Should the management of my CRM fall under sales ops or sales enablement? Does it ultimately matter?
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How do you differentiate sales ops and enablement? And what does the difference imply? Sorry, we do not have this difference. With us CRM-decision was taken by Sales together with C-Level.
I tend to think of Sales Enablement as readying the people to have better sales performance; and Sales Operations to measure and account for that selling outcome. What you’ve asked does vary by company.
Thank you!
Great question, and to answer this we need to break it down into three constituent parts:
1) The Platform - this should be owned by IT/IS. A CRM (such as Salesforce) has many moving parts, with many different stakeholders. There’s development code that needs to be written, and a significant level of access control which should be subjected to the GRC process. Your IT/IS department holds all the keys to this information, so it makes sense for it to be owned by them.
2) The Process - Booking deals, moving stages and automations within a platform should fall under the Sales/Revenue Operations team. Their entire remit is focused on ‘the process’, whether this be deal desk or quote-to-cash, everything that the RevOps team does should hinge around the data in the platform, so it’s natural that they control what/how data is entered into the platform.
3) The People - This is where the Enablement team shines. Once the platform and process has been established, the enablement team should educate the people on how to follow this correctly. Whether it be through training, reinforcement, or sales process adherence, the enablement team are there to keep things on track.
Once you have harmony between these three units, you can establish a process flow between each division to fulfill CRM joy
Definitely Sales Ops vs. Sales Enablement, between the two. I have never seen a pure Sales Enablement team manage the CRM for the organization, based upon their purview. In smaller organizations, CRM management tends to sit under Operations, whereas in larger organizations, you may see an IT function manage the CRM from a technical perspective and Ops act as the business owner.
Sales Enablement
I believe that it belongs under sales ops, however, there must be strong alignment with sales enablement. Either way, what matters is that the responsible party is in sync with the business’ needs for data and reporting.