The American Transportation Research Institute keeps a list of the worst bottlenecks on America’s highways. Using GPS data from commercial trucks, they have determined which interchanges have the worst traffic, slowing semis to a crawl.
If you’ve driven across the US much, it won’t surprise you at all that Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, and LA figure prominently at the top of the list. The very worst? Where I-95 meets SR4 in Ft. Lee, NJ. During peak hours, average speed is less than 20 mph.
In many B2B organizations, many sales teams accuse Sales Ops of being a bottleneck.
You see, most sales teams view Sales Ops as a support function. And sales whines—a lot—when they think the Sales Ops team isn’t moving fast enough. They want reports updated, CRM issues fixed, RFQ completed, and presentation materials readied. And they want it right away.
As a result, the Sales Ops team spends a great deal of time and energy trying to demonstrate that they aren’t a bottleneck. They work to become as fast and efficient as possible. They set up KPIs that track the number of tasks that they accomplish. They prioritize urgent requests. And they scurry around to make sure sales never has a reason to complain.
But they aren’t focused on the right things.
Don’t get us wrong, trying to be efficient is commendable. But jumping every time the sales team tells you to hop doesn’t do anything to address the real bottleneck in the organization:
The bottleneck of missed potential.
The real bottleneck
We have all kinds of business clichés that warn us about the dangers of over-focusing on speed and efficiency: Work smarter not harder. Go slow to go fast. Haste makes waste. We all know that getting things done quickly isn’t the same as doing things well.
But in the daily grind, it’s easy to forget. We get caught up in firefighting and miss the opportunities for real strategic improvements.
When we’re spending all our time on day-to-day tactical activities, we’re actually missing out on opportunities to steer the sales team toward better, faster, and smarter ways of working. We don’t have the time to spend on long-term improvements that could make the entire team more effective.
The real bottleneck happens when you allow your Sales Ops team to be pigeonholed into a sales support function. Your access to critical sales data and your comprehensive view of the sales organization make you incredibly valuable—far too valuable to waste your skills doing only tactical activities. By stepping into a strategic role, your sales ops team can become the driving force that guides the sales team toward the right opportunities, efficient processes, and higher profitability.
How exactly do you do that? We have some resources with suggestions:
- How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel explains how to boost sales performance with small improvements in just the right places. It helps you visualize the sales process like a factory and shows you how to make small tweaks that yield big results
- Using Sales Analysis to Drive More Growth delves deep into sales performance data, showing you how to improve retention, identify untapped growth opportunities, develop better sales plans, and more. It’s a how-to guide for using data to address your biggest strategic questions.
- Effective Sales Enablement explains what sales enablement is and why it’s a helpful concept. It provides examples of how others have used this idea effectively, as well as a host of tips for putting it into practice at your organization.
- Essential Sales Ops Roles highlights the seven most important functions of a B2B sales ops team. It pays special attention to the roles that act as force multipliers, helping the rest of the organization become more effective.
Becoming incredibly efficient at tactical tasks is a little like taking a Ferrari out on one of those bottlenecked highways during rush hour. It might make you look good, but it doesn’t actually get your business where it needs to go any faster.
Tackling some of this strategic work is a little like merging over into the HOV lane. It helps your organization move a whole lot faster, even if your Sales Ops team only has the horsepower of a 2005 minivan.
How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel
With so many different variables involved, improving sales performance across the board and at-scale can seem like a daunting task. But with a different perspective on your sales funnel, you can generate huge improvements much more easily and with far less risk.
How to Use Sales Analysis to Drive More Growth
Sales analysis often has much more potential than it is given credit for. This on-demand webinar explains how to using the analytical processes and underlying data to reveal powerful insights and opportunities for growth.
Effective Sales Enablement
The concept of "sales enablement" can be somewhat confusing. While there are different definitions, our research has identified a number of core themes and best practices that spell success.
Essential Sales Ops Roles
While there's only one Sales Ops title on the business card, there are actually many different "jobs within the job." And it isn't easy to do the right jobs, at the right times, and in the right ways.
