Sales operations: The driving force behind GTM teams

It’s easy to see why sales operations is one of the most in-demand roles across modern GTM orgs: It brings structure, scale, and sanity to complex selling.

From fast-growing SaaS startups, to global enterprises, sales ops is now (rightfully) recognized as the driving force behind B2B go-to-market performance.

What makes sales operations important to B2B companies like yours today is that it gives marketing, enablement, and (of course) sales teams the robust, yet agile frameworks they need to execute quickly and judiciously in their day-to-day.

Simply put, sales ops teams keep things moving along smoothly.

From setting up AI-driven workflow automations and ensuring forecast accuracy for each quarter, to tracking performance metrics in real time and taking administrative tasks off sales reps plates, ops teams make it (a lot) easier to win.

What is sales operations?

Sales operations is the business function that helps go-to-market teams execute their strategy with more clarity, rigor, and impact across roles and regions. Sales operations plays a central role in improving how GTM teams plan, measure, and act: from pipeline generation, to quota attainment, to rep productivity.

Sales ops teams focus primarily on workflow and process automation and evaluating and onboarding best-in-class tools for customer-facing teams. By aligning GTM personnel on goals and actions, sales operations enables sellers to focus, move faster, and win more consistently across complex sales cycles.

Why does having a team focused on sales operations matters for B2B organizations?

Sales operations is essential for keeping the business efficient, controlling costs, and empowering sales teams. It ensures workflows run without disruption and sales territories are aptly covered so that reps can focus on revenue-generating activities.

A high-functioning sales operations team is a necessary growth partner for any business. In fact, companies with dedicated sales ops often see higher go-to-market team alignment and realize greater GTM performance long-term.

Sales, marketing, and enablement leaders each depend on sales ops teams to glean valuable insights on their behalf, forecast future revenue, identify potential pipeline opportunities, and set up sales dashboards and automation workflows so reps can prioritize selling over tackling time-consuming admin tasks.

What exactly is the difference between sales operations and revenue operations?

Sales operations professionals focus on helping their sales teams execute more effectively through tools, processes, and analytics that support real-time deal execution. RevOps, on the other hand, aligns sales, marketing, and customer success to optimize the full revenue engine from top-of-funnel to renewal.

Sales operations is a function that ultimately supports predictable revenue growth through sales planning, territory design, and operational discipline.

How does sales operations support customer relationship management at scale?

Sales operations managers build bespoke sales coverage models to ensure reps are assigned new leads based on capacity, territory potential, and buyer needs. They also set up governance frameworks around data, workflows, and CRM systems to drive consistency across accounts, stages, and opportunity types.

Sales ops delivers sales data insights tied to buyer engagement and prospecting to each frontline sales team member, helping BDRs know where to focus their time and energy and learn how to gradually increase their sales conversion efficiency.

What role does sales ops play in enabling effective sales leadership decisions?

Sales operations analysts equip each sales manager and director with the solutions, reporting, and workflows to drive execution across teams and regions. They provide visibility into pipeline health, forecast accuracy, territory coverage, and rep performance across products, plays, and segments.

By connecting key metrics related to pipeline trends and go-to-market initiatives, sales ops professionals help revenue leaders assess impact quickly, adjust sales tactics as needed, and ensure their teams stay aligned to targets.

Sales operations FAQ	Answer
How can sales operations ensure reps adopt strategic initiatives?	Tie initiatives to rep workflows with clear steps, aligned content, and measurable goals. Track content and sales play adoption through usage data, manager coaching, and performance analysis.
What data should inform annual sales operations planning cycles?	Use historical data tied to quota attainment, rep capacity, average deal size, win rate, and ramp time. Layer in headcount projections, product priorities, and GTM changes to model accurately.
How do sales operations leaders balance efficiency and growth?	Standardize repeatable sales processes while enabling flexibility for expansion plays and new-market penetration. Build infrastructure that supports both scale and experimentation in parallel.
How does sales operations planning align go-to-market teams?	Sales ops sets shared targets, account coverage, and resource allocation across sales, marketing, and enablement. This alignment enables coordinated execution and better, faster decision-making.
What external signals should inform sales operations decisions?	Track competitive shifts, economic trends, buyer behavior data, and product adoption patterns. Combine external benchmarks with internal go-to-market analytics to adapt strategies proactively.
How can sales operations workflows be optimized for scale?	Automate manual tasks like lead routing, approvals, and reporting through integrated GTM systems. Design scalable sales playbooks and templates that reduce overhead without limiting flexibility.
How can sales operations better anticipate ramp bottlenecks?	Analyze sales rep onboarding completion, time-to-first-activity, and early-stage lead conversion rates. Use these insights to adjust training, content delivery, and manager coaching support.
What metrics should guide sales operations strategy decisions?	Look primarily at buyer conversion rates, average sales cycle length, attainment vs. target, and territory coverage. Use this intel to forecast needs, remove blockers, and guide GTM investments.
How can I improve sales operations alignment with marketing ops?	Identify key performance indicators tied to funnel velocity, campaign impact, and sales asset usage. Meet regularly to review what’s working, where to adjust, and how to support sellers better.
What tools help sales operations leaders build agile planning models?	Scenario modeling, business intelligence, and CRM-integrated forecasting tools are essential for sales ops. Choose tech that supports real-time data, multi-variable inputs, and dynamic changes.

How sales operations managers help each go-to-market team succeed

“The need for operations talent with strong analytical skills, business acumen and institutional knowledge is growing as SalesOps’ remit expands,” Gartner Sales Practice Sr. Director Analyst Greg Hessong recently wrote.

And he’s right.

Sales operations teams are the glue that binds all GTM teams together, as they:

Offer sales process optimization suggestions

Sales ops managers don’t just keep the trains running. They also suggest new tracks, smoother turns, and faster routes that cut out slowdowns before they start.

Specifically, sales operations professionals assess existing rep workflows, lead qualification stages, marketing-to-sales handoff moments, and pipeline progression across every segment to pinpoint where process shifts can accelerate revenue.

With this data in hand, sales ops is able to instantly flag what’s slowing GTM teams as a collective unit down and propose cleaner paths forward that simplify how BDRs, in particular, sell. They make sales easier by making processes smarter, cleaner, and tighter, then keep iterating until the whole thing runs like clockwork.

Share relevant insights with sales professionals

Similar to giving input on ideal process-related alterations, sales ops is also charged with supplying each sales rep with intel tied to their individual efforts.

That means delivering data on deal velocity, conversion by stage, buyer trends (like those tied to engagement activities), and which actions most often lead to wins so sellers can adapt in real time. Instead of asking BDRs to dig, sales ops brings the right info to the surface so they’re ready before the next call.

Monitor sales performance to identify trends

Sales operations focuses on spotting inflection points across team, territory, product line, and stage—well before a slide deck calls them out.

More to the point, they tap into AI-powered insights, pipeline velocity, quota pacing, win rates, and sales goals set by revenue leaders to flag what’s improving—or lagging. Then, sales ops team members share best practices across GTM teams to help strong patterns repeat and ensure weaker ones fall away.

The goal is fairly straightforward: Help high-performing sellers remain a great sales force by empowering them to show up 100% prepared for every conversation with potential customers and spend time only on what helps them close.

Provide annual sales planning recommendations

Sales operations tackles sales operations initiatives like territory design, headcount modeling, compensation planning, and quota setting in one go.

The unit partners across GTM leadership to align sales targets tied to revenue growth aspirations with resources, motion type, and ramp expectations.

What’s more, they tie those recommendations back to data and revenue insights so go-to-market teams are equipped and never overextended across each planning horizon cycle.

Sales planning serves as a calendar event. It becomes an annual alignment mission for the entire sales department uniting go-to-market leaders around shared priorities for durable, coordinated commercial execution globally.

Analyze and manage the sales technology stack

Sales operations focuses on the tools that power every pitch, process, and deal—evaluating how each one helps teams work faster and with less effort.

They track adoption, measure usage, ensure reps adopt and embrace onboarded GTM tools, and integrate directly with other essential go-to-market software.

A strong technology ecosystem that features proven, AI-powered tools drives consistency not just for reps but also within the marketing and sales enablement teams, ensuring each GTM role that shares accountability in complex multichannel selling environments gets access to the rich insights they need to excel.

(Think of an AI-forward sales tech stack constructed by sales ops as one powered by an always-on-teammate that delivers continuous support in the background across all workflows and, in turn, shapes every crucial commercial moment.)

Keep data management standards consistent

Standardizing data isn’t glamorous, but it’s what separates high-functioning GTM teams from the ones constantly rewriting their own dashboards.

Ops managers define fields, naming conventions, lifecycle stages, and access rules before things get messy—and audit regularly to keep it that way.

That work lays the foundation for systems that talk to each other, reports that hold up, and metrics that don’t shift mid-quarter. Clean data builds trust—internally, across teams, and wherever your numbers need to show up next.

Highspot CEO Robert Wahbe notes how AI-powered tools for go-to-market teams can dramatically improve GTM performance and drive more consistent, predictable revenue.

Create sales forecasting models for each region

No two regions sell the same, so forecasting them the same way rarely ends well.

Sales ops leaders factor in ramp timing, deal cycles, holidays, hiring plans, and territory coverage to model projections that actually hold up.

They blend current pipeline data with contextual nuance—because past performance doesn’t explain what’s changed. Good forecasting isn’t just math. It’s risk mitigation for go-to-market leaders who hate surprises (which is all of them).

Track rep adoption of enablement and training

If enablement collateral goes unused or training gets skipped, it doesn’t matter how good the material is. Sales ops teams track who’s completing what, how fast, and whether the timing of learning lines up with what reps are doing in deals.

That intel helps sales leaders, Chief Revenue Officers, and enablement directors all know who is and isn’t following through so they can ensure reps in the latter bucket get the necessary education to abide by the chosen methodology.

Sales training programs exist for a reason, and it’s on sales operations to ensure every BDR takes the requisite courses to go out into the field with the confidence and expertise required to build customer relationships and win new business.

Identify gaps in pipeline engagement coverage

When deals stall, it’s often because too few people are doing too little, too late. Sales ops looks across accounts and sales stages to find the blank spaces—those opportunities without recent contact, next steps, or exec involvement.

By flagging those gaps before the pipeline bloats with deals that aren’t moving, sales ops prevents sellers from wasting time on never-gonna-close opps.

Tasks that successful sales operations team handle for GTM orgs today

Modern sales operations teams are the secret to faster sales cycles.

Sales excellence relies on the operations team’s ability to streamline workflows. If you’re new to sales operations, start by preparing a strategy, assembling the right team, collaborating across the business, and investing in the right technology.

Some initial action items to establish your sales ops strategy include:

• Assessing and improving reporting workflows and accuracy: Make sure every dashboard is pulling clean, current data and that teams actually use sales reporting to make decisions.
• Automating selling and non-selling tasks, wherever possible: Free up reps from repetitive back-office work so they can spend more time prepping for calls and engaging prospects and less time copying, pasting, and toggling between go-to-market systems.
• Evaluating and integrating your GTM tools for seamless use: Ensure your stack plays well together, supports your workflows, and isn’t creating extra work for reps, managers, or analysts.
• Developing and adjusting compensation and incentive plans: Tie comp plans to what matters now, whether it’s new business, expansion, multi-product deals, or short-term pipeline creation.
• Overseeing successful implementation of new platforms: Roll out tools with sales training, governance, and adoption plans that keep things from falling apart three months after launch.

Since you can’t afford to put the cart before the horse, this latter task—investing in the best AI sales tools on the market—is essential for your sales ops team to tackle first and foremost, as it informs how GTM operates (and excels).

Just remember that not all AI-centric solutions aren’t the same—nor do they provide the same efficiencies for GTM or ROI for your business.

“The teams winning today aren’t rushing to deploy [AI],” Highspot’s GTM Performance Gap Report explains. “They’re choosing informed AI that delivers the right insights, context, and expertise—AI that’s embedded in their GTM motion. Because in a noisy market, it’s not the loudest tools that win, it’s the smartest.

3 best practices to improve sales operations (and drive GTM performance)

As with any facet of your GTM strategy, continuous improvement is paramount for sales ops. Some best practices to optimize rep execution and output include:

1. Establishing a sales operations charter tied to North Star business and revenue goals

Every sales operations team needs a clear, defined, agreed-upon purpose. Define why the unit exists and what success looks like. This clarity can be created by crafting two simple, repeatable statements for the team’s mission and vision.

For example:

• Mission statement: “We want to empower the sales team to work faster, show up smarter, and win more deals by simplifying processes, relying on data for business decision-making, and providing tools they need to be productive and close deals.”
• Vision statement: “We strive to be a partner that delivers operational excellence and aligns sales efforts with business goals. We will support growth and a seamless customer experience.”

Define the purpose and scope of your sales operations function and how it connects to broader GTM outcomes. Anchor the charter to business priorities like revenue growth, efficiency, and cross-functional coordination.

Just ensure it’s documented, visible, and referenced during key planning discussions.

The strongest charters help every go-to-market team row in the same direction to achieve big-picture goals laid out in the annual sales strategy for your org.

2. Regularly liaising with both marketing and revenue operations to stay on the same page

Success in sales ops often comes down to how well teams collaborate.

Meeting regularly with marketing and revenue operations to review metrics, near- and long-term GTM plans, and upcoming programs ensures cross-functional work across teams feels less like a handoff and more like a shared initiative.

Make sure those sales-ops-led conversations lead to decisions that ultimately translate into meaningful, data-informed changes. When everyone builds together, it’s easier to share ownership of sales performance and course-correct quickly.

3. Tracking reps’ sales productivity and utilization of your go-to-market technologies

As noted, your sales representatives perform best when their tools do more than sit on a checklist—they should inform, assist, and evolve alongside them.

Investing in the right platforms is only step one; success depends on what those tools enable and how consistently they’re used in the flow of work.

This is where sales enablement tools like Highspot come in.

Our platform gives sales ops teams complete visibility into rep activity, software utilization, and how key actions translate into go-to-market performance gains.

With an agentic GTM solution like Highspot, sales operations can:

• Use AI sales role play to simulate high-stakes selling scenarios by persona, product, or stage, then measure how BDRs improve through structured feedback, skill scoring, and reinforcement.
• Deliver personalized sales training in the form of bespoke learning paths tailored to ramp phase, role, experience level, and/or team priorities, with assets that dynamically adjust based on progress, skill gaps, upcoming plays, and performance data tied to actual execution in the field.
• Deploy easy-to-use AI agents for sales teams that act as embedded collaborators across GTM workflows, surfacing relevant collateral and messaging, surfacing deal insights, recommending next steps, and helping managers coach with less overhead and more context.

Whatever tools your sales operations team secures for reps, just make sure they empower your sellers—and every other GTM team, for that matter—to execute with the speed, precision, and accountability your C-suite desires and turn every buying signal into intelligent, timely actions that advance deals.