The sales operations function went through dynamic changes this past year. Economic uncertainties in 2023 killed the “growth at all costs” model.
In 2024, budgets will be tighter, talent scarce and selling more challenging. All these challenges make one thing clear – Delighting customers at every turn is what matters.
If we walk backwards from this larger goal, it requires a maniacal focus on the customer. What do customers really need? How can they be assisted? How can they be helped with making confident purchase decisions without seeming pushy?
To achieve this, sales teams have to meet customers where they are, at the right time. And act as their trusted advisors.
Having complete visibility into the customer journey from lead to cash (to renewal and expansion) is critical to survive what lies ahead. The new mantra for sales operations in 2024 will be to “build a seamless customer journey.”
This article will cover the top sales operations trends that 2024 can expect. It’s vastly different from the trends we saw last year. Which is a testament to the fact how fast things are changing in the B2B sales world.
What is Sales Operations or SalesOps?
Sales Operations refers to the function, role, activities or processes within a sales organization that help sales reps sell faster and better.
This department is responsible for reducing frictions within the sales process. It enables reps to achieve higher win rates in a predictable and repeatable manner.
The sales operations function strategizes on ways that can help sales reps focus on tasks that contribute to revenue. This includes implementing sales training, investing in tools and technology that eliminate roadblocks in selling, or creating processes that optimize the sales process for all reps.
The ultimate goal of a sales operations function is to create a sales engine that runs smoothly.
The sales operations function has a direct impact on business revenue. This department continues to be a strategic component of an organization’s structure.
Top Trends To Expect in Sales Operations in 2024
B2B sales has been evolving at a rapidly fast pace, making traditional processes of operations obsolete.
Some of the biggest challenges facing sales operations today include:
- 72% of B2B buyers demand a rep-free experience.
- 47% sellers say their sales tech stack does not boost their productivity or improves results.
- Close to half of operations professionals say that processes within their companies are only moderately data-driven or not data-driven at all.
- The confidence of operations professionals dipped over the last two years.
As companies hold back on investments because of the downturn, sales leaders will have to devise new ways to survive and sustain in 2024. This puts sales operations in a unique position to help organizations navigate these new challenges.
By embracing innovation and pivoting at the right time, sales operations leaders can provide some much needed relief in the tough months that await.
They can do this by staying on top of these trends that demand attention:
1. Reduce Technology Overwhelm Among Sellers
2023 was the year of AI. The space of sales technology was already an exhausted field, and artificial intelligence tools just got added to the mix in 2023.
But too many tools also cause overwhelm among salespeople.
As high as 49% of sellers feel overwhelmed by the tech they are required to use for their jobs. This reduces the likelihood to attain quota by 43%.
More tools in the tech stack add the burden of deployment, management and adoption. The goal for sales leaders is to evaluate what they have, consolidate wherever they can and optimize their tech stacks to improve productivity and execution across every role.
Bloated tech stacks can also create many problems in disguise and add to a lot of hidden costs such as cost of integrating, tool fatigue, cost of siloed data and much more.
Which is why 2024 will be the year of tech stack consolidation.
Tech stack consolidation is the process of reducing the number of tools in a company’s tech stack by merging functionalities into lesser and more exhaustive platforms.
The goal of consolidation is not to knock down all of the investments in point solutions that already exist. It demands a structured approach in analyzing which tools offer real value for sales teams. And eliminate tools that don’t add any merit to their day to day workflows.
Sales leaders will have to do a cross-functional exercise to identify what their top use cases are for sales operations. And lay down a complete technology roadmap against these use cases.
Teams that use tech stack that enable the full sales motion, from creating pipeline to closing deals are more likely to meet their revenue goals.
A lean and fully capable sales tech stack is a reality as companies look to consolidate vendors while retaining the features and capability of their previous array of point solutions.
If you are also looking to consolidate your sales tech stack in 2024, here’s an evaluation framework to get started on.
2. Strategic Multithreading Will Become a Competitive Differentiator
B2B buying has changed drastically over the last few years. Relying on decade old strategies to close deals do not appeal to the modern buyer. Especially when buying is no longer a linear process or a one person event.
From an average of 6.8 decision makers in every B2B purchase, the number has now gone up to 14. And most of these contacts never make it to the CRM. As they can be from other departments within the company calling the shots in the background.
This is where strategic multithreading comes into the picture. Knowing exactly how many people are involved in a deal and having complete visibility into their needs, aspirations and expectations are vital for sales people to know.
This kind of relationship intelligence enables reps to form relationships with multiple stakeholders on the buying committee of an account. And they have to do it in a strategic manner. Having access to the list of contacts that might be influencing a deal will be a saviour for sales teams in 2024.
More than eight in 10 sellers (81%) say they have had deals lost or stalled due to a key stakeholder leaving a client or prospect company.
Lack of strategic multithreading also emerged as a top reason why sales teams lose deals in our survey. Not having strong relationships with all of the key players within the buying committee can be a big risk.
More than eight in 10 sellers (81%) say they have had deals lost or stalled in the past 12 months due to a key stakeholder leaving a client or prospect company.
With multithreading, even if the primary stakeholder quits the organization, reps can capitalize on the relationships they have with the rest of the stakeholders within that account. And always be on top of executive movements or when a new person gets introduced to a deal.
Having relationships with multiple members of the buying committee gives a more holistic view of the problems buyers face. It can potentially increase the budget of buyers with buy-in from multiple stakeholders in the company.
This becomes especially more important in an economy sailing through choppy waters, where customer retention and engagement is top priority.
Multithreading will become important as having access to influencers, champions, gatekeepers, decision makers, economic buyers, and all other members of an ever increasing buying committee will make or break opportunities to solve customer problems.
3. Investing in AI Will Help Sellers Win More Deals
There is no doubt about the fact that AI tools in sales tech help improve sales productivity and close deals.
81% of salespeople agree that AI tools help them save time on manual tasks, and make them more efficient.
88% of Chief Sales Officers (CSOs) had already invested in or were considering investing in AI analytics tools and technologies. But without having a proper AI strategy in place and the plethora of options out there, it’s getting harder for SalesOps leaders to assess where to invest.
At the same time, CSOs who don’t invest in AI are missing opportunities to increase efficiency and improve customer engagement.
With a shrinking window of opportunity for sellers to engage with buyers, improving the effectiveness of sales becomes even more crucial. And AI can aid this by helping free up time for sales teams to deal with delicate customer cases that require acute problem solving skills, empathy and creativity.
Some top use cases for AI can include:
- Automating manual tasks for sales teams such as manual data entry of CRM
- Automating contact and activity data capture into CRM systems
- Identify risks in forecasting
- Recommend which sales lead to prioritize
- Provide insights about next-best action to move a deal towards closure
The investment in AI tech will continue to see an upward trend in 2024. But the approach will be more strategic as budget cuts are the norm right now.
Organizations will select use cases for AI in their sales processes by focusing on how to improve buyer engagement, build confidence around seller funnels, activities and deals.
We would like our sellers to spend more time interacting with customers and do less busy work in the background. We’re investing in enablement to direct them to the next opportunity, but we’re also trying to free them from administrative work by using automation as much as possible. Ideally, sellers won’t even notice the change. They just notice that they are spending less time doing non-value add activities and more time selling, building relationships, and explaining options to overwhelmed customers. I think that’s where we want the sellers to excel.
TOBIAS WALDECK SERVES AS VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES AND MARKETING NORTH AMERICA FOR DAIMLER TRUCK FINANCIAL SERVICES.
4. Placing Clean Data at the Center of Operations
Sales operations leaders are in a unique position to drive efficiency in 2024 by building the tech stack of the future. According to LinkedIn’s State of SalesOps Report, sales intelligence and CRM tools are the key building blocks of a modern sales tech stack.
But bad data is a huge problem. Poor quality data has been cited as one of the biggest barriers to the success of data analytics by 44% of sales leaders.
Critical data in systems like CRM are mostly missing, incomplete or duplicated. Almost half of sellers (45%) say their biggest data challenge is incomplete data. Unreliable data continues to sit in core systems like CRM.
Organizations today are working in hybrid environments. They are using multiple tools and communication channels. This leads to scattered data and disconnected systems across distributed teams.
Sales Operations teams are struggling to tie all of this together and fix the systems to surface the insights they need to help drive timely business decisions. And data inefficiencies are making companies lose as high as 30% of their annual revenue.
Sadly, most companies don’t even know of these hidden costs that bad data brings with it. Nearly 60% of companies don’t know how much bad data costs their businesses because they don’t measure it in the first place.
This is why clean data will be a top priority for sales operations in 2024. Sales leaders will look inwards at their own data and revenue systems and maintain its hygiene through solutions like automation and enrichment.
Clean and connected data can provide visibility into insights such as:
- Where are your reps spending time? Are they chasing the right deals?
- Are your Customer success team members meeting your top customers frequently?
- Are you losing more deals selling to technical buyers vs economic buyers?
- Is your sales team spending more time on low-margin customers?
- Are you reps ramping fast enough and enabling you to have a better payback period?
- Which stages are slowing down your revenue generation?
- Are your reps working on the hot leads that marketing generated?
- When was the last time your rep touched the committed deal this month?
Finding answers to such critical business questions needs cleaner data in systems like CRM. This should be done with a focus of mapping the entire sales funnel and capturing all your revenue facing activities and touch points holistically and reliably.
Organizations can no longer afford to work with bad data in 2024.
Discover the granular insights your sales team needs to win more deals!
5. Unified Data to Drive Actionable Revenue Insights
A critical challenge facing senior sales leadership is the identification of actionable insights from analytics on seller performance. This is a concern voiced by 60% of sales leaders according to Gartner. Mere access to dashboards without actionable strategies to enhance seller performance is no longer viable.
Reflecting on the analytics employed by sales organizations in the past year, approximately 60% of sales leaders acknowledge that these analytics fell short of expectations. Consequently, there is a pressing need to shift focus towards unifying unstructured data throughout the customer journey, aiming for insights that drive high-impact decisions.
This evolution involves moving beyond merely reporting data and transitioning towards driving actionability from the data. The goal is to empower leaders to make confident decisions even in the face of uncertainty, revealing insights rather than just presenting information.
However, a current dilemma exists with a growing demand for insights. Commercial leaders seek deeper insights at the seller level to enhance team performance, yet managers grapple with uncertainty regarding which analytics to employ for specific use cases.
To address this, certain challenges need to be overcome:
- Break Legacy Silos: Correlate information and signals from previously siloed systems to prevent the loss of critical insights.
- Poor Data Governance: While enterprise data governance may exist, it often fails to meet the specific needs of sales, resulting in limited return on investment (ROI) from analytics.
- Quality Over Quantity: The emphasis should not solely be on having copious amounts of data but rather on the qualitative nature of the data for making informed business decisions. This shift is only possible in an organization that prioritizes a data-driven culture.
A 360-degree view of the revenue funnel and its value becomes evident when it transforms data into actionable insights related to customers, markets, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Tighter alignment between all revenue functions like sales, marketing and customer success can connect the dots between various data sources, establishing processes, systems, and tools to extract actionable insights.
By encouraging teams to use clean and contextual data for decision-making, alignment contributes to the creation of organized ownership of data and seamless go-to-market (GTM) integration.
In conclusion, for sales organizations to thrive in 2024, investing in clean data will be imperative.
Revenue-Driving Functions Will Pave the Way
Organizations will address the digital transformation and aim to establish a holistic, end-to-end approach to managing the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle. As a result, all operations will eventually come under one single roof called revenue operations.
Revenue operations (RevOps) is a function responsible for operations across all revenue-generating teams – sales, marketing and customer success. RevOps does all that SalesOps does.
Additionally, it looks over revenue generating functions like marketing and customer success. It aims to keep the GTM function aligned.
Deploying a RevOps strategy can have massive gains for for organizations, such as:
- 100% to 200% increases in digital marketing ROI
- 10% to 20% increases in sales productivity
- 10% increases in lead acceptance
- 15% to 20% increases in internal customer satisfaction
- 30% reduction in GTM expenses
More than 90% of operations leaders say their organization has some form of revenue operations capability, and 40% of those organizations have already implemented a centralized revenue operations function.
RevOps will tie all customer-facing operations like sales, marketing and customer success together and create a single-source of truth for them.
In order to serve the modern B2B customer, organizations need to know their unique pain points and have thorough knowledge of the stage they are at in their buying journey.
Fulfilling the needs of this customer requires sales, marketing and customer success to be aligned and work towards common goals.
RevOps teams will create this opportunity where sales ops, marketing ops and customer ops can have complete visibility into the buyer’s digital journey.
RevOps will also be responsible for investment in technology and tools that sales ops can use to develop realistic quotas and enhance seller productivity.
If you’re interested in knowing more about what’s happening in the sales operations space, subscribe to our podcast – The Revenue Lounge where we interview some phenomenal Operations leaders and ask them their secrets to running a powerful revenue engine.
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