Sales Operations: The Guiding Light to Resource Allocation

Joining us for today’s show is a sales operations leader who knows a thing or two about impacting revenue growth in a meaningful way. Shannon’s company has an incredible customer retention record of accomplishment that results in a robust Customer Lifetime Value for her company.

Today’s topic is focused on sales operations and we are going to demonstrate how to improve the efficiency of the sales team. To follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the sales strategy section and flip to the Sales Operations phase on pages 314 - 319 of the PDF workbook.

Helping me with our demonstration is Shannon Gregg, the head of sales operations for TeleTracking Technologies, a clinical workflow company. Shannon is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with 15 years of sales operations experience.

Why this topic? Sales operations has become a catch-all phrase. The sales op leader gets assigned all the work no one else wants to do. Often underfunded and under staffed, sales operations leaders fail to deliver a meaningful revenue contribution, yet the best growth executives understand that sale ops are the most strategic sales function in the entire company. They understand that when deployed correctly, sales ops can impact revenue growth in a very meaningful way. Do not starve this key department. If you do, you're going to miss your revenue goal.

Listen as Shannon begins the show providing a foundation of the strategic focus areas of her sales operations team. She begins with the strategic focus of reducing the administration time of your people in the field to increase their available revenue generating time. Shannon asks herself, how can sales operations create more time with efficiency and effectiveness to allow the sales team to get out there and do what they're doing best, which is closing deals and making money? To make this happen, her team provides predictable processes, operational resource planning, revenue projections, pipelines, forecasting and technology so that the sales team can use systems, tools and processes that give sales more time in the field. Shannon describes how she tracks Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) to provide the executive team with a clear read on how much to invest to acquire a customer. The goal for most companies is to have a ratio of 4-5 dollars created for every one dollar of customer acquisition cost. Shannon’s company enjoys long-term retention of customers that can be up to 25 years. This opens many options for the sales and marketing leaders to invest acquiring new customers. The sales operations team who provides this ratio brings great clarity to the head of sales, the CEO, the head of marketing, and the product leader.

Enjoy the exchange with Shannon regarding the use of descriptive and predictive analytics. Shannon describes how she is going beyond what happened to reliably predict the future. Her team looks at traditional KPIs, velocity, volume, customer touches to understand exactly what's coming out of this team. Understanding geographies and what's happening in the industry helps Shannon understand in how to redeploy resources, including where we should be pulling resources. The insights from analytics also inform where to perform early stage of marketing and nurturing campaigns to generate marketing qualified leads. Shannon understands exactly what pathway sales operations should direct marketing to focus alongside the traditional sales process.