Mature Sales Operations shows that a single seller or account exec can’t and shouldn’t fulfil the many roles that their managers expect them too.
Not convinced? Have a look at the Sales Enablement Roles Matrix at Demand Metric, I rely on them to check in with mature operations and sales and marketing best practice. It’s a free download from their many paid tools.
The roles from the matrix below show how many are key to mature sales operations, and I’m sure you will recognise that some of these roles are either not being owned or properly executed by other teams, or you assume your sales team are doing them.
Below is my short notes on some of the roles and also how they relate to our local market in South Africa.
Senior Management : This role is responsible for Revenue across a team, so could be Sales Manager for a region, or Business Development Director. One of the better understood roles, but often gets dragged into the weeds of some of the role functions below.
Product Management: We know these guys and gals right? They own the product or service your team’s are trying to sell. The problem is often there is not enough ownership of sales enablement, and the matrix shows some of these below.
Sales are typically asking for a lot of this from product management, but make do with out it, leading to lost opportunity and lack of clarity and consistency across a team.
Sales Operations: Probably one of the least well staffed roles, but that the top role will do with some success and is mostly assumed to be the role of the leadership. The key here is that it’s not great use of their expensive time and can easily be supported by other resources and can make the whole team more effective if done better.
Marketing Operations : Often a disconnect as Marketing is concerned with Events, Branding and other fun stuff and this role is not well executed. Its the linkage between the Sales and Marketing functions and as the Metrics show, it’s where Marketing bring leads to the table from their own operations activities.
Demand Generation: Some of this role looks like the conventional marketing department, and it is. Events, Emails, Sponsorships etc. When seen as part of sales enablement it makes sure that Marketing is there as part of a sales strategy.
Sales and Account Management: In many smaller teams this will be mixed up with the sales leaders roles and even be delegated to directors. Good account people are often in the business, connected to the services and products and trusted by their customers. These are ultimately the sales team, responsible for quoting and finding and converting customers. This role is often burdened with many of the above functions and as a result they don’t get done well.
Customer Support : If you run a help desk, you have most of this function, but many consulting and tech firms don’t so again this key function of sales support sometimes fall into the cracks, or is assumed to be done by the Sales and Account team. A good admin or inside sales resource can be used here to support a larger team at a much better price point.
If you want more information about how to assess above or see some of the paid content from Demand Metric under my subscription, let me know and I’m interested to test the assumptions above with you and the local market.