What are the traits of effective sales ops leaders?

I've run into that as well, where people think, “oh, sales ops is just the fixed percentage ratio of head count.” You're 3%, 5%, 7% of sales headcount, that's what you get. When in reality, in some cases it can be a lot less (you're running a pretty simple organization, and you're just scaling, you don't have a lot of complexities) while in others it can be significantly more depending on what sits in sales ops (commissions and compensation administration, quote to cash, the quote tool, the whole order administration function, deal desk, etc). It's not just the fixed ratio, but also really depends on what's in your purview and the operational complexity within the business.

And the level of automation drives a lot of that as well, right? The level of automation and the ecosystem around you. There's so many factors. I've run into that challenge as well. It's not a simple percentage of revenue, or percentage of sales headcount, calculation, it can get a lot more complex. It's not traditional sales operations anymore. There's so many different components that are getting added for all the right reasons. I think something that we all struggle with as leaders is how do you actually build a model to appropriately scale your sales operations organization?

I love the “being of value.” I think you've hit upon a very important trait. Folks that are really successful at sales ops are the ones that have that mindset: how do you make the lives of others around you easier?

I've got this sales operations matrix, a circle that includes four components: tools and technology, process and policy, analytics and reporting, and then support and enablement. I walk everyone through it and say, "Look, if you're going to build a career in sales ops, you're going to need to be thinking about these four different quadrants of how you're going to support the organization, and they all interplay with one another."

One of the things I train my directors to do is  say “no” more often to some of the immediate fire drills, so we can think about how we can build a long-term foundation. Because if you get caught up in all the immediate day-to-day stuff, and you're running around just putting out fires all the time, you end up not devoting enough energy and effort towards fixing the root causes of those problems. Without that, you can’t build a more scalable organization. For example, I came into a new company and inherited deal desk, and I had 10 reps calling me to ask for deal desk advice. I said, "I'm just not going to do it for you." Our CFO and some of the reps got concerned about it, but instead I focused a lot of energy on fixing the foundational issues that were broken in our CPQ deployment. And all of a sudden those deal desk issues started going away. If I would have just focused on helping the reps, we would have never been able to dig ourselves out of that hole.

I think I read a statement once that a lot of the job in the operations role is about saying no. You have to say no to many things in order to deliver something of a strategic nature.

"Say no to even the good in order to make space for the great." One of the things I have struggled with is the first part that you brought up, Imran: how do you balance the strategic and the operational?