Why your best sales operations candidates are former sales reps

Some of the best demand generation marketers I’ve worked with have actually come from the sales side.  They spent the early part of their career carrying a bag, owning a quota.

They know that effective B2B marketing isn’t about pretty pictures and cold lists and flashy trade show booths.  They know that everything boils down to pipeline growth and revenue responsibility.

Former sales pros understand intimately what their former direct peers are going through. They’re far more likely to understand and successfully execute on the sales enablement side of modern marketing’s role.

A similar rationale could put some of your sales reps successfully into an operations role.  If you hire administrative professionals into sales operations, they tend to be too reactive.  Too focused on tactics and not results.  They don’t inherently understand the sales role and how to support it.

That’s absolutely not to imply that successful sales operations is a subservient position.  Quite the contrary, well-executed sales operations is quite possibly the most important role on the entire sales floor.

A well-run, focused and nimble sales operations group can make every single sales professional more efficient, more effective and more successful.  They can single-handedly improve productivity, sales pipeline growth and conversion rates.

In that light, I could argue that putting one of your best reps in a sales operations management role might not only help you retain them but also significantly increase their value to the organization.

Worth thinking about…