues.

Other missions carried out by Sales Ops

Sales Ops are also in charge of ensuring the Respect for iCPs (Ideal Customer Profile) defined by management. ICPs represent the companies that are most likely to become customers (for a B2B company). Sales Ops will therefore supervise company data (via CRM).

This segmentation comes from the comparison and analysis of data on past, successful or lost deals, for example. It allows you to create business categories with segments based on numbers such as the size of the company, the number of employees, the date of establishment of the company and the sector of activity.

For example, Spendesk's main ICP is a company created after the 2000s, with 20 to 200 employees and located in the SaaS business sector.

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Am I meant to be Sales Ops?

The pros and cons of the Sales Ops business

Sales Ops is in charge of overseeing the entire sales funnel, and therefore also the creation of opportunities. It is part of the company's strategic decision-making and answers questions: Who is our target? In what volume? What are the goals of our BDRs? So it's a analytical and strategic role within the company.

Sales Ops has a real impact within the company. It is also a job where we Learns a lot. Expectations are high!

Likewise, since Sales Ops takes part in strategic decisions, it is very busy by the team and must also manage numerous incoming requests from the sales team. He is their direct referent. Monitoring the implementation of a new process is just as complex: you have to demonstrate a lot of pedagogy and resilience so that the processes put in place are followed.

Finally, sometimes failure is to be expected: some processes do not work. You have to know how not to be discouraged, to hang on and to learn from your mistakes.

Another major advantage is that Sales Ops teaches how to develop great communication qualities, like a consultant.

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Sales Ops salary

The Sales Ops salary depends less on the performance obtained than for the salespeople they support. Since a Sales Ops necessarily has 2-3 years of professional experience and an above average level of education, his minimum wage starts at around €42-43,000.

The salary for a Sales Ops with 2 to 3 years of experience in the business will be 45 to 55 M€. He will then be able to earn around €5,000 in annual salary per year. Overall, it will rarely exceed €80-90,000.

The soft and hard skills of good Sales Ops

A word now on the qualities required to become Sales Ops:

Soft Skills : you have to know To be curious And to stay Up to date with Sales innovations. You should subscribe to newsletters on acquisition, on outreach strategies, on emailing practices that allow for a better response rate. This information must then be redistributed to Sales.

You must also want to develop large communication qualities And of pedagogy.

So there is an approach customer-centric to adopt: Sales Ops works as an internal consultant for its company and its customers are Sales. Sales must be made more productive, and this does not only involve processes: you also need to know how to advise. Likewise, Sales Ops helps Sales to use processes and must onboard them on them when they have just been set up. These processes should not be too burdensome for them to be accepted and respected. Since Sales Ops is the point of reference for Sales, you must also be able to help them when they have a bug, a particular need... You must therefore know how to be diplomacy and have a very good relationship.

Hard Skills : you have to know the CRM environment (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho...), the operation of a sales funnel and the different stages of selling a SaaS. And ideally, have already sold. There is no particular need to know how to code, but to know how to use SQL (or even Python!) is a plus. In general, you have to enjoy solving problems and analyzing numbers.

Sales Ops generally spends a lot of time on Excel. Although many tools allow you to automate calculations on Excel as much as possible, you should expect to spend time on the software. Using Excel for Sales Ops mostly comes down to creating pivot tables and using formulas.

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Evaluating the performance of Sales Ops

Sales Ops assess sales performance. So how is their own performance evaluated? What are their KPIs? The performance of Sales Ops is evaluated through that of Sales.

First, Sales Ops is supposed to have a impact on conversion rates. Thus, if we rely on the conversion rate between the number of accounts that we contacted over a period X and all the accounts that were converted into opportunities, we can get an idea of the performance of Sales Ops.

Second, we can choose a qualitative measurement of performance, which also works very well. The tool 15Five thus makes it possible to indirectly assess the performance of colleagues by giving feedback via questionnaires.

These are two ways to assess Sales Ops performance, although there are no KPIs specifically dedicated to evaluating Sales Ops performance.

The prospects for development after the Sales Ops job

What are the different possible evolutions? It is possible to turn to:

• The Revenue Ops business, which is similar to Sales Ops but with a scope (Scope) wider since it also intervenes to help CSMs, the marketing team...
• Sales Ops can also become Head of Operations and create its own department.

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