selling<\/span>, recruiting, hiring, motivating, skills coaching, forecasting, achieving your quota, etc.)\u00a0 At some point either you start to\u00a0burn out or those helpful folks in Finance or HR push back, suggesting you hire a Sales Operations person to handle some of these tasks.\u00a0 When you get to around\u00a0ten selling resources the pressure\u00a0mounts and\u00a0action has to be taken.<\/p>\nAs the Sales leader you will probably write a job description for the new Sales Ops role and include those responsibilities you\u2019re most comfortable sharing or giving up entirely.\u00a0 That could mean your first Sales Ops person is simply responsible for administering a CRM system and generating reports, or it could mean that your Sales Ops person\u00a0is responsible only for forecast reporting\u00a0and performance analytics.\u00a0 The overall list of tasks for which Sales is responsible doesn\u2019t change, it\u2019s just a matter of which of them will be delegated to Sales Ops and which continue to be performed by Sales management.\u00a0 The word delegated\u00a0is carefully selected since all of these items remain the responsibility of the Sales leader.<\/p>\n
I\u00a0draw two insights from this.\u00a0 First, the responsibilities of a Sales Operations role are a subset<\/em><\/strong> of the Sales leader’s role\u00a0and second, the reason Sales Operations responsibilities vary so widely by company is because the tasks included in that subset are at the discretion<\/em><\/strong> of the Sales leader.<\/p>\nIn the last few years the role of Sales Operations has matured and you will find Sales Ops practitioners more established and disciplined in focus, capabilities and Sales 2.0 tools.\u00a0 They will expect to be responsible for more of the\u00a0tasks cited by CEB and, for the Sales leader willing to share some of that load with the right individual,\u00a0the result should be a more scalable, effective team with higher revenue attainment.<\/p>\n
I should add that once an organization grows to employ hundreds of selling resources, entire departments are built up around some of these Sales Operations tasks.\u00a0 As time goes by and sales leaders come and go, these departments are gradually vested with increasing control over their area of discipline with more and more independence from direct Sales management.<\/p>\n
These are my thoughts based on personal experience and interviews with Sales leaders but please feel free to post how you determined the scope of Sales Ops responsibilities in the comment box below.<\/p>\n
Cheers!<\/p>\n
Bob Bacon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The difference between Sales and Sales Operations is clearly confusing to those outside of the Sales profession but I suspect it is not entirely clear to a few of us here as well.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how many times … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"no","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[62,13,31,64,29,21,37,35],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sales_ops","tag-b2b","tag-incentive-comp","tag-metrics","tag-sales-2-0","tag-sales-compensation","tag-sales-management","tag-sales-operations","tag-sales-ops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1037,"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/bobbacon.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/Sales-tasks-with-arm.jpg\" "\\"Sales")
The difference between Sales and Sales Operations is clearly confusing to those outside of the Sales profession but I suspect it is not entirely clear to a few of us here as well.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how many times I get calls from Sales recruiters who after looking at my job title on LinkedIn, \u201cVP of Sales Operations\u201d, ask me if I would be interested in a Sales management role.\u00a0 I always explain that my role is as staff to Sales and that they are probably looking for a quota carrying Sales leader that manages other quota carrying sales resources.\u00a0 While that seems to clarify the difference for the recruiters,\u00a0I\u2019ve had conversations with Sales managers who don\u2019t agree that managing quota carrying resources\u00a0is the\u00a0primary differentiator.\u00a0 I am hopeful that some readers of this article\u00a0will reply with their perspective on the distinction between Sales and Sales Operations.<\/p>\n