Operations, or ops, is a rapidly changing field, and many organizations are unsure whether they need to build an ops team. With go-to-market teams being increasingly dependent on various systems to perform specialized tasks, it’s important to have the right operational support to make the most of those tools.
So how do you know if building an ops team is right for you? First, let’s define the role of ops.
What is operations?
At a high level, ops teams break down silos so that sales, marketing, and customer success teams can operate more efficiently and generate more revenue. From a more granular perspective, they bring together the systems, processes, and techniques that enable go-to-market teams to be more efficient and effective.
Building an operations team at your organization ensures that you optimize the investment you make in your tech stack and you set your teams up for success. Companies that invest in aligning go-to-market teams are able to grow 12 to 15 times faster than their peers.
So does creating an ops team make sense for your organization? Here are some scenarios to help you evaluate whether you need to build an ops team.
Sales teams are spending time duplicating work across systems
Your sales teams are trying to meet their quotas, so when systems don’t work properly or don’t integrate together, they create their own workarounds. It’s a common problem, considering 49% of businesses say they have systems that don’t integrate. Creating workarounds eats into time that sales reps should spend talking to leads. And as we all know, any workaround can lead to data inaccuracies across your disparate systems.
But without someone dedicated to addressing those system errors, the status quo will continue. An ops team can identify ways for systems to work more seamlessly and alleviate sales from the burden of creating their own workarounds.
You’ve got way too many system admins
Sometimes the number of system admins just gets away from you. In the worst-case scenario, you’ve got more system admins than actual salespeople. How does a company get to that point? By not having a bird’s-eye view on the entire operation.
Admins are added for specialized purposes and each have their own, sometimes competing, needs and preferences. Building an ops team gives clear ownership over your systems to a specific group of people, so you can see which other admins are really needed. Once you have clear accountability, the ops team can configure your tech stack to meet the diverse needs of users and the organization as a whole.
No one is responsible for sales admin
Sales professionals spend more than one-fourth of their time on internal administrative activities. That means each member of your team is spending more than two hours each day on data entry, reporting, and processing paperwork. These are typically tasks that can be automated or streamlined. But salespeople don’t need to waste any more time trying to find and implement the tools and processes they need to be more productive.
That’s what ops teams do. They understand the technology landscape, and they have a comprehensive perspective of how customers move through the entire buying journey. They don’t just relieve the sales team of time-wasting tasks, they set up scalable processes and systems that make the department more efficient and effective as a whole.
You’re implementing cross-functional programs
Implementing customer marketing strategies or launching a new product can be the ultimate test of how well you break down silos at your organization. The process often reveals communication gaps, variations in working styles, and the disparateness of your systems. These initiatives require collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success who all need data and tasks to flow easily between groups.
That puts your tech stack front and center. Even if everyone is communicating well and gelling together as a group, each team will have their head down, in the weeds of their day-to-day tasks. An operations team proactively addresses system and process issues and makes sure they’re working with the most accurate, up-to-date data.
Drive better outcomes with an ops team
There’s no doubt that technology makes today’s revenue teams smarter and more efficient. But the sheer volume of tools and data available today demands proactive, ongoing management to prevent teams from drowning in workarounds and errors.
Sonar helps ops teams execute change management across the entire organization by working from a single source of truth. Schedule a demo to see how it works.