We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

—Aristotle

Here’s one for the record books: a sales team was so delighted by the increased productivity it experienced after the sales support function was re-engineered that reps volunteered to give part of their bonuses to the support staff. Yes, that’s right. The reps dug into their own pockets to show their gratitude.

You’d be grateful, too, if you’d lived through this global manufacturer’s transformation. Sales operations had reached a stage where phone-sales reps were spending 75 percent of their time away from the phones. They were trying to push through stalled deals, scurrying to find data to answer customer questions, and cobbling together one-off proposals for even the simplest requests. Even highly paid field reps were spending almost half their time on internal sales support and tracking deal progress. In order to put a standard proposal together, reps had to coordinate meetings with as many as seven different people. Often, it took two to three weeks of constant effort for a field rep to get a special price approved.

This headache reached its climax during a product launch. The organization simply wasn’t able to deliver the volume of time-sensitive proposals needed to nail down those critically important first orders. In addition, proposal quality varied dramatically across field reps. Some sent out spreadsheets with a simple price quote, while others created 50-page documents, stressing value propositions they had dreamed up on their own. This was not what senior management had in mind.

After this wake-up call, sales leaders decided it was time to act and moved to separate sales from support. The goal was simple: let sales reps sell, and let support staff support. The company created “sales factories” comprised of specialized sales-support staff with functional responsibility, and “deal coordinators” with back-office responsibility to shepherd deals through the system on behalf of the sales reps.

The company standardized internal sales processes and simplified interfaces between sales, customers, and manufacturing. It established clear service-level agreements for core support functions that spelled out what was required and a comprehensive performance-management system that focused on speed and quality. The company also streamlined the proposal process, creating a library of proven pitch documents by product and by industry segment, which reps could quickly adapt rather than waste time writing proposals from scratch.

As the company rolled out the program country by country, the impact began to be felt—in some cases in as little as four months. Reps gained 15 percent more time for selling, there was a 5 percent improvement in win rates, and cycle time for internal sales processes shrank by 20 percent.

Even if these reps were unusual in their generous gesture toward their back-office colleagues, the results are actually fairly typical for a successful sales transformation. Sales leaders at other companies told us how optimizing sales operations across all channels led to revenue gains of 10 to 25 percent, even as standardization and other process improvements reduced back-office costs by 20 to 30 percent. Furthermore, our research with product- or hardware-focused companies shows that sales leaders who allocate half of their staff to customer-facing and back-office roles drive a significantly higher ratio of gross margin/sales cost than those who underinvest in sales support. For a major global player, the potential benefits can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In researching more than 100 companies, we found that the average company can be classed as best practice on only 40 percent of sales-operations capabilities, and even those in the top quartile manage to demonstrate best practice on only 60 percent of the capabilities. So why haven’t more companies overhauled sales operations to get these top- and bottom-line benefits?

Many have yet to realize the extent of the opportunity. Pockets of sales support are hidden across divisions and locations—along with costs and redundancy. Management often has no idea just how much pain is inflicted on frontline sales staff and customers when sales operations are slow, overly complex, unresponsive, and inaccurate. By contrast, the best leaders run weekly, monthly, and quarterly pipeline, forecast, and business reviews, lead account and territory planning clinics, and drive the customer- segmentation, capacity-planning, rostering, and quota-setting processes for their entire geography or global segment. They harness the power of advanced analytics to provide deeper business insight that leads to better management decision-making or front-line sales rep targeting and customer engagement. In many of these leading companies, the sales operations leader acts as the COO of the sales organization and the right-hand person to the senior sales leader.

Our interviews and experience suggest that sales operations remain one of the biggest opportunities for improvement in selling, general, and administrative expenses, as well as a source of growth and differentiation. The first step toward realizing these gains is to get a comprehensive assessment of the current state of play. Top sales leaders ask somebody in their direct team to assay the entire sales-operations landscape—with the understanding that sales operations includes all non-quota-carrying activities that support quota-carrying activities, extending beyond transactional tasks and including any activity that affects sales performance (Figure 9.1).

As sales leaders plan to optimize sales operations, they must also consider how actions taken in one area affect other parts of the sales organization. One risk is that centralization and standardization can go too far, undermining the ability of some divisions or sales departments to serve their customers. All sales operations can be improved, but not always in the same way.

The leading companies we spoke to focus on two areas of improvements to propel operations to the next levels of sales excellence:

1. Give sales teams more time to sell. Sales operations are crucial to releasing reps’ time from non-selling activity; once they see the benefit of the change, their behavior becomes self-sustaining.
2. Use sales operations to customers’ benefit. Improving operations can have an enormous impact on customers. A smoother and faster sales process can boost loyalty, even if it may require some adaptations to customers’ own operations.

Give Sales Teams More Time to Sell

When it comes to optimizing sales operations, the guiding principle for sales executives is to maximize time for selling and relationship building (Figure 9.2). This sounds obvious, but it’s critical to remember as the drive for effectiveness races against the forces of rising complexity. Growth and the proliferation of products and channels in both B2B and B2C continually reinject non-selling activities into the salesperson’s day. Winning back and protecting selling time, therefore, requires continuous vigilance.

Here’s how one logistics company did it. As it plotted its comeback from the recession and tried to develop new growth initiatives, it surveyed its sales teams and found that only 35 percent of their time was spent actively selling, while six nonsales activities consumed nearly half their time. Billing- system updates, firefighting, and internal communications were the chief time wasters.

The sales managers analyzed the diaries of every rep to find the cause of each time sink and convened cross-organizational teams to come up with solutions. They equipped the sales force with tools to automate and expedite preclose activities (contract templates, automated pricing tools, etc.). Second, they outsourced dispute resolution and reassigned other nonsales activities such as billing and collection from the front line to the back office, with clear rules and standard procedures. Finally, the company invested in customer self-serve tools that preempted inquiries to sales and support staff. The online system also helped internally, giving the customer-service teams clear guidance on how to handle common issues. As a result, the company was able to maintain its workload with 25 percent fewer staff.

Once you have created more selling time, the trick is to defend it and make it permanent. Not only do new demands chip away at reps’ selling time; so do ancient habits. Based on training and experience, a rep’s reflex response is to drop everything and dive in when a customer demands a quick answer. These were good habits at one time, but are highly unproductive when a modern sales-support mechanism is in place that can handle the issue faster and better than the rep. “It is key to stop reps from bypassing the new system, even if they think they are more effective,” says a top sales executive at the high-tech company. “Their time is better used to sell.”

A European telecommunications company helped break the old habits by colocating sales-operations teams with sales groups. Actually seeing the support staffer who was helping their customers, and how well they performed, engendered trust between sales and sales-operations staff. Each customer and allocated sales rep were assigned a customer-service person, whose photo and phone number they received. These service reps would answer customer calls 80 percent of the time (if they were away from their desk, another member of the customer-care team would answer). Each sales group established clear roles and responsibilities to determine which requests went to sales and which to sales operations. The company also created formal service- level agreements specifying sales reps’ minimum levels of satisfaction with their customer-service rep. The increased selling time and back-office improvements significantly improved revenue at the telecommunications company, raising the value of contracts closed per week by 30 percent.

Finally, sales leaders reinforced the new model—and protected the expanded selling time—by setting aggressive activity targets, such as for the number of new-customer meetings reps needed to make. Targets were calibrated so that reps could not hit the numbers unless they stepped away from sales-operations tasks and trusted the process to work. Once reps saw that the process did in fact work, a self-reinforcing cycle began—the more they stayed out of the support realm, the better they did.

Use Sales Operations to Benefit Customers

Optimizing sales operations isn’t purely for the vendor’s benefit. It also has a direct positive impact on customer experience and can help retain and expand accounts. Tighter cycle times for proposals and queries, for example, translate into higher win rates and greater customer loyalty. A Fortune 50 company found that for every two days it cut from cycle time, it increased its win rate by 1 percent.

This all might seem obvious, but it doesn’t mean that execution is always straightforward. For example, sales leaders we interviewed at a service provider had worked hard to reduce the time for various steps in the sales process, such as providing a quote or sending a completed contract. But, over the years, total cycle time actually expanded, and customers grew so frustrated with increasing delays that they were ringing up the company to say they were considering switching providers.

The root of the problem was that rather than optimize the end-to-end sales process, the company had focused on each individual step. Employees were quick to close a ticket and hand off their work package with incomplete information, creating delay and rework when materials returned for completion. As a result, overall cycle time had grown and grown, even though it took less time to complete each step.

Before they lost any major customers, the head of sales operations set out to transform the back office. First, he asked a few major customers to act as an advisory board on process redesign. Then his team followed a sample of orders through every step of the process to see where the delays occurred. They soon discovered that 80 percent of sales-operations efforts were consumed by deals worth just 20 percent of revenues.

The team solved the problem by segmenting deals by complexity and tailoring the process for each segment in order to remove unnecessary steps and touches. For example, minor price changes no longer required going back through the full process. The personnel who were freed up from simpler deals were reallocated to the highly complex, large-value deals that really did require extensive customization and hand-holding. This effort improved cycle time for all the deals—including the most complex ones—by weeks and even months. By eliminating unnecessary steps, the company also cut the cost of sales operations by 15 percent. If companies are to maximize the potential captured from segmenting at the front line, this back-office segmentation is a critical step.

In this example, one of the key success factors was the customer-advisory board, which provided feedback on every step of the improvement process. Importantly, for the new deal-segmentation model to work, customers had to change their own internal processes to adapt to the standard interface on simpler deals and accept that not every deal needed the white-glove treatment. Customers benefited financially from this change, too: one was able to reduce the resources dedicated to interacting with the service provider by 25 percent, which restored and enhanced customer loyalty.

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Improving sales operations requires a commitment to change and organizational collaboration. Nevertheless, when the manufacturer at the start of the chapter realized that reps had 15 percent more time for selling, win rates rose by 5 percent, and sales processes were 20 percent quicker, it was glad it had made the leap. At their heart, the best salespeople want to be out there selling, and the best sales leaders know they must do whatever they can to make this happen. This might take the form of colocating operations teams with sales teams, like the telecommunications company, or following the lead of the logistics company and investing in self-service tools so that customers don’t need to call reps with simple queries. SWIFT’s Alain Raes explains below how more efficient operations helped push sales volumes up by 8 percent a year.

To truly overhaul sales operations, the best companies have no qualms about engaging customers in the transformation; helping them change their own systems can be incredibly beneficial for both parties, reducing the resource commitment from both sides, while improving the process—for once, a win-win where both parties really do benefit.

A critical component of a sales-support organization is a presales team that can qualify leads and offer the right technical expertise to customers—this is the focus of our next chapter.