1. Managing a Sales
Operation
Patrick Flanagan, CCO of Administrate

2. Purpose of Today
• Provide a quick overview of considerations to be made when
managing sales
• To provoke thinking about what you might change in your own
sales operation
• It is not the purpose of this talk to discuss marketing!

3. Managing a Sales Operation in 2017
• Today’s reality
• Millennials are buying, millennials are selling
• Buyers have information at their fingertips and are willing to invest time
into their own research before talking to you
• The sale needs to be low friction for the buyer
• The closer the product is to a commodity, the more the service needs
to be differentiated. Or conversely, the less the product is a commodity,
the less the service needs to be differentiated. You have to get this ratio
right and sales has to be clear on the value prop.
• Some salespeople unfortunately are still being taught sales tactics from
the 1980’s. Most don’t apply and make your business look bad.

4. How do we manage all of this?
The Right culture
The Right people
The Right structure

5. The Right Culture
• Start with the why, what do you care about?
• Define a set of values or reassess your company values and
make sure those values drive what you want for your sales
operation?
• Make these values easy to understand and memorable
• Teach these values
• Hire, fire, reviews, 121’s, Pulse, #, get made fun of
• Culture should drive the structure, structure should support the
culture

6. The Right People
• #1 goal is to get the right people in
• Culture fit – do a cultural interview, ask questions and assess the candidate
against each one of your values, decline the candidate if they don’t score
100% on cultural fit!
• Technical fit – WHO have they sold to, Ideal Customer Profile needs to match
e.g. don’t hire an enterprise salesperson to sell to SMB’s and vice versa, don’t
be afraid of lesser sales experience if the candidate is hungry to learn and
you are willing to invest some time
• #2 goal is to keep the right people
• Make sales a part of your team – reduces friction, reduces cycle times on
feedback, improvement, market adaptation
• Give them the right kit/tools
• Reduce the hurdles
• Be available – 121’s, PDP’s, L&D

7. The Right Structure
• Are you selling public or private courses?
• Public
• higher marketing effort, lower sales effort
• lots of structure around efficiency/scalability/repeatability
• ideal scenario is to automate the sale
• repeat business is often low, but marketing can help with repeat and cross selling
• Private
• medium marketing effort, high sales effort
• lots of structure and investment into the sales process
• Ideal scenario is to use high touch resource to land big accounts
• Repeat business from few customers ideal

8. The Right Structure
• Public one-off training event sales
• Great website
• Marketing automation
• Automated sales with follow-on marketing for cross selling or repeat business
• Use your inbound sales team to add service differentiation and cross selling
• Public subscription training sales
• Great website
• Marketing automation
• Automated sales or inbound sales
• Use your inbound sales team to add service differentiation
• Low touch account management or customer marketing

9. The Right Structure
• Private
• Targeted marketing
• Account based sales and marketing (ABSM)
• Specialized roles allows for focus and tight metrics
• Lead generation
• Appointment maker
• Closer
• Account Manager

10. The Right Structure
• We’ve gone from an art to a science.
• No area of your business today should feel squishy or give you
pause when thinking about resourcing and investment – ROI
should be clear and possible
• Marketing, sales, training

11. The Right Structure
Run sales like an operation.

12. The Right Structure
• Running sales like an assembly line allows you to:
• Improve inputs and outputs at each stage
• Identify constraints and bottlenecks
• Standardize and improve operations
• Add goals and metrics to each stage
• Add new assembly lines once standardised
• Sketch out the ideal workflow and then make it a reality.
(see Bob Sabra’s talk)

13. The Right Structure
• Metrics in place for each role/function/team – manage to
performance
• Have reports built and sent on a schedule to assist with this
• You may do things like consider making metrics and
bonus/commissions team based
• Drives collaboration
• No one likes to let the team down
• L&D and improvement happens team wide

14. Scaling the Sales Operation
• The Right culture
• Values should scale, if not, then build in an updater
• Preserves a sustainable business where people want to work and
clients and partners want to join
• The Right people
• Allows the culture of the operation to scale
• A-players hang out with A-players, recruitment gets easier
• Allows for a pipeline to hire within, better in most cases when scaling
• The Right structure
• Allows for sustainability and growth and supports the culture

15. Of all of these, culture is #1.
• Your job is to get the culture right and keep it right.
• If you stop being passionate about the culture, figure out why
and change or move on to something else.

16. Resources:
To Sell is Human – Daniel Pink
Predictable Revenue – Aaron Ross
Selling to Big Companies – Jill Konrath
The Advantage – Patrick Lencioni
The Goal – Eli Goldratt