Welcome!

Welcome to my blog where I write about issues relevant to B2B software sales and related teams effectiveness, enablement and operations.  My name is Bob Bacon and if you work in B2B software Sales or some operational aspect of revenue generation then you are my intended audience!  I started this blog to help organize and share my thoughts around the challenges we face selling software in this rapidly changing environment.

I do this for fun!  Yes, I’m one of those lucky people who enjoy what I do and get even more pleasure from exchanging ideas with other Sales and Revenue Ops professionals.  There is no advertising and nothing for sale here.  My motivation is to simply help others and be helped by them when they share their comments and questions.

The role of sales operations can dramatically vary from company to company.  To understand a major reason why sales ops responsibilities vary across companies please see this article that explains my theory.

I believe the Sales Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) did  a good job of building a comprehensive list of possible sales operations responsibilities.  I have paraphrased it below:

Sales Force Enablement

  • Sales Process Development
  • Sales Process Adoption and Compliance
  • CRM Development and Processes
  • Sales Tool Development
  • Sales Training
  • Sales Force Communications Management

Business Analytics

  • Sales Metrics
  • Sales Forecasting

Sales Administration

  • Proposal/Contract Development
  • Deal Desk – Pricing and Compliance
  • Vendor Selection and Management
  • Planning Process Stewardship

Attainment Planning

  • GTM Strategy Alignment with Roles and Components
  • Territory Analysis and Definition
  • Goal Setting
  • Incentive Sales Compensation Plan Design

Sales Operations Mandate and Design

  • Chief of Staff to the Sales Organization
  • Stewardship of Sales Force Capacity
  • Initiative Change Management
  • Sales Operations Team Design
  • Sales Operations Talent Management

Over time I hope to address issues relevant to many of the above areas, some deserving of more detail than others.  I hope you will return from time to time and add your thoughts.  Please click on “Articles” in the menu bar above or select from the list of recent posts in the upper right corner of this page to see what I think is important to know in this profession.

Thanks for visiting and please comment on any of the articles you find interesting!

Bob Bacon

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