Sales operations is a set of business activities and processes that help a sales organization run effectively, efficiently and in support of business strategies and objectives. Sales operations may also be referred to as
sales, sales support, or
business operations
Business operations is the ''harvesting'' of value from assets owned by a business. Assets can be either ''physical'' or '' intangible''. An example of value derived from a physical asset, like a building, is rent. An example of value derived fro ...
.
Categories
The set of sales operations activities vary from company to company but often include these five categories:<
Sales force enablement
* Sales process development
* Sales process adoption and compliance
* Sales development
* Sales training
* Sales force communications management
Business analytics
* Sales metrics
* Sales forecasting
Sales administration
* Proposal/contract development
* Vendor selection and management
* Planning process stewardship
Attainment planning
* Incentive sales compensation plan design
* GTM strategy alignment with roles and components
* Territory analysis and definition
* Goal setting
Sales operations mandate and design
* Chief of staff to the sales organization
* Stewardship of sales force capacity
* Initiative change management
* Sales operations team design
* Sales operations talent management
The sales operations team members are often liaisons for sales to other parts of the organisation such as
finance
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...
,
marketing,
legal,
QA and
IT departments. They represent the needs of sales in meetings and cross-functional projects.
More and more companies are forming sales operations departments within their organizations and, per the sales operations excellence center, sales operations is an established process and considered to be vital contributor to business operations and accounting functions.
Sales operation analysts as a department usually have sales analysts who work directly under them, supplying them with the data needed to make decisions. These decisions can transform a fragmented and stilted model into a customer-adaptive enterprise.
Nowadays, many businesses use internet tools to improve sales function.
Sales target
A sales target is the minimum sales goal for a set time span. A sales target may be a minimum amount of value (monetary) or product sold (volume). Sales targets may also be for sales activities, such as number of calls per day.
Management usually sets the sales targets and the
sales territory. The time span could be set for the day, week, month,
fiscal quarter or year.
Sales territory
A
sales territory is usually the customer group or geographical area assigned to an individual salesperson or a sales team. The geographical area may also be assigned to a
franchisee,
distributor, or
agent. A territory may also be assigned by industry verticals, such as all retailers or all wholesalers in a geographical area. A sales territory may be as large as a
continent,
country,
state or
province, or as small as a
precinct
Precinct may refer to:
* An electoral precinct
* A police precinct
* A religious precinct
* A shopping precinct or shopping mall
** A Pedestrian zone
Places
* A neighborhood, in Australia
* A unit of public housing in Singapore
* A former elect ...
,
suburb
A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area, which may include commercial and mixed-use, that is primarily a residential area. A suburb can exist either as part of a larger city/urban area or as a separate ...
,
town or
city
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...
. Generally, a sales manager will assign a sales territory based on the territories of the sales resources reporting to him/her.
Sales forecasting
Sales
forecasting uses past sales figures to predict the short-term or long-term future performance to enable sound
financial planning. Historical sales and/or economic data is often used to improve the forecast of sales.
For shops and stores,
market research may yield the following indicators for deriving initial forecasts:
Three Methods Of Sales Forecasting - Sales Forecasting By Multiple Methods Is Most Accurate
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* average sales volume per unit area for similar shops in similar locations of similar size
* number of consumers or consumer households in appropriate vicinity of the store and their annual expenses on the product in question
See also
{{Wiktionary, sale
* Choice architecture
* Customer relationship management
* Customer service
* Demand forecasting
Demand forecasting is known as the process of making future estimations in relation to customer demand over a specific period. Generally, demand forecasting will consider historical data and other analytical information to produce the most accurat ...
* Point of sale
The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place at which a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice f ...
* Retailing
Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...
* Sales (accounting)
* Sales incentive plan
* Sales management
* Sales process engineering
* Sales promotion
* Sales territory
* Sales variance Sales variance is the difference between actual sales and budgeted sales. It is used to measure the performance of a sales function, and/or analyze business results to better understand market
Market is a term used to describe concepts such as:
*M ...
* Selling
* Trade
* Transaction
Transaction or transactional may refer to:
Commerce
* Financial transaction, an agreement, communication, or movement carried out between a buyer and a seller to exchange an asset for payment
*Debits and credits in a Double-entry bookkeeping sys ...
References
Business terms
Sales
Selling techniques