I won’t blame you for asking that question really (that’s presuming you did). My own parents confuse my work to that of a Sales guy after years of working in the function.

For that matter SalesOps is not a new function and yet it is just seeing the light of the day – especially outside of the Silicon Valley. Originally established by Xerox Corp. in 70s, the function is critical to any startup that has raised first round of funding and needs to make data-driven sales decisions.

To put it very simply, the below image is pretty representational of what is SalesOps for all the Game of Thrones fans out there.

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The gist of what is SalesOps really lies in “Why do you require SalesOps?”.

If your sales rep ‘has a hunch’ that she will close the deal this quarter, you need SalesOps. Hunch is not scalable.

If you have no idea on what % of your deals were lost to pricing to your largest competitor last fiscal, you need SalesOps. A good strategy is built on the availability of data patterns. No data – no patterns – no strategy.

If you have no idea what should be your pipeline volume to close the quota for the next quarter, you need SalesOps. Nobody closes every deal in their pipeline – then knowing how much pipeline is needed is what really feeds into your FY goal.

Those are pretty high-level reasons on why you need SalesOps: to make data-driven decisions, to have a proactive function that can build patterns to forecast your sales.

SalesOps is your sailor aboard the Titanic who first sighted the iceberg ahead to alarm rest of the crew of the impending disaster – that’s being proactive.

And I truly believe data analysis is the only way to time-travel in a business and with great sales data comes great responsibility and SalesOps is your friendly neighbourhood analyst.

In the upcoming blogs, we will cover finer nuances of the function in detail. For now you will want to check if you have been closing deals in the blind or hunch with no objective metric to be sure.