From a surface perspective, sales and sales ops seem like they have a lot in common. After all, they both have the word “sales” in them, and they are both concerned about generating revenue for the company. They two teams often work closely together, and it’s pretty common for sales ops staff to have worked in the sales department, and vice versa.
In our experience, however, sales ops requires a radically different mindset than sales. Great salespeople are often ambitious and competitive. They are focused winning sales and closing deals right away so that they can make their quota and increase their commissions. They are thinking tactically about what they can do to encourage individual customers to buy from them.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, it’s just the opposite—those are all characteristics that you really want in your sales team.
But you don’t want everyone in your organization to be thinking like the sales team.
If everyone is focused on short-term metrics and tactics, who will do the more strategic thinking? In our opinion, it’s the job of sales ops to take the big picture view, to examine your sales process as a whole and look for ways to improve it. Sales ops shouldn’t be as worried about individual deals as they are with maximizing wallet share, improving retention, and optimizing prices.
| Sales Mindset | Sales Ops Mindset |
| Short-term | Long-term |
| Focused on closing individual deals | Focused on the bigger picture |
| Competitive | Team player |
| Tactical | Strategic |
Adopting the right mindset can be challenging, especially for sales ops practitioners who are coming from the sales department. And even if you don’t come from a sales background, sales ops has to work so closely with sales that it can be tough to resist getting sucked into their way of thinking.
We have three key resources that can help sales ops develop the right frame of mind for improving your sales processes as a whole:
- How to Retain Your Key Customers is a webinar that offers strategies for keeping your most valuable customers coming back to buy from you. Because they are so focused on the day-to-day, individual salespeople often find it difficult to spot customers who are in danger of defecting to a competitor. But sales ops has all the data necessary to identify customers who might be at risk and to put into place strategies for keeping those customers happy.
- Generating More Sales from Existing Customers explains what sales ops can do to increase wallet-share. They don’t see all the data, so sales reps often don’t have a good perspective on which customers could be buying more. Sales ops can help guide the sales team towards new opportunities for growing current accounts.
- Getting Salespeople to Price Better offers several ways to enforce your pricing strategies. Good pricing is one of the easiest ways to increase B2B sales margins, but salespeople are often tempted to discount prices because they really want to win each sale. This webinar goes through several steps sales ops can take to change mindsets, behavior, and underlying systems in a way that encourages more strategic pricing.
How to Retain Your Key Customers
When you lose business from existing accounts, the sales team must acquire even more new business to compensate. In this on-demand training session, learn about seven innovative strategies leading sales operations are using to minimize revenue attrition and customer defection.
Generating More Sales from Existing Customers
Many B2B companies struggle to identify untapped sales opportunities and maximize revenue from the customers they've already acquired. In this four-part recorded training session, learn what leading sales operations are doing differently to grow share-of-wallet with existing customers.
Getting Your Salespeople to Price Better
Chances are, the behavior of your salespeople will ultimately determine whether pricing strategies are effective or not. In this on-demand training seminar, learn proven approaches and strategies for getting your sales team to price and discount far more effectively.
