Sales operations (sometimes called “sales ops”) is a systemized approach that uses advanced technology and processes to help sales teams hit and exceed their quotas.
Sales managers use sales ops to make data-driven decisions about how many reps to hire, what support they need, and how to incentivize them to meet their goals. Sales operations process flows are an important part of these actions, allowing your sales team to maintain consistency and scalability.
Building and optimizing a sales op process flow involves multiple steps, including:
A sales operations process flow is a systematic approach to managing tasks, data, and strategies. It can help promote alignment between sales teams, create consistency in tool usage, and set expectations around objectives and goals.
You may, for example, require that SDRs get certain information to qualify leads during their first conversation.
While this is a singular task, it allows your team to:
Sales operations process flows can improve efficiency, minimize errors, and help your team drive predictable and repeatable results.
An optimized process flow offers the following benefits for your team:
There’s plenty of data that shows the importance of optimized process flows. For example, connecting with a prospect takes an average of three cold calls. As a result, building follow-up requirements— with minimum attempt limits—into sales processes can increase your number of closed deals.
While each team will have unique sales ops process flows based on its business objectives, target customer base, and average sales cycle, key components can benefit all sales teams’ performance. Let’s review each. 👇
Prospecting, lead generation, and qualification processes can help you identify and attract prospects, build segmented lists for outreach, and prioritize high-intent leads.
Sales tools like Kaspr can be essential during prospecting. Sales reps can use Kaspr to streamline lead identification and data enrichment, capturing up-to-date lead information while browsing on LinkedIn.
This can improve a rep’s sales productivity, helping them to scale up their prospecting efforts to generate more pipeline while also providing accurate data to facilitate informed decisions.
Other lead generation and qualification processes may include:
Pipeline management requires structured approaches to tracking opportunities and nurturing leads from discovery to closed deals.
Sales process flows for pipeline management may include the following:
Some sales analytics tools provide key performance metrics (KPIs) that can help you assess individual rep and team performance. Sales leaders can use this information to determine potential training needs and existing processes that need adjustment.
You should have sales process flows to do the following:
For example, you may find that SDRs prioritize prospecting quantity, and quality has suffered. Therefore, they may be doing more outreach but booking fewer meetings and closing fewer deals.
Sales op specialists and leaders typically invest effort in sales enablement, ensuring that outbound sales teams have what they need to succeed. If your reps don’t have the tools, training, and resources to excel, they’ll struggle to hit their sales goals.
Examples of sales enablement that you can include in your processes may include:
Collect and implement insights from your sales rep about your existing processes and future changes that you want to make.
Your sales reps are the ones implementing the processes in question, and may even be more aware of what obstacles prevent success than their leaders. They’re making the calls and sending the emails, and they know what’s slowing them down.
To continually get valuable feedback from your team, you should do the following:
To create a sales operations process flow, you can follow these steps.
The first step is to assess your current processes. Use sales analytics data and rep feedback to identify potential inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and gaps in potential support.
You may notice, for example:
To create effective systems, you need to understand each stage in the buyer’s journey.
Depending on your sales cycle and buyer’s journey, this may include:
Choose sales technology that integrates well to increase automation potential and prevent data silos.
CRM systems, for example, are essential for sales teams. They can help you track lead engagement, automate follow-ups, and forecast deal value. Integrating your CRM with prospecting tools like Kaspr can streamline list building and data enrichment, ensuring all lead contacts are always up to date.
Small sales teams may have reps who own the entire process, from prospecting to deal closure. Larger teams, however, may use a divide-and-conquer approach.
Determine which team members will be responsible for which specific tasks. Examples may include:
Measure success at each stage of the buyer’s journey to help you identify potential bottlenecks and opportunities for growth.
Popular KPIs may include:
The work isn’t done once your new sales op process flow is in place. It’s important to continually test, review, and refine your processes.
Collect team feedback and regularly monitor analytics to assess how well your new strategic improvements impact rep productivity, efficiency, and performance.
If you’ve provided a new tool that allows reps to automate initial outreach and increases the number of emails sent, for example, that may seem like a good first step. However, if they rely too much on automation, engagement rates from those emails will fall.
You’d need to tweak this process by offering training on personalizing outreach to get better results moving forward.
When implementing a new sales operations process flow— or adding new sales methodologies and tactics to an existing one— you can expect to face the following challenges:
🙅 Resistance to change
Many people hesitate to accept change, especially if it disrupts their daily routines. Explain the value of upcoming changes— including how they will benefit sales reps— and provide detailed training on implementing new changes to increase adoption.
⚠️ Data silos
Sales teams often struggle with disjointed data spread across too many tools. Integrated tools like Kaspr, which can provide data enrichment and automated data synching across multiple platforms, are essential to overcoming these challenges.
😅 Overcomplicated processes
Complicated tech stacks can sometimes mean complicated processes, reducing rep productivity and potentially causing mistakes. Keep things simple with workflows that are designed to be streamlined and that leverage automation as much as possible. Remember: Simple but effective.
As you go through sales process optimizations, it’s important to consider tech stack additions that will support your sales team. These tools can support your sales op process flow:
Choose tools that integrate to streamline productivity and reduce operational tasks for best results. For example, you can use LinkedIn prospecting tools like Kaspr to capture prospect data you discover on Sales Navigator. Build lists, save contact data, and automatically sync that information to your CRM.
When your sales tools work well together, it can eliminate potential data silos and create easy access to actionable insights that your sales team can benefit from.
A clear and effective sales operations process flow is essential for improving the success of your sales team.
These process flows can increase performance consistency and overall outcomes by providing systemized approaches and clear support for your reps.
Tools like Kaspr can help your team by enabling accurate, efficient workflows to identify high-value prospects without guesswork. Creating processes with your current tech stack in mind can set your team up for success.
Before you do anything else, evaluate your current processes and discover where you may have room for growth. Once you do, you can implement improvements that will take your sales strategy to the next level.