The B2B Sales Operations Playbook

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The B2B Sales
Operations Playbook
The ultimate guide to mastering the art of
Sales Operations.
Full Version: http://discover.datahug.com/sales-operations-playbook/

Call us any time on +1-855-Datahug sales@datahug.com www.datahug.com
Overview
• Build:
• Structure your sales team
• Design handoffs between teams
• Work together in Salesforce
• Measure:
• Define the sales process
• Manage the pipeline
• Forecast sales
• Learn:
• Find blockers in the pipeline
• Optimize territories and quotas
• Implement change

Build:
Structure your sales team
The Sales Development (SDR) team:
● Half of your sales organization.
● Work from the office, perform no field activities.
● Build interest in your product through outbound emails and phone calls to leads.
● Arrange meetings, transfer ownership to an Account Executive.
The Account Executive (AE) team:
● Best closers in the organization.
● Only come into contact with prospects once the SDR team has arranged a meeting.
● SDR is in charge of bringing deals into the funnel; the AE is in charge of closing them.
Data Enrichment Specialists:
● Sorts through purchased lists to find worthwhile leads.
● Produces lists of their own that are customized to the needs of the company.
● Takes on “data cleaning” and frees SDRs to focus on prospecting.
Sales Opstacle 1: Unclear expectations of roles and responsibilities cause confusion and
tension in your sales team.

Build:
Design handoffs between teams
Creating airtight handoffs between individuals at each stage of the sales cycle is key for an
inside sales organization.
Transferring prospect ownership from one person to another once it reaches a certain
stage efficiently plays to your team members’ individual strengths creates more
opportunities to quantify the sales cycle. But handoffs are tricky to get right.
Most teams simply rely on laborious check-ins throughout the sales cycle. Push your team
beyond the sum of its parts and smooth the handoff process by prioritizing transparency
and maximizing knowledge-sharing. Figure out who knows what on your team during each
stage in the sales process, create a culture of accountability and reward responsibility
throughout the organization, and your team will excel.
Sales Opstacle 2: Inefficient and poorly-defined handovers between teams lead to well-
qualified prospects falling between the cracks.

Work together in Salesforce
With team structure set and handoffs established, it’s time to connect the parts.
Creating and maintaining a cohesive system of tools and trackers to accelerate and
manage your team is one of the most valuable things you can do for your company. We’ll
be discussing this step within the context of Salesforce, but the ideas here apply to other
CRMs as well.
Equip your sales team with the right tools and they’ll scale with ease. But there’s no toolkit
that can fix a poorly managed team. Build an excellent sales process as a foundation
before investing in any tools. Start with a simple CRM configuration that ensures that your
data stays clean over the implementation of advanced requirements. Then you can build a
toolkit that meets the requirements of your team. It should remove, not increase, the
complexity of your sales operation. You can always add tools later, but it very hard to
simplify your toolset once your team adopts it.
Sales Opstacle 3: It takes forever to unravel the mess you create in Salesforce when
teams have different understandings of how it should be used.
Build:

Define the sales process
The sales process is a set of ideal steps that you lay out for your team as the most effective
course of action to close a deal.
The path of actual deal conversations may take many turns and stray from your ideal sales
process; having a template to follow gives your reps a “true north” to help them navigate
deals when this happens. It also improves your ability to manage your pipeline by giving
you a barometer of the health of the deals in your funnel and checkpoints to track how
deals are progressing through each stage.
Determining the ideal sales process is one of the most difficult challenges of running a
sales operation. It requires lots of research and lengthy discussions with both reps and
customers, and it never really stops. As the sales team grows and the product evolves, the
sales process must be altered accordingly.
Sales Opstacle 4: A poorly defined sales process prevents you getting visibility into what is
working and what is not for your sales team.
Build:

Measure
Manage the pipeline
Most companies place all their focus at the top and bottom of their sales pipeline, without
paying enough attention to how deals actually get from one end to the other.
When they find themselves in a stagnant period, some sales organizations reflexively buy
more leads or push harder on recent late-stage deals. But their real issue is that deals fall
apart in the middle of their pipeline. This is a problem that no deluge of leads or brute
force rescue attempts will solve.
The reason so many companies struggle with mid-pipeline attrition is that mid-pipeline
deal stages are much harder to define and manage. It’s easy to determine when leads are
acquired and when deals are closed. But identifying two or three concrete checkpoints
between those events requires careful examination of deals throughout their lifecycle, a
function that typically falls down the priority list for time-strapped teams. Don’t make the
mistake of ignoring this step; creating the middle stages can make a huge difference to
your win rate.
Sales Opstacle 5: Poor pipeline management leads to holes in forecasts and inconsistent
revenue.

Measure
Sales forecasting
Sales forecasts give company executives a macro-level view of what they can expect to
earn in a given month and quarter.
Creating accurate forecasts is one of the most important tasks assigned to sales ops, as
having an accurate estimate of how much money is coming in is the only way to know how
much is available to spend.
For most companies, forecasting is a balancing act between productivity and accuracy.
Whichever path you choose, make sure you weigh your choice against the priorities of
your company so that you aren’t sacrificing too much accuracy for a negligible amount of
additional productivity, or vice versa. Excellent forecasts are incredibly valuable to
companies when planning for the future and managing growth, but they can become a
time sink that pull reps away from their actual job of selling the company’s product or
service.
Sales Opstacle 6: Delivering an inaccurate sales forecast reduces your reliability and leads
to less faith placed in your sales team by company leadership, hindering growth.

Learn
Finding blockers in the pipeline
Once your sales process is up and running and you’ve begun measuring how well it works,
you’ll begin to discover the roadblocks in your pipeline.
These kinks in the tube repeatedly delay deals or kill them outright. It’s up to you to ensure
that deals flow at their usual pace. You must be prepared to navigate your team through a
variety of obstacles:
•Ineffective messaging
•Underperforming sales reps
•Missing decision makers
•Competitors
Identifying these roadblocks requires mastery of your team’s data and constant
communication with your sales reps and managers. Find the root of the problems in your
pipeline, and you’ll be able to develop custom solutions for every novice sales rep,
troublesome market or difficult competitor slowing down your machine.
Sales Opstacle 7: If not quickly identified and resolved, pipeline blockers can have a
detrimental effect on your win rates.

Learn
Optimizing territories and quotas
Assigning territories for an early stage company is easy, as the world is your oyster. But
when teams scale up, territory definitions narrow and expectations increase. This makes
assigning territories a much more difficult task.
Everyone on the team will have an opinion not just on their own quota and territory, but
on everyone else’s as well. To prevent problems down the road, it’s important to get these
right and to explain them logically.
Once territories have been assigned, targets must be set that are both ambitious and
achievable based on your analysis of each territory’s potential. Setting quotas is a
complicated process for companies of all sizes. Small companies can manage with simpler
systems and benchmark goals against industry averages. But as product and team
complexity increases, considerations must be made so that reps with lucrative territories
don’t coast and reps with difficult territories don’t feel overwhelmed. Most teams find their
ideal balance after a series of trial and error.
Sales Opstacle 8: As a sales team grows, poorly defined territories and quotas adversely
impact results.

Learn
Implementing change
If you’ve followed all the previous steps above, by now you’ve built a state-of-the-art sales
operation. Your sales team knows what’s required of them. They’re incentivized to perform
their best, they’re equipped with the tools they need to work at scale, and they’re smoothly
shepherding deals along the pipeline.
Best of all for you, the system you’ve created gives you insight into the performance of the
operation. You can see which deals are cruising along, where deals are falling out of your
pipeline, and can forecast with accuracy the amount of revenue it’s creating. But this
machine requires constant iteration.
To navigate a systemic change, your team has to understand your expectations. Relying on
the same ways you communicate with your team during normal periods may not be
sufficient, as you need to be absolutely sure that your tools are accurately measuring the
results of your process revisions. Be transparent with your team and let them know exactly
what they need to do for the initiative to be successful, and listen to what they have to say.
Your sales reps are the ones on the frontline of your operation, so they will likely have
some of the best ideas on how to improve it.
Sales Opstacle 9: An inability to adapt to change leaves your best laid plans with very little
chance of success.

Next Steps
Need help getting started?
Sales Operations is a difficult, often underappreciated job. For years, sales ops managers
have been underserved by the sales software world, and have had to rely on outdated
technology to create useful intelligence for their companies.
At Datahug, we’re equipping the world’s sales teams with the tools they deserve.
Companies that have deployed Datahug have seen an average of 21% higher close rates,
with their reps spending 80% less time updating their CRM. Sales teams spend 70% less
time in deal review meetings and achieve 95% accuracy in their forecasts.
Stop settling for mediocre forecast accuracy and give your reps what they need to spend
more time selling and close more deals.
Full Version: http://discover.datahug.com/sales-operations-playbook/

The B2B Sales Operations Playbook

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