If you were building a brand new sales operations team, where would you invest first or the most? What would be most important?

I recently had this conversation with a friend and sales operations consultant and emphatically stated, “Accurate, timely and effective data, reporting and analysis are the foundation for a healthy sales operations department. You must invest in a highly skilled “reporting & analysis” team and ensure that they have the right tools to execute.”

If you skimp in this area and hire a skeleton crew or entry level staff, I guarantee you will have ongoing and major problems. Here are a few reasons why:

Quotas & Compensation

In my most recent sales operations leadership role, I uttered or heard the word quotas on a daily basis. Salespeople need accurate and timely quotas followed by accurate, timely payment based on quota attainment.

To set accurate quotas, your gold source data must be 100% accurate and you need staff members who can create models, “what if” analyses and link up sales goals with the financials. They should also be able to advise your sales leaders on the likely difficulty level in achieving quotas and what is “most fair”.

To pay your salesforce correctly, you need staff members who can pull accurate data (think Microsoft Access, SAS, Business Objects, queries), on time and effectively match it up to the sales quotas and calculate the appropriate payout.  This is no easy task considering the complex compensation plans and manual adjustments, which we deal with in most sales organizations.

(On a related note, sales contests and recognition programs often require the same types of data and reporting – that must be accurate and timely.)

CRM – Garbage In, Garbage Out

CRM systems have become commonplace in most sales organizations, and I bet if you surveyed your sales people they would tell you that the data within the CRM needs to be updated.

Contact information and “lead data” must be cleansed on an ongoing basis, in order to remain relevant and to maintain or improve sales productivity. Do you want your sales team calling wrong numbers or closing deals? Please refer to an earlier post called “How clean is your sales data” for more information and ideas.

Don’t expect the marketing or IT team to staff an employee who worries about your CRM sales data. This should be part of someone’s job on the Sales Operations team.

Decision Making

A sales operations reporting leader should ensure that the sales leadership team has the information that they need at their fingertips, to make sound decisions and move their teams towards goal achievement. This is beyond just pumping out reports. They needs to help identify the right leading and lagging key indicators and activities that will help predict future success. They need to create “real time” reporting, so sales leaders can measure progress at any time.  And, these critical reports must be 100% accurate.

Who should you hire?

To head up a reporting/analysis function, you must find a senior level, experienced “data nerd” who is familiar with different ways to extract, massage and present data. They need to be able to be able to link big picture thinking with the right metrics and analysis. They must be extremely detail oriented with skills in QCing data.

The leader should also know how to automate reporting. Even with a sales team of 1,000 people, you should not need an army of analysts creating manual reports for you. With a front end investment in time, query programming, and basic tools, many ongoing reports should require minimal human manipulation. And, a well designed, real time dashboard report, can be an extremely valuable tool.

I know from past experience that it is hard to find this mix of skills and experience. When you do, pay them well. Investing an extra $20k in a base salary here could results in thousands of dollars in saved time and problems later.. or even millions of extra dollars towards your quote achievement. If salespeople are not distracted by bad quotas, incorrect payouts or obsolete CRM data… They wlll be off selling.

How valuable is your reporting and analysis team? Do you agree with my recommendations? Please add your comments….

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