Sales Operations People Are My Heroes

Over the past few weeks, I have spent a lot of (high quality) time speaking with our clients to understand how they use Win Loss intelligence to power their Competitive Intelligence programs and enhance their sales efforts.

It turns out that those companies that have the most effective systems that marry up sales, marketing, competitive intelligence and sales intelligence also have a very strong champion or a great team in the Sales Operations or Sales Training department.

In other words, these companies are selling more effectively than their competitors because they know how to collect the right kind of information, interpret it correctly and give the sales team marching orders based on those observations.

We work with many companies that run their Win Loss program out of Marketing, Analyst, or even Sales Leadership positions. However, in most cases, there are obstacles to making the most of the intelligence programs. I’ll describe some of my observations below:

Marketing – The marketing team generally seems interested in brand, value proposition, marketing messages and measuring the results of their other marketing efforts. To them, Win Loss is a part of a voice of the customer program (which isn’t a bad thing at all) or a one-time project to measure. But, I find that most of these marketers don’t pass along information to the sales group. In some cases, they don’t know how to make the information palatable to sales. Surprisingly, many of the marketers don’t think that sales would be interested.

Sales – Sales leaders do a better job of evangelizing their Win Loss programs to the sale reps, but they don’t usually spread the intelligence around to anyone else, which is a shame. There is so much quality information in a Win Loss program for so many departments that pigeon-holing the information in one department for one purpose marginalizes the value significantly.

Analysts – These groups can be proactive about the distribution of the competitive intelligence in Win Loss. However, analysts seem to be too far away from the corporate decision-makers to be able to give the intelligence a strong voice.

While sales operations may be different from company to company, talking to them made me think that they stand the best chance of bridging the sales/marketing gap. These people can think like sales and understands what the reps need. However, they also seem to have a mind for information and can interpret research results in a way that sales will understand.

Even better, the sales operations people are likely to be able to act on this information and take it to the next level of action. They can see where sales may need additional training and prescribe it. They may see that a marketing idea is not working and help to correct that. They can listen to the needs of sales, understand what marketing can do and facilitate the necessary transactions.

So, if you are wondering how to make an intelligence program (Competitive, Sales or Market) work more effectively in sales, make sure you have the Sales Operations people on board. This is likely the best step you can take to ensure success.