We recently partnered with the Sales Management Association, a leading professional organization for sales operations practitioners, to present a “state-of-the-profession” Webcast. Based on a survey of hundreds of sales operations professionals conducted by the Sales Management Association, three major themes emerged for professional success in 2010:
1. Don’t be pigeon-holed into being a “data jockey.”
If you’re spending all your time building reports, then you don’t have time to become the strategic, trusted advisor you want to be to add value to your organization–and build your career.
2. Think strategically about technology delivery.
Don’t to get bogged down in doing the work that technology–particularly solutions delivered as a service–can do for you and your team. A new emerging class of sales pipeline analytics are helping sales operations professionals rapidly deploy comprehensive pipeline and forecasting solutions to their teams so they can devote their time to more strategic initiatives.
3. Sales operations professionals need to bring new ideas to the table.
The sales operations function is at the nexus of many different parts of the organization and while those organizations have their own priorities, sales ops is in a unique position to tie everything together for greater efficiencies across the board. The message here is step up, because no one else will.
