Repairing the sales and operations handoff process and creating a better employee and customer experience.
Industry: Technology services
Size: $40M, 200 employees
Years in business: 13
Developing and mature organizations often experience pushing and pulling between the sales and operations teams. Even smaller organizations that may have very small groups of sales and operations professionals can feel this internal tug of war.
The struggle usually presents first internally, and management or business owners become aware when departments or individuals start feuding. In more exacerbated cases this problem can become apparent when dissatisfied customers complain about promises not kept and your rescission rate increases. If it isn’t quite that bad, but you have inside sales folks who can’t seem to re-sell or upsell to existing customers, you may have a sales and operations divide.
In the case I’ll refer to here, I was working with a well-established organization that had no trouble with sales and had made significant investments in operations staffing and process design. The trouble was the two departments operated independently and over time, a rift had formed between the two. The sales team viewed the operations department as underperforming and the operations team viewed the sales team as a bunch of over-paid suits who had no idea how anything actually “got done”.
Here’s where I recommend you start:
Begin by having separate conversations with subject matter experts from each team. It’s important to start these conversations separately so that you can begin to understand the perspective of each team without the other informing the conversation. If you’re a director or business owner who doesn’t feel comfortable having these sometimes-sensitive conversations, don’t be afraid to delegate this to a neutral party who has the bandwidth to tackle this project or consult an expert. It can also be valuable in larger organizations, if you have the time and resources, to start with SMEs from each team and then have similar conversations with more junior employees from each team. Those junior-level employees can often serve as a “fresh pair of eyes” on the situation and may be able to quickly recall how your organization compares to your competitors or the last organization they worked for. These employees are often influenced to a lesser degree by any personal issues that may exist between established team members that have been dealing with the same frustrations in your sales and operations departments.
Take time to gather information from both teams. If you are a director or business owner who was promoted from one department or the other, you may need to spend extra time understanding the challenges or concerns of the “opposing” department. If you’re delegating this task to your COO, for example, she or he may need to spend a bit more time with the sales team to understand the sales process, cycle time, and joys and pains of your salespeople.
Once you’ve gathered your data – and be assured this data collection will be less numerical and more opinion-based, so you need to be prepared to navigate those more nuanced conversations with the soft-skills that will ensure you complete this project successfully with your team intact. Now it’s time to think about your process. Think about your customer journey from lead qualification through deal closing – handled by your sales team presumably, through implementation, and finally handoff to operations and ongoing account management.
Some of the major gaps I identified with my client included: requirements gathering, training (during the implementation process), and handoff to operations who were also responsible for ongoing account management. I’m going to break these down into a bit more detail:
Requirements gathering: The sales team, and in many cases, the administrative sales (sales assistant) staff were pulling together the requirements from the customer via email or free-text documents. These requirements were then communicated to the salesperson without any input from the operations team. Important details like turn around times, the scope of requests (in-state requests vs. nation-wide requests vs. international requests), and user interface customizations were being vetted by the sales team. If your sales team has an intimate understanding of operational processes and what can and can’t be done, this can work and can be efficient. In most cases, your sales team is going to be inclined to say ‘sure, we can do that’ without understanding the downstream impact this is going to have on the operations staff.
Remember the motivators here: your sales team wants to close the deal, get the contract signed and move on to the next one – and there’s nothing wrong with that. The same way your operations team is focused on (and often rewarded for) customer satisfaction, turnaround time and NPS.
Training and Implementation: The sales team and a representative from the operations team were put in front of the customer (at the same time, for the first time) at customer training. It’s incredibly valuable to present a unified front to your customer, demonstrating that your organization espouses the same values and the customer can expect the same great experience post-implementation as they did during the sales process. It can be a problem, however, when your trainer from operations learns about the customer’s requirements from the customer during training!
Handoff to Operations: There was no handoff process. I will never advocate for over-engineering. This is a problem that plagues many organizations. When you have so many meetings you have to do your ‘real work’ after office hours because every discussion must be formal, in a conference room, with at least twelve people present. But in many cases, a 30-minute handoff meeting between the sales and operations teams can be beneficial. In the case of my client, we created a handoff meeting process where the sales and operations team would meet to review the requirements, review the decision-maker contact list, discuss the training session or series of training sessions and identify any changes that occurred between the contract signing and go-live. If both teams weren’t comfortable proceeding – meaning the salesperson moves on and the operations team becomes responsible for the success of the customer – then the handoff meeting becomes recurring until all of the issues are resolved, questions are answered, and both teams sign off.
I want to reinforce the motivators here: your sales team wants to close the deal, get the contract signed and move on to the next one. Your operations team wants to understand all the requirements so that they can deliver top-notch service to the new customer, receive great feedback, and ideally create an opportunity for the sales team to up sell or re-sell into the account. In this model, you’re creating a customer base that you can pour back into your sales funnel.
If you continually reinforce that operational success feeds new (warm and qualified) leads for the sales team you can bolster the relationship between the two departments. Try to create a space for an ongoing conversation between the two teams. The operations team has special knowledge about what customers need that can help the sales team refine their pitch. They also have success stories, customer testimonials, and references the sales team can leverage. The sales team has special knowledge about what potential customers are looking for, what the competition is or isn’t doing well, and what can set your organization apart from others. Once you build the bridge between sales and operations you may want to create incentives for your operations staff to qualify leads for your sales team and start to fill that sales funnel.
I hope sharing this client’s case has been helpful. If this isn’t the particular challenge your organization is facing, get in touch, and let’s chat about it:
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