A guide to sales operations: Strategies, tools, and best practices 

Sales operations is more than the day-to-day activities of a sales team; it’s the hand that guides the ship. Even if your sales reps are sharks and you have every shiny new sales tool under your belt, without the right processes and systems in place, your sales risk going off track.

This is where sales operations come in. Organizations that are serious about growing their revenue need to implement sales operations to promote productivity, efficiency, and collaboration. But what is sales operations, and how does it help your company grow? That’s what we’re going to answer.

This guide gives you a detailed overview of sales operations, including what it is, roles involved in sales operations teams, and metrics to track. We’ll also look at some best practices, such as using the right tools and software like monday CRM to optimize sales operations planning and strategizing.

What is sales operations?

Sales operations is a combination of the tools, strategies, and activities a team employs to support sales initiatives. Sales ops normally involves relying on both technology and data to improve sales processes and build a comprehensive approach to sales.

Overall, the vision for strategic sales operations is to help sales agents work more efficiently and maximize revenue opportunities by optimizing various sales processes.

Companies often implement several sales tools and systems, and the role of sales operations is to make sure technologies are being used as efficiently as possible through strategic planning and data analysis.

How do sales operations help your business grow?

Sales operations teams handle S&OP, sales and operations planning, to make sure every aspect of the sales process is working smoothly. Building a sales ops team creates a significant expense for businesses between manpower and resources, but S&OP can lead to significant growth, making it a worthwhile investment. Let’s take a closer look at a few quick examples of how S&OP leads to business growth.

• Improved efficiency and organization help teams standardize processes to avoid stalled deals and bottlenecks in the sales funnel.
• Sales ops relies heavily on data analysis, which can lead to more reliable decision-making thanks to actionable insights.
• Evaluating your sales technology makes it easier to optimize the tools and systems teams use to make sure they’re really serving their needs and goals.
• SO&P strategies lead to smooth collaboration between teams and departments so that there’s less missed communication and crossed wires.
• Sales ops teams work to identify successful sales processes to turn them into company-wide best practices that improve productivity and profitability.

Sales operations vs. sales enablement: What’s the difference?

Sales operations and sales enablement may sound interchangeable. They’re both focused on improving sales efficiency, but through different methods and practices. Sales ops involves data analysis and the systematic optimization of sales processes, while sales enablement is about directly empowering sales reps with the tools, training, and content they need. The table below provides a side-by-side breakdown of their differences.

What are the different roles in a sales operations team?

The size of your sales ops team will depend on your business goals and how big your existing team is. You can have a sales operations team with dozens of employees, or just one person to oversee it all if you’re a small business. When growing out your sales ops team, consider building responsibilities around the roles below.

• Vice president or director of sales operations: Leads the sales ops team and builds strategies to increase sales productivity.
• Sales operations manager: Leads by turning S&OP strategy into daily processes by creating a plan and building best practices for sales reps.
• Sales operations specialist: Works on coordinating, organizing, and supporting sales reps with resources like contracts, cross-departmental communication, and scheduling.
• Sales operations analyst: This role focuses on data and relies on software like CRMs to identify trends, forecast sales, and recommend improvements and automations.
• Sales operations representative: Entry-level role that works on daily tasks and offers administrative support by handling tasks like reports, data entry, and progress tracking.

Sales operations strategies: How to build a strong sales operations plan

It’s the job of the sales ops team to innovate and help the front line step up their game. That’s a big job, but implementing established best practices can help break the process down into a manageable plan.

1. Create a mission statement

The sales ops team should start by defining their mission and purpose, making sure that it aligns with the sales team and distributing it company-wide. In the mission statement, avoid vague statements in favor of concrete ones that outline the “how” of achieving each goal, like “Automate more operational tasks to free up time in the case queue.”

2. Foster collaboration

Consistent communication between sales ops and the sales, marketing, and sales enablement teams is crucial to keeping a sales operations team running smoothly and avoiding repetitive work. A weekly meeting between the team leaders to review changes and maintain alignment will help teams collaborate seamlessly.

3. Establish a clear leadership structure

Someone high-level, like a director or vice president, should lead the sales operations team and report to the C-suite. This establishes a clear chain of command and ensures sales ops has the authority to implement changes.

4. Shadow sales team members

Having sales operations staff work closely with people on the sales team will give them first-hand experience with daily duties and challenges. This helps them better guide overall sales strategy while forming deeper connections between teams.

5. Be smart about the tools you choose

Be selective and strategic about where to apply technology, opting for tools that solve problems or fill needs over adding complexity. One multi-functional tool, such an AI-powered CRM platform like monday CRM, is better than a dozen separate programs that your team has to learn to use.

6. Stay innovative

The sales operations team should continually monitor what’s working and what can be improved, adopting new technology or policies that make sense. That said, this needs to be done at an appropriate pace since your sales team won’t get much done if they need to be trained every week.

Measuring success: Important KPIs and metrics to track for sales operations

Sales ops teams can be costly and resource-intensive, which is why it’s essential to keep tabs on how they’re impacting sales efficiency. The metrics and KPIs below are a good starting point for measuring how successful your sales operations are overall.

• Sales cycle length: A shorter sales cycle shows that sales ops targeted inefficiencies and implemented the right solutions
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Determines if new S&OP initiatives brought down the cost of acquiring new customers
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): A high CLV shows that customers are satisfied and is a good indicator of sustainable business growth
• Churn rate: Demonstrates if a sales team is nurturing existing customers so that sales ops teams can focus on strategies to better engage clients
• Win rate: Find out how effective your sales team is so you can start uncovering areas for improvement
• Sales team turnover: Part of sales operations is determining if your sales team is happy, so this is an essential metric to track alongside customer-focused ones
• Lead conversion rate: Understand how effective your sales team is in the conversion stages
• Forecast accuracy: Verify if there are discrepancies in your forecasting or if the process is prone to error
• Close rate: Provides a big-picture view of the overall performance of your sales team
• Sales pipeline velocity: Learn where sales are stalling and implement plans to close deals quicker by understanding how quickly deals move through the pipeline
• Average lead response time: Determine how long it takes for reps to reply to clients so that sales ops teams can implement new technologies or automations if needed

Upgrade sales operations planning with monday CRM

Both sales agents and sales operations teams can use a CRM system to improve collaboration and communication. Having a unified platform that operates a single source of truth for both teams, or even additional departments, makes it simpler to improve operations across the board. Software like monday CRM helps sales operations teams create data-based sales plans that sales agents can implement in their daily work through trackable tasks.

To take your strategies even further, monday CRM is equipped with advanced artificial intelligence for sales that has the power to completely change your operations. According to research by Gartner, sales teams that use AI are 3.7x more likely to reach sales quotas. With the platform’s built-in AI features, teams can automate sales workflows with no-code AI-powered automations, generate sales content in a flash, and get predictive insights to power strategic decision-making. The combination of advanced technology with AI-led automation that teams get from a platform like monday CRM creates a comprehensive solution that drives strategic growth and delivers measurable results across an entire organization.

Here’s a closer look at some of the features that allow sales operations teams to increase productivity with monday CRM.

Get actionable AI-powered insights

With monday CRM’s AI data analytics, teams get instantly generated reports that assess real-time performance along with dashboards to track sales progress. Thanks to AI, teams can identify patterns and trends that would otherwise go unnoticed, automatically highlighting opportunities for improvement to optimize sales strategies.

Level up revenue teams with monday sidekick

Make it easier for sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing deals with monday sidekick, a built-in AI digital worker. Operating as an autonomous agent, monday sidekick can help sales reps execute strategies by writing emails, creating sales pitches, or generating sales reports through simple natural language prompts.

Build data-based plans with sales forecasting

Get accurate predictive data with monday CRM’s sales forecasting, boosted by AI. Our State of sales technology 2025 report shows that 82% of respondents use AI to boost productivity, with sales forecasting being one of the primary applications. Teams that employ software with AI-powered sales forecasting features, like monday CRM, can benefit from accurate projections based and smart suggestions to course correct when needed.

Create effective sales processes with AI automations

Whether managing incoming leads or summarizing meetings, teams can create custom AI-powered automations in an instant. AI can help teams automate lead qualification, scoring, and routing to make lead management simpler, auto-summarize meetings and long email chains, create tasks from the key takeaways, and categorize tasks based on priority level.

5 best practices for great sales operations teams

Sales ops teams have a lot on their plate. There are countless processes and responsibilities to monitor and plan for, which can make it easy for work to get disorganized if you’re not careful. Here are a few key tips and best practices teams can implement to make S&OP planning a little smoother.

1. Decide which metrics to focus on

There are a lot of different metrics and KPIs that sales ops teams can track, as we saw earlier. Measuring success doesn’t always mean tracking endless metrics, but rather honing in on the ones your team needs to work on most based on short and long-term sales goals.

2. Keep records of plans and strategies

It’s likely that your early sales operations plan won’t run as smoothly as you wanted, and that’s ok. For sales ops teams to succeed, they need to constantly improve strategies using tangible data, so make sure you have a system in place to keep records of previous plans to make it easier to track improvements and changes over time.

3. Align teams with a mission statement

If your company doesn’t have a mission statement yet, it’s time to make one before getting started on any sales strategy. A mission statement will help align different teams with sales ops by giving everyone a clear objective to work towards. The mission statement should be clear, brief, and straight to the point.

4. Use the right tools to help plan

When forming your sales ops team, you also want to consider which tools your team will need most. Before adopting dozens of new technologies, focus on the ones that have the most wide-reaching uses, such as a CRM, sales enablement technology, or analytics tools.

5. Focus on sales process automation

When looking for ways to make sales operations more efficient, start by breaking down which processes can be automated. For example, you can automate lead qualification with a smart AI-powered CRM so that sales reps don’t waste time manually combing through leads to decide which ones to focus on.

What’s next for sales operations?

Looking ahead to emerging trends, AI in sales operations will continue to leave its mark on how teams analyze data, predict sales, and automate processes. In the future, we’re likely to see deeper integration of predictive analytics, conversational AI, and hyper-personalization that will help sales ops teams create more complex, data-driven strategies. For teams to start leveraging these powerful technologies, it’s more important than ever to integrate comprehensive platforms like monday CRM. Featuring an intuitive interface that’s easy to use and advanced AI capabilities, monday CRM offers the right combination of tools to give sales operations teams the foundation they need to succeed.