Sales Operations: What It Is and How Technology Can Make Your Team More Effective

Sales teams have a lot to manage, from meeting their targets and adapting to customer expectations to standing out from competitors in an ever-changing market.

Plus, they must consider how to use emerging tools and technology — including AI and automation — to improve operations efficiency. Sales operations are designed to help teams work smarter and faster and support a business’s bottom line. But to successfully streamline processes, it’s important to have the right tools in place.

Learn what sales operations are, how they can make life easier for sales teams, and how they help drive business success.

What are sales operations?

Sales operations are the business activities that allow a sales organization to run successfully. They outline the processes that sales reps need to do their jobs and support the many tasks sales teams perform behind the scenes. Well-structured operations supported by the right tools can boost a company’s productivity and bottom line.

For example, a sales manager might look at data insights to determine how many sales reps to hire and where to place them. Optimized sales processes can also make it easier for reps to reach their targets, including analyzing which sales activities tend to land the most deals. From there, a sales leader might create an automated sales playbook to guide reps through the most effective sequence of sales tactics.

Why do sales operations matter for businesses?

Salesforce’s State of Sales Report found that sales reps only spend about 30% of their time selling. The rest of their time is typically spent on repetitive tasks like manually entering customer and sales information or researching prospects. With more efficient sales operations in place, teams can spend less time on administrative tasks and focus on what matters most — building relationships with customers.

Modern tools and technology support sales operations, giving teams access to the resources they need to win more opportunities. For example, teams that use Slack to support their sales operations can spot trends in real-time data, prioritize leads, and focus on the deals that are most likely to close. This way, reps can jump straight into the meaningful customer conversations that earn repeat business.

What makes an effective sales operations team?

Your sales operation team should be designed with your company’s size and needs in mind. A small company might only need a single sales operations manager. But larger businesses with more sophisticated requirements may build out multiple, specialized sales ops teams to tackle specific challenges across the sales process.

Key roles of a sales operations team

A sales operations team includes several key players. Here are some of the most common roles:

• Sales operations managers. These are the people who oversee daily processes, identify and implement best practices, and scale them throughout the organization. The sales ops manager works closely with sales leaders to transform high-level strategy into actionable steps, then holds reps accountable.
• Sales operations analysts. This role supports the operations manager by examining data to predict future performance and provide actionable insights to sales teams. They analyze historical sales data and market trends, identify patterns, and generate sales forecasts.
• Sales operations reps. These team members handle day-to-day tasks that keep the sales team running smoothly. For example, they might track goal progress, enter data, update reports, and provide administrative support for sales reps.
• Sales operations directors. This specialist role is responsible for creating long-term strategy with input from sales leaders. Organizations usually hire someone for this position as they expand their sales operations to become more strategic.

Essential skills for sales operations teams

Sales operations professionals must have a blend of technical and soft skills to be effective in their roles. Here are a few of the abilities they typically rely on:

• Analytical thinking and problem solving are essential for defining, measuring, and evaluating key performance indicators, among other things.
• Project management chops are important, since sales operations work now involves a higher degree of cross-functional collaboration throughout the company.
• Communication and relationship building are also vital. Sales ops professionals must explain data insights to different audiences, whether that’s sales representatives or C-suite executives. Sales ops teams can use Slack for Sales to share intuitive data visualizations and streamlined reports that make sales performance information accessible to everyone.
• Adaptability is key, because the very nature of sales is changing. According to the Salesforce report, changing customer expectations is the top challenge in sales, followed by competition with other businesses, supply chain issues, macroeconomic conditions, and inadequate or ineffective tools and technology. Sales ops teams need the agility to help their sales colleagues confront and overcome these obstacles to success.

Common challenges for sales operations teams

Teams can run into roadblocks when trying to optimize sales processes. Many sales ops professionals still spend too much time on tasks that could be automated, like manually routing leads to the right sales representatives. Teams can use Slack to set up automated workflows and alerts for pipeline changes or use AI to automatically route leads based on sales reps’ territories.

When customer information is scattered across different platforms, operations teams struggle to get a complete picture of sales performance. Slack helps teams integrate data with their other sales software, like Salesforce. Reps can then make updates to Salesforce within Slack to streamline sales operations, eliminate platform switching, and create a single source of truth.

Sales teams may struggle to scale operations as the organization grows. It’s a challenge to maintain efficiency as they support more sales reps, manage larger territories, and handle more data. By integrating autonomous AI agents with Slack, teams can do more in less time. AI agents can help sales teams prepare executive briefings, create proposals, and reach out to customers directly in Slack. This supports reps in a way that’s cost-effective for businesses.

How to create a sales operations strategy

Developing an effective sales operations strategy requires careful planning and strong collaboration throughout your organization. Here’s a step-by-step approach to creating a strategy that drives sales performance.

Step 1: Set clear objectives and goals

Collaborate with sales leadership to define specific and measurable operations goals that align with company targets. For example, you might strive to increase the percentage of time reps actually spend selling from 30% to 40%, or you might aim to improve your forecast accuracy by 25%.

Slack makes it easier to get everyone on the same page with sales goals. By including key stakeholders in sales operations channels, sales ops teams can instantly share data visualizations and reports that help everyone understand current sales performance and agree on realistic targets.

Step 2: Develop a roadmap for sales process optimization

Next, map out your current sales process. Look for bottlenecks — such as where deals tend to slow down in the pipeline — tedious tasks that could be automated, or gaps in data collection. Create a list of improvements you want to make, then prioritize them by their potential value and the time and effort it will take to accomplish them.

Start with tasks that are relatively easy to achieve. For example, if manual data entry is eating up your sales reps’ time, consider automating those processes before tackling more complex improvements.

Step 3: Implement sales technology solutions

Select and deploy tools and technology that will support your operations strategy. Start with core applications like a customer relationship management system (CRM), then add any specialized tools you may have for things like sales enablement or territory planning.

As you evaluate new sales tech, prioritize solutions that easily integrate with your existing tools. Slack integrates with many popular sales applications, so your team can receive automated deal insight notifications, access customer data, and collaborate with colleagues without switching between applications.

Step 4: Monitor, measure, and adjust your strategy

To understand the effectiveness of your operations strategy, it’s crucial to regularly check your progress against your goals. Use dashboards and reports to track key metrics, so you can figure out what’s working and what needs tweaking.

Invite your sales ops team to share performance updates in a dedicated Slack channel, and gather feedback from the sales team on how things are going. This type of collaboration helps teams spot issues early on and make informed strategy adjustments as needed. If something’s not working, you can bring the right people together quickly to solve the problem.

Measuring sales operations success

Key metrics help your operations team measure the impact of their efforts and spot opportunities to improve sales performance even further. Let’s look at a couple ways to do this.

Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)

To see how well your optimization efforts are working, look at key sales metrics such as sales velocity, average sales cycle length, individual rep closing rates, and overall win rate. Other metrics — for example, average deal size and revenue per sales rep — give you insights into where you can improve to maximize revenue.

Forecasting helps sales leaders set realistic sales goals, create attainable and motivating quotas for reps, and assess expected revenue to make smarter budgeting and spending decisions. Inaccurate forecasts can lead to overspending and setting unattainable quotas — both of which can hurt your business. Predict more accurate outcomes and plan accordingly by regularly evaluating your sales forecasting accuracy.

The Salesforce Slack integration lets your sales operations team access real-time sales dashboards from your CRM data. This way, they can easily monitor KPIs at a glance without leaving Slack, saving them time and effort.

Use data for strategic decision-making

KPIs help teams quickly spot trends and identify sales processes that need course correction. For example, if you see that your sales cycle is growing, you can analyze your pipeline progress within the Sales Cloud dashboard in Slack to pinpoint where deals are getting stuck. From there, you can adjust your approach based on what you learn — perhaps shifting more resources to the proposal or negotiation stages. You can also configure real-time alerts to keep everyone on the team updated about pipeline changes as they happen.

Slack gives you a central place to share these data insights, explore areas that need attention, and collaborate on solutions. For example, operations teams can create channels or break out into huddles where they can quickly discuss sales trends, share important data, and collaborate on solutions to improve the sales process.

Must-have tools and technology for sales operations

Sales operations teams need modern sales tools to succeed. Different organizations will have different needs, but some technologies are fundamental to all sales operations. Here are a few to consider:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial to any sales organization. It provides one source of truth for all customer and sales information, making it easy to track deals as they make their way through your pipeline. Integrating your CRM with Slack helps sales teams access and act on real-time customer data, performance metrics, and more, all in one place.
• Performance and territory management tools help sales ops teams segment customers, balance territories, and manage quotas. The right software can streamline these traditionally manual tasks. By using sales performance management software for performance tracking, incentive management, forecasting, and territory planning, you can empower sales reps to make data-driven decisions and boost overall sales efficiency.
• Sales enablement tools can help you onboard new reps efficiently. Accelerate the process by creating a Slack channel specifically for new hires. Delegate an AI Onboarding Agent to answer new colleagues’ questions, automatically set up sales enablement tools for them, guide them through training modules, and connect them with key resources like sales playbooks.
• AI sales agents are autonomous applications that analyze and learn from your sales and customer data to perform tasks with little or no human input. These agents can perform a variety of functions, from top-of-funnel tasks like nurturing leads with email outreach, answering questions, booking meetings, and quote creation to tasks more deeply integrated within sales teams, like active buyer role plays and coaching. They can increase productivity, customer satisfaction, and scalability, among other benefits.

Best practices to maximize sales operations efficiency

Sales operations teams should always be looking for ways to improve. They should regularly review their existing processes to understand what’s working well and what could be better.

Implementing new technologies like AI can help teams improve efficiency. The State of Sales Report found that 83% of sales teams using AI saw revenue growth in the past year compared with 66% of teams that didn’t.

Operations teams should also look for ways to make forecasting more accurate, such as combining historical data with real-time insights. This approach helps you find patterns in past performance while factoring in current market conditions and pipeline changes. Armed with data, sales teams can catch potential issues early and make changes right away — before revenue is affected.

Teams that encourage a culture of continuous improvement create a place to learn from others’ mistakes, bounce ideas off others, and come up with innovative solutions. Make it easy for sales teams to share their wins and learnings in Slack by creating channels for knowledge sharing. By regularly reviewing processes and progress against KPIs and asking reps for feedback, you can see whether your sales operations are succeeding.

Optimize your sales operations for more efficiency

Advanced technology and greater access to data have contributed to more efficient sales operations across organizations. With the right combination of people, processes, and tools, operations teams can improve sales performance faster.

By bringing everything together in Slack, your sales operations team can automate time-consuming administrative tasks, allowing sales reps to spend more time nurturing customer relationships. With access to performance data at a glance in dashboards and channels, teams can align on KPIs and make smart sales decisions together.

Autonomous AI agents can serve as digital teammates that answer sales reps’ questions, assist with tasks, and provide the resources they need to meet their targets. With the right technology, your sales team can spend less time on mundane tasks and more time closing deals.

Learn how Slack AI can transform your sales operations.