When businesses decide to move from a sales ops mindset to a revenue operations mindset, it’s because they recognize that their revenue strategy is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps the sales team is making consequential decisions without coordinating with marketing and product development first. Or perhaps the organization is sacrificing long-term revenue gains to meet short-term sales quotas.
No matter what the motivation is, an intent to embrace RevoOps does not automatically translate to RevOps success. That’s because 52% of all people working in RevOps come from a sales background, according to industry research by Revenue Operations Alliance. In other words, there’s a pervasive sales ops bias among the people who are tasked with implementing RevOps. As a result, even businesses with the best of intentions can still end up defaulting to a sales ops mindset over the long term.
For annual territory planning, the consequences of a sales ops bias are enormous. A sales ops mindset leads to inefficiencies, imbalances, and unfairness in territory assignments, and frustration among rank-and-file sales team members.
By contrast, a RevOps mindset puts organizations on a path to establishing optimized territories and fostering productive connections and collaborations among all of the teams that contribute to revenue generation.
Let’s explore four specific strategies for not getting trapped in a sales ops mindset when doing territory planning:
1. Don’t let the sales team dominate the planning process
Because territory planning most directly affects sales teams, salespeople tend to be the most vocal during the territory planning process. Hence, businesses that are committed to adopting a RevOps mindset need to push back on the sales team’s wants and demands during territory planning.
Instead, the business should proactively work to balance the sales team’s goals and priorities with those of marketing, customer support, customer experience, product development, and business development. All of these teams, when they’re putting their heads together, can develop informed, long-term revenue strategies optimized for the entire organization. The more that a business involves all relevant teams in revenue strategy, the less dominance the sales team can exert.
Moreover, this collaboration ensures departments across the organization are aware of and fully able to weigh in on how one team’s revenue-related actions may have impacts on other parts of the organization.
2. Focus on strategy instead of tactical execution
Sales ops tends to focus on short-term actions to meet quotas. Unfortunately, this thinking tends to come at the expense of strategic planning. The reality is that sales has a vested interest in achieving the monthly or quarterly sales targets that have been put in front of them. By contrast, RevOps requires businesses to prioritize the long-term, strategic revenue goals of the entire organization – and not allow short-term sales goals to become a roadblock to optimizing the organization’s revenue strategy. Moreover, RevOps brings to the table every team that should be helping to shape the organization’s long-term revenue strategy. When these teams engage in holistic, forward-thinking revenue planning, they’re effectively building a solid foundation for effective territory planning.
3. Engage in revenue planning, not sales forecasting
The most basic purpose of sales forecasting is to develop accurate estimates of future sales. To derive these estimates, sales teams rely disproportionately on their own historical sales data and their own intuition – in other words, limited information that may turn out to be completely wrong.
Consequently, when businesses use these sales forecasts as the basis for territory planning, the quality and fairness of their territory-related decisions tend to suffer. By contrast, RevOps calls on businesses to engage in holistic, long-term revenue planning.
With revenue planning, businesses consider multiple types of data from across the organization, including marketing campaigns, customer success initiatives, and product development pipelines – in addition to sales data. As a result, instead of a myopic, limited view of future sales, revenue planning gives businesses a more in-depth, comprehensive view of the future – one that is balanced, insightful and reliable.
4. Put a RevOps leader in charge of sales ops
For a RevOps mindset to catch on in an organization, RevOps leaders cannot simply be one of many decision-makers at the table – especially not if the table is dominated by sales leaders. Rather, RevOps leaders should be put in charge of sales ops. With this arrangement, RevOps leaders receive and consider input from sales ops, but simultaneously also are integrating input from marketing, customer experience and so forth. Ultimately, effective territory planning is wholly dependent on a RevOps leader who can adeptly solicit and integrate revenue strategy insights from across the organization.
A RevOps mindset is the foundation of effective territory planning, yet most businesses face a pervasive sales bias in their organization that effectively puts RevOps at risk of becoming sales ops in disguise. To overcome this bias and engage in optimized, data-driven territory planning, businesses should avoid letting the sales team dominate the planning process, focus on strategy instead of tactical execution, engage in revenue planning instead of sales forecasting, and appoint a RevOps leader to be over sales ops.
Fullcast specializes in enabling optimized territory planning with our industry-leading RevOps Go-to-Market Cloud platform. This comprehensive solution integrates territory, quota, capacity, and coverage assignments, ensuring that all teams involved in revenue planning can collaborate and help shape a unified, visionary revenue strategy.
To learn more about how Fullcast prevents organizations from getting stuck in a sales ops mindset, please visit https://www.fullcast.com/product/plan-collaborate/.
