Don’t underestimate the importance of sales operations in your business. It’s no secret that when a B2B founder launches a business, they do everything, including all the selling. At some point during the growth of the company, they decide to hire sales representatives. A skilled sales professional can offer two significant benefits to founder-led organizations. First, bringing on new salespeople can drive revenue, helping to accelerate momentum in the marketplace. Next, these resources reduce the owner’s overall burden, creating the freedom required for the founder to focus on other areas of the business. All great stuff, right?
Yes and no.
At FounderScale, we’ve spoken to a number of founders who assume they will solve their challenges by “just hiring a salesperson.” However, once a B2B founder onboards the sales rep, they typically see that sales still aren’t increasing in any meaningful way. They also often realize that they don’t have as much free time as they anticipated. In fact, many of them quickly learn that the real work has just begun. The reason for these business hiccups is because once these leaders build a team, the next set of challenges arises, stemming from a lack of internal sales operations.
Once You’ve Built The Sales Team, It’s Time Focus on Sales Operations
Hiring a salesperson is usually the first step in a journey that quickly evolves into supporting the sales rep in many unexpected ways. In the first few weeks of hiring a sales professional, the B2B founder and team scramble to provide everything they need. The urgency to provide support can sometimes signal to the new hire that nothing is in place. It can also reinforce the belief that they can do whatever they can as they hit the ground running.
Eventually, the team builds up the sales operations resources and support needed for the sales rep to be successful, but at the expense of results. As the sales team grows, the challenges with the sales operations grow along with it. The obstacles can cover a lot of ground and may include varying frustrations, such as:
- We don’t get sales metrics and reports regularly
- The CRM data isn’t accurate or helpful
- None of our sales forecasts are accurate
- Sales and marketing are not aligned
- Our sales meetings don’t reinforce the sales standards
- We don’t have sales training
- These leads are “bad,” so we just don’t look at them
One of the best ways for B2B founders to plan for the future is by knowing that developing sales operations is a natural next step when building a sales and marketing team. The goal of sales operations and sales operations services is to identify and remove these blockers as they arise. Eliminating factors that hinder success enables your sales team to focus on their most important task: selling. Most importantly, by enabling the sales team, sales operations take on strategic projects to enhance sales and marketing and provide the decision-making metrics that sales management requires for repeatable success.
FounderScale Can Help You Develop Sales Enablement Standards
FounderScale equips founder-led businesses in every vertical with actionable sales enablement solutions designed for operational growth. Contact us today to learn more.
How to Increase B2B Sales Engagement by 667%
Engaging people on a human-to-human level to provide experiences and education is one of the few long-term sustainable lead generation methods that you can employ. Many other methods like contact and pitch may provide a certain level of results but the efficiency and cost are less than ideal. To maximize sales engagement platforms, you have a number of different options ranging from webinars to group lunch and learns which provide 667% higher engagement than cold outreach to set a meeting.
Read our new mini-book to learn real-world strategies to boost sales engagement by 667%.
