Using Talmix For...Sales Operations
What’s the demand?
Businesses are creating specific operations functions within sales maximise performance of the sales team by separating out the administrative and functions from the revenue generating pieces. This allows sales leadership to focus on revenue opportunities and growth strategies, while the operations team can concentrate on the supporting processes and reporting required to establish an ongoing sales strategy.
Not all businesses will be of sufficient scale to justify a sales operations function. The tipping point is when performance is being impacted by admin, both at a sales leader and sales rep level, so that KPIs are no longer improving, or if growth is no longer being maintained yet overall health is good. The function can establish the processes, identify areas for automation and other systems to streamline these processes and interactions and develop the reporting processes, data requirements and analysis of all results providing vital insights to leadership teams.
What’s involved?
Sales Operations can make a significant difference in your business as it increases focus on the revenue generating activities, while providing better insights into performance. Those companies implementing sales operations will need to bring new skills into the business so that they can cover things like:
- Develop key performance metrics and dashboards that help the sales organization focus on performance drivers to support and refine the sales strategy
- Design key sales processes and metrics, including pipeline management, process optimisation and revenue analysis
- Generate data-driven insight and forecasts for strategy planning
- Establish a sales enablement team to train sales teams on systems and processes
- Manage customer contract life cycle
- Design and implement compensation and incentives program
- Enforce processes, methodologies, and performance matrices
- Specify, implement and manage the technology stack which will include CRM, SFA and other systems
- Create sales territory plans and manage capacity planning identifying where teams will need additional resources.
- Track performance against budgets and provide input to forecasting and financial models
- Support all aspects of sales administration: pricing adherence, contract administration, commission calculations, etc
- Add process rigor to current sales opportunities / pipeline
- Set up core sales and account management reporting structure
- Organize reference materials (e.g. training, RFP templates, battlecards, competitive intelligence, marketing materials, etc) and set up digital asset management and version control
- Liaise regularly with the leadership team to provide insight to support decision-making
What skills are needed?
- Experience working with CRM platforms
- Analytical skills – data visualisation, dashboard building, Tableau etc
- Sales enablement platforms
- Knowledge of aligned functions and their systems to create an end to end process
- Process modelling
- Financial Planning and Reporting
- Building KPIs
- Knowledge of sales incentive programmes and commission structure calculations
- Presentation and communication skills
Why turn to Talmix?
Using on-demand talent for newer functions provides the following advantages:
Processes can be identified, optimised and implemented and the level of ongoing resources can be determined very quickly by someone who has done this before, rather than making a permanent hire ahead of this exercise.
The need for sales operations is often triggered by a change requiring immediate action – for example a plateau in growth, leadership resources required to intervene in direct sales activity. A long period to identify and hire for the team structure may result in a delay to the programs running and losing the impact that the transformation is expected to bring.
Once the processes, training, structures and reporting have been established by more experienced talent, and the on-demand lead can determine the best structure of the team moving forward. In many organisations the running of the processes, maintaining the systems and ongoing reporting and training reverts to a more junior role to support this.
Because it is a relatively new function, it is a challenge to reskill internal people or may mean that you are taking away sales talent and creating new gaps. The impact of on-demand is to set up what is necessary faster than trying to deploy from existing sales resources, and longer term create a more efficient and cost-effective function.
Similarly the skills are in demand externally and marketplaces like Talmix provide the most way to access this hot topic talent quickly.
The Talmix marketplace focuses on on-demand talent and has delivered sales operations talent to many organisations as they grow, providing that strategic advantage as the function is built quickly so that results are seen in parallel to the overall growth.
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Getting Started with Talmix
If this is a function that you want to bring talent on-demand into then you can post your project straight away on the Talmix marketplace. It’s a very intuitive, streamlined process. If you want a little more advice on scoping then you can post the project basics and our customer success team can help you draw out specific screening questions, talent types and budgets. Get started now and you could have this function up and running sooner than you realised.
