There and Back Again: Sales Operations to Sales and Back

Business Operations, or BizOps, can encompass many different things depending on the company. It involves managing all the platforms a company uses day to day, tracking progress, reporting on processes and implementing and overseeing changes.

While having someone devoted to business operations is an expense — they don’t directly generate revenue, and they don’t deliver a product or service — they do help the rest of the team operate more efficiently. They can also provide a valuable, objective perspective when examining how things are working. For example, if I’m a sales rep and I’m controlling the lead rotation, and my paycheck is coming from the deals I close, I’m literally incentivized to give myself all the leads.

However, due to unusual circumstances, I spent the last six months working as part of the sales team instead of in my BizOps role.

What My role in BizOps Entails

As an Operations Strategist at New Breed, my role involves:

• Managing the different platforms we use across the company.

• Making sure those platforms are speaking to each other.

• Ensuring that people are able to use those platforms and gain value from them.

• Assisting with reporting.

• Overseeing change management.

Change management is putting in the effort before and after a change happens so the change is launched smoothly and effectively, with as few problems as possible. Rolling out a change is never going to be perfect; change is hard and stressful, and nobody likes it. But the goal of change management is to consolidate all the risks and occurrences and minimize their impact on the end user.

This is an important process because any change is going to hurt productivity as well as some level of morale.

For example, when we initially adopted Slack, people were up in arms. We used to use Google Hangouts, and the change to Slack was a big roll-out. Even though we explained to everyone all of the reasons why Slack was better for our needs, people were upset, and it impacted the entire company. When that happens, there’s a productivity loss in the learning curve.

One aspect of change management is trying to limit the amount of training an individual has to do on their own to try and get used to something. If you can provide everyone the resources they need to perform most day-to-day tasks, that’ll save your company a lot of time and therefore money.

Another important part of change management is morale. If someone has a say in a decision, even if it doesn’t go their way, they’re more likely to be happy with the outcome, or at least go along with it.

The final element of change management is the “QA” of changes. Just like with a website, you can’t just launch a change and walk away. The timeline doesn’t end when the change is rolled out. You still have to answer questions and provide documents and work with everyone to make sure they can back to working smoothly as soon as possible.

If you’re not in Ops, you may not be thinking about how your time and productivity line up in relation to overall company goals, but when productivity is decreased due to a change, even if it’s only by 2%, it still costs the company money.

The impact of the change takes time away from employees doing the job they’re there to do. If you’re working slowly, you may not be able to make traction against the company’s goal as quickly as you’d want to.

Leaving Ops for Sales

I’ve always had some interest in sales. In college, a lot of my professors suggested I go into sales, but I’ve never actually done it. So when New Breed found itself in a situation where we had too many leads for our sales team and we needed to capitalize on those leads to reach our growth goals, I stepped away from my position in operations into a sales role for six months.

We strongly believe in the necessity of operations. We were aware of the challenges we would face without someone dedicated to this role and we knew that change management and software support would be more difficult during this time. That being said, we decided there was a greater need on the sales side. So I stepped over to the sales team to attempt to close new business, get new clients with high lifetime value and help the team out.

Through this experience, I learned how hard sales is and how completely opposite the mindsets are for sales and operations. In operations, you’re not thinking so much about active listening. You’re not thinking about identifying the pain or what’s the best next question to ask on this call. The switch into that was very difficult for me, especially on occasions when I would go on a sales call directly after being in an operational meeting.

Sales is a very difficult position because you can put hundreds of hours into a huge deal, and they just don’t pick you, and it’s gone forever. That was hard for me because in operations if I put a lot of time into something it will probably get used or at least I can see what it becomes. With sales, you just have to let that go.

What I Learned

As an operations person, you imagine the system you’re creating from the top view, like playing The Sims: you’re building this structure, and there are people inside of it, but when you personally are inside of it, you notice a lot of things that you couldn’t possibly have anticipated when you were building the whole thing. There were small nuances within our sales process that were more annoying than I thought they’d be, even though I had a say in making them that way.

The experience also humanized sales reps for me. There’s a reason they’re not known for filling out their data in the CRM. It’s because when they get off a call, they’re immediately moving on to the next things on their to-do list, not thinking about how they need to add a detail to the CRM. So, the more things we can automate for them, the better.

I’m now more driven to streamline operations. It’s always good to be proactive. Just because it’s working now doesn’t mean it is how it should be. Being in a sales role made me value responding to tickets, even if it’s just an estimate of when it might be done so it’s not a black hole for the person.

The Return

We decided the date for my return to ops based on our sales cycle, and I stopped getting leads mid-November. I transitioned all the deals I was working that would go past Dec. 31 to the appropriate sales reps and worked really hard to close everything else before the end of the month.

We planned it well, but the high level of demand for BizOps made the return very stressful. I got pulled back into operations earlier than we expected. By mid-December, I was back in ops. It was like the floodgates had opened. People were Slacking me all the time with requests and questions, and all the people who had been hired during that time weren’t taught how to deal with operations and thought I was just this on-demand resource for them. I had to have a meeting with the sales team to set expectations and explain the queue.

Switching from ops to sales taught me invaluable lessons. It also really demonstrated how much demand there is for operations. I think it was ultimately worth it — though it’s a close call.