Sales operations manual

Build a winning sales force by giving your team a tool to live by. What is a sales manual? What are the benefits of a sales manual? Having a well-thought put sales manual provides your business with a variety of benefits: Keeps employees on the same page. A sales manual can help keep new and seasoned employees stay on the same page. It ensures your messaging is consistent across all of your employees, eliminating confusion when multiple people are dealing with prospects.

Aligns your sales team with company priorities. A good sales manual helps members of your sales team see how their efforts benefit the rest of the company. By creating a repeatable process that all of your sales staff can follow, you'll improve your onboarding and strengthen company culture. Improves sales and marketing alignment. The manual can also educate your sales reps on your marketing goals and initiatives. This understanding helps promote better sales and marketing alignment.

Equips your sales team with the tools they need. A proper manual gives your sales reps the tools they need to close deals and turn prospects into buyers. Over the long run, this will help you increase your sales and thus your bottom line. Get organized To get started, you must determine how you plan to deliver the sales manual to your team members.

From there, you can list important steps as subheadings. Describe what you sell One of the most important topics to cover in your sales manual is company inventory. Step 3. Outline your ideal customer In addition to understanding your product, your sales reps must know who they are selling it to. Step 4. Explain your sales process Next, you need to explain the process your sales reps will go through to sell to a potential customer. Step 5. Describe your business model It's also important to equip your team with the knowledge they need about your business as a whole.

A sales ops unit aims to support sales managers not only to achieve targets but to optimize the talent pool i. To do this, a sales ops manager assumes many of the administrative and operational loads required to run a sales organization. This frees up the sales manager to focus on leading sellers in meeting their quotas and making tactical decisions and strategic plans for long-term growth.

Among the key benefits of having a functional sales ops unit is the formulation, adoption and execution of an efficient sales process guiding the entire sales organization. Established processes serve as templates and reference points salespeople return to when the road ahead turns hazy or a new challenge suddenly emerges. The gateway i. In many mature organizations, sales ops fully assume ownership of administrative and technical functions while lending sales leaders its analytical support where strategy formulations and other critical decision-making scenarios are concerned.

Preferred metrics vary across teams and organizations. For sales ops, these key metrics provide insight not only on how to improve win rates but also on how the entire process can still be optimized.

The following are just a subset of all metrics commonly used by many sales operations units to evaluate past performance and to consistently improve organizational results in the long term:. Average Win Rate is the ratio of closed-won deals over the total number of won and lost deals.

Average Sales Cycle Length is the average length of time it takes to close deals. Average Deal Size is the average value of deal sizes sellers are managing at any given point in the process. Time Spent Selling Is the actual time sellers spend selling as compared to other tasks such as internal meetings, training, and administrative work.

Lead Response Time is the time it takes before leads respond positively to a pitch or call to action. Pipeline Efficiency measures how effective sellers are at managing their pipelines. Forecast Accuracy computes the rate of error of prior forecasts vs.

Number of Prospect Meetings per Period is a measure of prospecting activity that compares the number of meetings individual sellers were able to set in a given period. Sales operations and sales enablement are sometimes used interchangeably but they are not synonyms. They do coincide in several areas and share many goals. Both aim to significantly improve the performance of a sales organization. Sales ops will focus on the entire organization and the structures, processes, human resources, and technologies that comprise it — meanwhile sales enablement will focus only on the efficiency and performance of sellers and the satisfaction and experience of customers.

In this context, you may think of sales enablement which historically emerged much later as a subset of sales operations. Many companies do in fact run sales enablement units under the umbrella of sales ops.

But this is not always the case. Some run the two units as co-equal branches of the sales organization. As a rule of thumb and where both are present, contemporary sales ops handle the operational side of selling including territory planning, deal and account assignments, transactions management, compensation, and overall management of systems and technologies used by the organization.

On the other hand, sales enablement focuses on aspects that directly impact the performance of sellers including staff training, sales communication, customer engagement tools, and process efficiencies.

The sales ops unit is an entity that emerged to bring system, science, and best practices into the the world of selling. However, while sales ops has become an integral part of the sales organization, variations in terms of structure, role, and implementation exist across businesses and industries such that one way of running a sales ops team may perfectly fit one company but not another. Corporate culture, scale, target markets, and sales maturity are just some of the factors that shape the ideal sales ops structure for each organization.

SAVO Group published a comprehensive report on best practices for sales operations in mature enterprises. Some of its salient points include:. Sales ops can provide the following key inputs into the mix:. Key Insight 2 — Sales ops can nurture talent and enable salespeople to deliver more value when it comes to achieving the overall sales strategy. On this front, sales ops can take ownership of the following processes:.

Key Insight 3 — Sales ops can drive sales team team efficiency and motivation. They can do so by managing the following functions:. Key Insight 4 — Sales ops can work with marketing to fine-tune brand messaging and content. The goal of sales operations is to minimize friction in the sales process to ensure that the salespeople are successful in their activities.

The role of a sales operations manager is to supervise a sales operations specialist team, set goals and KPIs, create revenue forecasts, and help optimize the sales process , which requires leadership skills. The manager needs to track the performance of the whole team and report on its progress. Each member of the sales team should set monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals.

But should you set sales operations KPIs and goals for the whole team? This department handles anything and everything that helps your sales teams establish and maintain sustainable growth.

Here are a few examples of the day-to-day activities someone in a sales operations might do:. Sales operations professionals help sales teams perform better, hit goals faster, and lead smoother sales processes. Senior leaders and sales managers can leverage sales operations teams to synthesize data about the sales experience in order to make it more effective.

Sales operations and sales enablement sound similar. Sales enablement is also working to improve sales productivity and boost revenue, so do you need both? For example, Ferrer explains, sales ops might determine your salespeople are moving too quickly through the discovery stage of the sales process — and hurting close rates.

Consequently, sales enablement would create sales training to help reps run a better discovery. Meanwhile, sales operations deals more with the negotiation and closing stages, along with high-level things like territory design and sales compensation. To make sure your sales ops and sales enablement teams are complementing — not conflicting with — each other, we recommend creating a clear division of labor.

Each department should have separate goals, deliverables, and key metrics. We talk more about the sales operations team structure below. The broader purpose of sales operations is to enhance the effectiveness, productivity, and business impact of your sales team.

To achieve this, though, your sales ops department has many roles and responsibilities. Sales operations measures and evaluates sales data to determine the effectiveness of a product, sales process, or campaign. By doing so, sales operations can verify the success of a product or service or choose to implement a new sales plan or process if the data is reflecting otherwise.

Sales ops also uses internal performance data, along with external market and competitor research , to craft sales strategy and achieve sales goals. By studying and understanding past data and performance trends, sales operations can forecast future sales and report on future goals and needs.

This is important as sales forecasts allow sales teams to spot potential issues while there's still time to avoid or fix them. For example, let's say your sales operations team uses the length of sales cycle forecasting model. Sales Operations handles administrative tasks like lead generation and appointment bookings with leads and contacts. They take care of this so that salespeople can focus on selling. One way that your sales operations would do this is by ensuring strong s ales and marketing alignment with an SLA.

An SLA helps answer questions and clarify communication around how sales teams can follow buyer personas, who on the sales team accepts marketing qualified leads , and where content like sales enablement lives. Sales operations manages sales rep compensation plans and incentives. They also set rewards for superior performance and establish processes for acknowledging and resolving poor performance.

Moreover, sales operations may conduct regular sales performance reviews or coach sales managers on how to conduct proper reviews of their own. While your sales team works on growing your business, sales operations works on improving how you can do business better. Sales operations exists to make salespeople more efficient and impactful.

They do this by providing leads, managing transactions, drawing up contracts, and providing training on time management skills. Sales operations teams often use their data analysis and forecasting to establish a sales strategy and set future sales goals. The department is also responsible for building a sales process that improves conversions, shortens sales cycles, and maximizes sales wins.

In fact sales manual can helps a company to keep its sales force informed and supplied with every resource it needs to do the job well. If you are going to write a sales manual, you should write your sales manual as if it were an instruction book or recipe so that anyone can pick it up and easily make a winning sale for your company.