How the Best Sales Operations Teams

Navigate the Digital Cosmos

Leading commercial operations teams emphasize
digital tools that help frontline reps.

By Chris Dent, Greg Callahan and Joost Vasters

Chris Dent is a principal, Greg Callahan is a partner and Joost Vasters
is a principal with Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing
practice. They are based, respectively, in Chicago, Boston and Amsterdam.

Copyright © 2019 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

 How the Best Sales Operations Teams Navigate the Digital Cosmos

At a Glance

Successful sales efforts today hinge on a mastery of digital tools—especially digital infrastructure,
applications and data analytics.

Bain’s survey finds that high-growth companies build more effective data and analytics capabili-
ties and that they deploy 25% more digital tools with wider adoption than low-growth companies.

The leading companies are twice as likely to maintain a best-in-class digital infrastructure.

Their commercial operations groups have shifted their focus from tracking selling and pipeline
activity to reducing the administrative burden on the front line and empowering reps to sell
more effectively.

Sales performance management tools have proliferated (more than 7,000 sales and marketing soft-
ware applications by one recent count) to the point at which sales organizations struggle to separate
the hype from proven value. Too many sales organizations go full steam ahead, acquiring good tools
only to find that they haven’t built the infrastructure to wring out the tools’ value. Or worse, companies
assemble tracking tools that increase the administrative burden on sales representatives, forcing them to
spend less time in front of their customers. On the flip side, some sales organizations that are skeptical
of new tools miss the opportunity to deploy their sales teams more efficiently at higher-quality prospects.

This predicament is more than an annoyance. Successful sales efforts today hinge on digital tools—
maintaining a robust digital infrastructure, deploying the right applications and mining digital data
to bring insights to the field are all crucial ingredients. High-performing sales organizations supported
by strong “commercial operations” teams (sales operations teams with a broader, more strategic man-
date) excel in using digital technologies and often function as the stewards and power users of these
technologies.

Bain & Company and Dynata research on 200 business-to-business (B2B) companies in the US, combined
with our experience working with hundreds of sales organizations, find that 14 capabilities underpin the
commercial operations group (see Figure 1). Furthermore, the leading companies (defined as the top 15% in
revenue and market share growth over the past two years) build and maintain more effective data and ana-
lytics capabilities, and they deploy 25% more digital tools with wider adoption than the laggard companies
(defined as the bottom 15% in revenue and market share growth over the past two years) do. Let’s look at
those digital capabilities in more detail.

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 How the Best Sales Operations Teams Navigate the Digital Cosmos

Figure 1: These 14 capabilities underpin sales and marketing effectiveness

Commercial strategy and planning

Market Go-to-market Customer

opportunity Territory and Incentives and Sales finance
strategy and experience
definition account planning goal setting and budgeting
design and loyalty

Sales and marketing execution

Sales and marketing insights Pipeline and forecast support Pricing and sales cycle support

Talent and enablement

Talent strategy and recruiting Sales enablement and training

Data infrastructure, applications and analytics

Data infrastructure Core commercial applications Data science and analytics

Source: Bain & Company

Data infrastructure
The leading companies are twice as likely to maintain a best-in-class digital infrastructure (the architec-
ture and management of core customer, sales and market data) relative to companies with flat revenue
and market share. Leaders have deliberately avoided storing customer and prospect data in multiple
places because data silos impede data flow and reliability—especially when a company is trying to use
advanced analytics. One medical technology company dealt with this problem by creating a master data
management team to oversee customer data quality, stewardship and use by the commercial organiza-
tion. Having a dedicated team laid the foundation for the company to make better use of its data.

Core commercial applications

Leaders are also twice as likely to curate a best-in-class digital application stack, which is built around
bedrock systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, business intelligence
tools and marketing automation platforms. When combined with the improved data infrastructure, a
smart deployment of digital tools contributes to higher margin and share growth.

While well intentioned, the trend of tracking selling and pipeline activity in ever-greater detail has
gone too far in many cases, and leading organizations are now trying to simplify and automate the

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 How the Best Sales Operations Teams Navigate the Digital Cosmos

mountain of call logs, account status updates, sales forecasts and other administrative activities that
burden the salesforce. They focus disproportionately more on deploying tools that help sales repre-
sentatives—including configure, price, quote platforms; advanced proposal tools; and sales training
technology. Many of these tools help to increase win rates or to free up reps from administrative tasks
so that they can spend more time selling.

One technology company, for instance, launched new coaching and sales enablement platforms, in-
cluding a digital knowledge management system (as part of its CRM) to prescribe the next best actions
for reps. Digital market mapping prioritized where to deploy resources to ensure that the salesforce
targeted the highest-value customer. A digital account planning tool focused account teams on the
highest-priority actions. As a result, the company expanded the time that reps spend actually selling
by roughly half, improved the overall win rate by about 60% and almost halved the ramp-up time for
new hires.

By contrast, the laggards focus more on maximizing their use of CRM because they are still trying to
bring their core commercial applications up to an acceptable level (see Figure 2).

Another point of distinction is that, after adopting a digital tool, leaders devote sufficient resources to-
ward reinforcing how to use it effectively. Companies too often give short shrift to the extended process
of adoption, which is why they don’t get the full value out of their digital investments.

Figure 2: Laggard organizations are trying to raise their data infrastructure to an acceptable level,
while winners focus on empowering the front line
Technologies in which winning organizations
are investing disproportionately
Customer
High relationship
management
Configure, price, quote

Business intelligence

Proposal tools
Share of
companies Sales training technology
deploying Marketing automation
each
technology Lead/contact intelligence
Sales enablement Predictive analytics
Compensation and Customer success
incentives
Talent assessment
Sales resource planning
Territory alignment
Voice of the customer/ Account planning
Low customer experience

Implemented, but not used Pockets of use, but not consistent Organizationally fluent

Depth and breadth of usage

Note: Leaders (top 15% of companies) are significantly growing market share and revenue; laggards (bottom 15%) have flat or declining market share and revenue
Source: Bain/Dynata Sales Operations Survey, September 2018 (N=200)

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 How the Best Sales Operations Teams Navigate the Digital Cosmos

Figure 3: Advanced analytics has raised productivity in numerous aspects of sales and marketing

Finding Improving sales Driving upsells, Enriching Improving Optimizing

customers and marketing cross-sells and core forecast pricing and
and prospects effectiveness retention data sets accuracy margin

• Ideal customer • Scoring and • Cross-sell • Data validation • Predictive • Guided pricing
profile discovery prioritization targeting pipeline analytics
• Data enrichment • Dynamic pricing
• Lookalike • Next best • Attrition warning • Artificial
modeling actions system intelligence–
driven forecasting
• Recommendation
engine for • Deal scoring
content and
training

Source: Bain & Company

Data science and analytics

Leading commercial operations groups are bringing big data to bear in solving sales and marketing
challenges. They’re using advanced analytics in endeavors such as finding the ideal customers and
prospects and increasing cross-selling of the right products (see Figure 3). And when the data science
and analytics conjoin with sound data infrastructure and the right technology applications, companies
can substantially boost sales productivity.

One B2B technology company uses advanced analytics to define its ideal customer profile, prioritize
specific accounts and align selling resources accordingly. Besides the basic criteria, such as customer
revenue and headcount, the organization developed a predictive model that looked for businesses
showing accelerated hiring of specific roles that served as a reliable indicator of demand for the com-
pany’s core product offerings. The company also incorporated variables that indicate a higher willing-
ness to purchase, such as changes in key leadership roles that typically made the purchasing decisions.
Using this data, the company now can deploy sales reps to the highest-priority opportunities while
also guiding them on which products to offer.

Software and digital tools have become indispensable to sales organizations. High-growth companies
use more digital tools, and use them more effectively, often thanks to a strong commercial operations
team that promotes the adoption of digital tools. The best commercial operations teams focus less on
tracking and more on building the digital infrastructure that yields insights and on investing in tools that
reduce the administrative burden on the front line, empowering those reps to become more effective.

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About Dynata

Dynata is one of the world’s leading providers of first-party data contributed by consumers and business
professionals. With a reach that encompasses 60+ million people globally and an extensive library of
individual profile attributes collected through surveys, Dynata provides precise, trustworthy quality data.
The company has built innovative data services and solutions around this core asset to bring the voice of
the individual to the entire marketing spectrum, from market research to marketing and advertising.
Dynata serves nearly 6,000 market research agencies, media and advertising agencies, consulting &
investment firms and healthcare and corporate customers in the North America, South America, Europe,
and Asia-Pacific. For more information, go to www.dynata.com.
For more information, visit www.bain.com