Sales Operations Vs Sales Enablement: The Hidden Differences

What We’ll Cover:

1. Distinct Roles and Objectives: Sales operations focus on managing and optimizing the sales process through data analysis, strategic planning, and implementation of sales technologies. In contrast, sales enablement is dedicated to empowering sales teams by providing training, coaching, and content to improve sales effectiveness and efficiency.

2. Collaboration for Success: Although they have different focuses, sales operations and sales enablement must work closely together to ensure alignment and coordination. This collaboration helps develop strategies to achieve revenue targets, enhance go-to-market efforts, and support the sales cycle from onboarding to closing deals.

3. Critical Responsibilities: Sales operations handle tasks such as lead generation, forecasting, quota setting, and performance analytics. Meanwhile, sales enablement is involved in creating educational programs, coaching, and developing tools and content to support sales teams in engaging with customers effectively.

4. Impact on Revenue Growth: Both sales operations and sales enablement play crucial roles in driving revenue by optimizing processes and enabling sales teams. Their combined efforts contribute to a more streamlined sales process and a higher success rate in closing deals.

5. Evolution and Misunderstandings: The fields of sales operations and sales enablement are often misunderstood due to overlapping responsibilities. However, distinguishing between them is vital for maximizing their effectiveness and ensuring that each function can focus on its core competencies to support the overall sales strategy.

The difference between sales operations and sales enablement teams

Sales operations and sales enablement are similar in some ways, but each discipline has a different purpose and domain. As a consequence, the day-to-day job of a sales operations person looks different than the daily tasks of a sales enablement professional. Plus, these two areas require different approaches and different people. In an organization that has a sales force, sales operations are largely concerned with data and processes. Once again, this requires a different mindset and skill set than organizing sales training, content, or coaching. Yet another common mistake. Just because someone is good at designing and executing a sales kickoff doesn’t mean they would be good as part of a dedicated sales enablement person or operations team if that’s not their pursuit, their will, and bias for detail or data. A dedicated sales enablement team plays a crucial role in preparing and educating sales reps, working closely with sales operations to implement new tools and processes, highlighting the importance of collaboration between these two functions for organizational success.

However, there are still a lot of definitions of sales enablement out there. A few of these definitions are good, others are not. This is one of the reasons why there are some common misunderstandings about what sales enablement is and how it differs from sales tech stack other related sales disciplines. The difference between sales operations and sales enablement is one of the most misunderstood. On the surface, their meanings sometimes appear to overlap. Beneath the surface, there are important differences between the two. These differences will become even more significant as time goes by. Yet, for now, many companies with a sales team or two don’t distinguish them from sales enablement. But they should be. Here’s why that is.

Most professionals outside of sales these days have some idea about what sales enablement is. Sales enablement roles have been growing rapidly in recent years. This is largely because it’s difficult to win deals in the complex, competitive markets today. Enabling salespeople with the right knowledge and tools at the right times is a proven way to drive more revenue.

Sales Enablement vs Sales Operations: The Hidden Differences

Sales Operations Team Roles and Responsibilities

Sales Operations role is multifaceted, consisting of behavioural studies, productivity analytics, and much more. That’s because, as part of an organization’s top sales development team, you need to understand the complex processes and procedures that occur behind the scenes so that you can streamline them and get them working in their most efficient condition. You need to have a micromanager’s attention to detail, without losing sight of long-term organisational vision or the ‘big picture’. All while possessing an acute understanding of the market and industry that directly affect revenue. So, if you do find yourself following up with leads and finalising on deals or even handling objections and complaints, you’d better start preparing a pitch to your employer about how money’s saved. We’re asking for a raise!

Assuming that you are a part of the Sales Operations team, you will know a very simple truth - there is no typical day at your job. Post data collection for high-quality lead generation to creating new training programmes for enhancing the sales ops team itself’s efficiency, the tasks are as diverse as your organisation’s sales strategy. Primary responsibilities of a Sales Operations include generating and classifying leads, tracking progress, and providing personnel support. Examples of tasks include analyzing customer feedback, creating commission structures, and managing changes in leadership. Ultimately, the role must be able to think critically and make informed decisions. With that said, if entrusted with certain responsibilities, Sales Operations can also handle the following as well. A sales operations manager plays a crucial role in this ecosystem, dedicated to ensuring that everyday operational tasks in sales departments operate smoothly and efficiently. This includes driving sales performance, process adherence, and forecast accuracy, as well as working on the infrastructure and leveraging CRM data to identify areas for improvement.

How Do Sales Operations and Sales Enablement Work Together?

Of all the capabilities-and-alignment paradigms in which sales readiness in play, two are most heavily in use outside the selling cycle. These related paradigms are why sales enablement leadership is pervasive at C level. As businesses begin to treat selling as something other than “just sales” and as strategy research determines the dollar achievements of doing so, two very significant leadership concepts emerge: first, that the mix of marketing, process engineering, product management, and sales is not as important as the mix of their capabilities in driving successful sales results. Second, that this mix of capabilities is not as important as the strength of their alignment.

If alignment over sales strategies is so much of a problem, why has sales enablement become a separate business function when previously the right-hand way to secure alignment over sales strategy was to place ownership in one hand? The reason why sales enablement is emerging as a separate function is because it addresses the problem of alignment from a different perspective: capabilities. The capabilities delivered through sales enablement completely complement sales operations capabilities, but they focus on the sales side of the strategy, not on the management side. Such are the scope and magnitude of the capabilities issues that sales enablement addresses that it has become necessary to solve for it with a separate function, fully dedicated to it.

The key to sales operations and sales enablement working well together, and achieving shared goals, is ensuring the alignment of marketing teams and sales and marketing teams with sales operations and sales enablement. This alignment is crucial for developing strategies to achieve revenue targets, measure the effectiveness of go-to-market efforts, and provide resources for closing sales and improving the bottom line. Sales operations focus and enablement has responsibility over training, content, and coaching, aligning all of those activities carefully with sales processes and sales strategy. There is plenty to keep all the members of that function very busy. Sales operations is responsible for continuously supporting sales performance throughout the sales cycle and aligning sales operations to sales strategy. The sales operations team likewise has plenty of its own to keep it busy, with quota setting, territory management, forecasting, incentives, analytics, reporting, effectiveness, and sales technology. There is plenty of scope for both to align on sales strategy and through other interrelated areas such as onboarding, joint sales projects, and post-sales support.

How can you achieve sales excellence and sales success?

Our sales force is the most important strategic asset the startup has. It helps you polish your first value proposition, build your persona, understand your problem, and together promise the most important thing – the way you are better than the competition. Then sales pushes and helps us build the necessary proof points to create revenue, keep the lights on, and build a magnetic story. You owe these champions the best possible ammunition you can provide. What’s given out to the sales is a product of Sales Operations and Sales Enablement. Enhancing your sales force productivity and productivity is crucial, as Sales Operations and Sales Enablement work together to evaluate and select technologies that streamline the sales process, allowing sales agents to focus more on selling and less on administrative tasks. This synergy between the two functions is essential for improving sales productivity and performance, underscoring the importance of maintaining a strong relationship between them. So what are they?

One of the most powerful things I know is when you can establish a customer’s willingness to part with their hard-earned cash if we can only address their need. This is based on your value proposition. A value proposition is the answer to: “What would make someone want to buy something I create and sell?” The answer is made up of several bits. What is it you create, and most importantly - how is that better than anything else that can be found on the market (faster, more reliable, recognized by industry leaders, …)? Now, the single most important thing coming from the salespersons are the objections. These guys are having hundreds of conversations with the prospects. We are learning from them what it is that makes our target segment hesitate when it comes to spending their budget on this particular class of problems. It is not what we think – it is with utmost certainty what the customers tell our sales forces.

The question of whether you should hire a dedicated person responsible only for sales enablement inside the company or if you need a generalist capable of wearing multiple hats and still taking care of sales operations is something I hear quite often. The answer is you should do both.

Sales Enablement vs. Sales Effectiveness

We had been giving rational solutions to deeply entrenched emotional behaviors. The promise of Sales Operations was that locally engaged reps were more efficient and effective when acting as college grant reviewers. They didn’t want enablement (a college helper that connects multiple silos), they only wanted their briefcase and playbook of favorite tactics. We mistakenly had asked them to abandon their favorite tactics and flip from talking to listening first, knowing that if we didn’t communicate with new generation families around completion of their FAFSA form and tax requirements, we would not advance the cycle. Sales operations required a unique product line of closely held tactics. We were offering national help and that was a non-starter: the playbook belongs to the college advisors. More egregiously, we weren’t in charge of branding or step grant authority, they were. There was an end-run to us on answering critical grant readership questions. Since they had fewer and fewer applications to read and report on, by all means, they were going to rely on what worked best for them, i.e. local tactics not best practice college advisor work; be they school counselors, college assistors or financial aid administrators. There’s nothing that a local grant reviewer insists on more than their preferred best low hanging fruit they religiously gave individuals in order to work the packaging cluster and wrestle much of the best students onto the cost valuable sheet. We had product market leadership that had no intellectual authority. We had the right key stakeholders, but they did not grant us the right keys to engage around the 800 lb. Revenue bucket to connect wide practice papers and multiple customer Q&A inviting conundrums back flack into a specific action plan.

We often lump sales enablement and sales effectiveness (or sales operations) into the same category. They have some overlap, but they are not the same thing. Why do we need to distinguish between them? Quite simply, if you don’t know what you are buying, you don’t know what you are delivering. Many of our customers flipped out over our new "go to market" sales platform, and it was not pretty. They said the tool was too simple, didn’t drill down to the real complexity of what they did in their silo and didn’t respect or enable their workplace norms and institutional memory. They needed customization, complexity and depth if we were going to meet their complex business needs and silos. However, that’s not what we built, or what we were selling. After many hours of screaming, we figured out that while they said they needed tools, in fact, they really wanted custom silos and we built a go-to-market mentality and platform.

How is sales excellence measured?

The singular importance of face-to-face interactions places sales closer to revenue success than any other part of an enterprise. Recognition of this fact leads enterprises of all types and sizes to allocate substantial investment to sales. In fact, today, sales is a huge contributor to local economies and directly provides career opportunities for thousands. It is very important to remember, where there is exchange of value, there often is disruption – sales enablement as a domain of sales excellence has not followed the process of evolution in lockstep with the entire sales process itself, leading to misunderstandings, hence the need to define and determine how sales enablement fits in the broad strokes of revenue success.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, a key measure of sales excellence is doing one’s absolute best under current conditions. It is implicitly obvious that sales assess their best when they are on the field, evangelizing and influencing the customer to a purchase decision - face-to-face interaction is the primary catalyst driving sales for businesses of all types and sizes. The sales pipeline, arguably the single most critical metric in sales operations, primarily reflects the value and merit of these human interactions; the intangible value-discussion taking place in the various touchpoints, both intra-enterprise and extra-enterprise (in front of a prospect or customer).

Sales Enablement Roles and Responsibilities

• Education. Sales Enablement needs diverse roles such as content creation, experience design, Education technologists, continuous education architects, and curriculum designers. They should create co-designed coaching processes with Sales Operations and CRM teams to extend upskilling engagements. Establish proper learning application technologies and support processes to ensure seamless adoption of the learning journey, and updates. Create and execute certification process for deals. A successful certification should be achieved prior to moving forward new sales reps. Requires Sales Exec approval after Sales Manager/equivalent certification. Furthermore, coaching can also be integrated into the certification process and can provide individualized updates on the go. Should require splitting the certification up into smaller sections, making LMS updates and adherence to security/compliance measures crucial to this role! Sales enablement technology plays a crucial role in supporting these responsibilities, particularly in content creation and education, by providing solutions for content management, sales training, and ensuring sales and marketing alignment.

• Coach for Commercial Excellence. Sales can be a high paying job. It is also one of the most transitory jobs in a company. Sales Enablement should get involved in all phases of the sales academy experience including boot camps, ongoing education, dynamic content, user feedback, what works and what doesn’t. Communicate to all Sales groups how their part of the equation fits in, more on this later! The Coach for Commercial Excellence role is why enablement is in sales (and spans marketing, support, and channel enablement). If exceptional messaging, cognitive skills, content, and feedback are available, enablement should replace the position with AI and a phone line!

The responsibilities of the Sales Enablement function are vast and varied. It’s important to understand that Sales Enablement is not a direct sales role, so what are Sales Enablement’s responsibilities? Sales Enablement is responsible for modeling, defining, implementing, and scaling the processes, as well as crafting the key stories and messages to ensure that sales activities achieve desired outcomes. Remember, outcomes are what are achieved by the buyer, not the seller. They should help to make it easy for buyers to buy, so sales enablement involves aligning them to see all value in the solution, and making it easy to get back to their lives! Here’s a deeper dive into the areas of responsibility of the Sales Enablement role.

How Should Sales Operations and Sales Enablement Collaborate?

Configure new hire playbooks. Draw on the power of your sales enablement tools in development of strong sales onboarding programs by embedding the new playbook as a key component of the onboarding process. This turns the new playbook from being an empty, external tool that must be presented in a workshop. As a result, the playbook becomes a home to the educational information that the salesperson has in fact already received, as they make sense of it. Furthermore, this automatically trains new salespeople in using it as a resource. Find out and quantify which resources are helpful for each of the New Hire Game Plans, and track these metrics in your sales enablement platform alongside other key sales content usage and adoption metrics.

Sales, sales enablement supports and sales operations teams collaborate closely to optimize the sales process, with sales operations teams responsible for supporting sales representatives by managing sales enablement, deal desk management, and leveraging CRM data to ensure profitability and compliance. This collaboration is crucial in developing and implementing strategies that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of sales teams. Sales enablement and sales operations have different focuses, and gaps between what sales operations manages and what sales enablement requires will become much more pronounced as organizations grow. However, the most effective tactic for bridging these gaps is to coordinate and collaborate. For example, when applied rigorously, innovative thinking, process, and tools that sales operations brings will often increase the effectiveness of sales enablement work. However, especially in large organizations, where resources are split and roles are clear, differences and mistakes in overlapping areas of sales enablement and sales operations deployment are inevitable. Here are several methods for breaking down the traditional silos between sales enablement and sales operations.

Ramp sellers quickly and efficiently

Sales enablement professionals focus on solving specific problems and identifying untapped team assets. They take a hands-on approach and concentrate on the activities, events, actions, and decisions that are characteristic of successful selling in their market. These professionals work to find the best long-term solutions for various goals, such as reducing ramp time, increasing usage, or improving prospecting effectiveness. They act as gatekeepers, leveraging corporate insights, building processes, and constantly evaluating and updating them. Importantly, sales enablement also focuses on empowering sales reps with the necessary tools and training to ensure their success, addressing the challenges and time constraints they face in their roles.

Sales enablement and sales operations work together closely, with sales operations supporting and optimizing the sales enablement process. While there are some differences between the two, they both aim to improve team productivity and revenue. Companies invest in new systems and processes to achieve a positive return on investment (ROI), although the specific workflows may vary.

Ramp up your revenue

If Sales Enablement is about teaching and coaching while sales operation is about ease of executing a well learned/taught task and the data visibility of the same - When large size sales team says seller hesitation/freezing - Sales operation creates a cheat sheet/aid for seller while, a sales enablement will create a skit/performance conversation building a solution not just for the seller but a supporting cast of product manager, sales ops leader, sales leader, product and marketing team etc. Where sales operation creates a new tool to be used, sales enablement creates best practices and innovate on the current sales tool (content; detailing aids associated) usage. Sales Enablement works on the Meta (precursor to the tool) not the source. Only when information actions in the above take place - Do we have insights and potential actions by Sales Operation. When we say a tool is effective unsupervised team problem solving is taking place and when a team transitions into deliberate complacency - Its not teamwork or team culture?

Sales leaders and sales managers play a crucial role in this ecosystem, utilizing tools, technology, and data to enable their teams to achieve success. They are instrumental in creating lessons, measuring performance, and optimizing strategies based on insights, which in turn drives revenue growth. Sales managers and sales executives, in particular, oversee everyday operational tasks, working closely with sales enablement specialists and collaborating with sales operations and enablement teams for training and coaching programs.

Needless to say, sales enablement is a part of the sales operations. A subset that contributes to revenue growth by addressing seller pain points is a solution or tool. In fact, there’s more to sales enablement that reinforces the hypothesis Sales Enablement is a digital cognitive behavioral therapy for sellers. Sales Enablement is an educational platform much before it becomes a workspace. Over a period of time, it presents itself as a parallel to sales coaching if not more. Sales Enablement end to end includes 1) Order of problem solving 2) Content creation 3) Content Cadences 4) Knowledge transfer cadences 5) Tool which host fruits from the above 6) Yes Visits (When physical meetings are allowed) 7) Interventions.

Sales enablement works with operations to create growth

Sales enablement and operations both serve a singular purpose: to create an environment where sales reps spend and can sell with the greatest likelihood of success. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. You can think of the relationship between sales enablement and operations as two different paths winding up a mountain. Both layers of rock guide you toward the right destination. But one will allow you to take in the sights, taking unique bends along the way to fine-tune your approach. You can see ahead and you can pivot easily. That path? Your sales enablement role, curving into the partnership and strategic direction toward the mountain's peak: growth. Now, they both arrive at the same destination: more growth. But, on the operation path, there's no turning back. It's steep and deliberate and you can't take those instant right angles as easily to stay on the highest impact course. To fine-tune and go forward with the speed of light to support the business as things change and change fast. It's an exercise in precision and manpower but you barely look up and see where you're going, let alone master real-time pivots to get there faster.

If revenue was a gas, sales operations would be the pipe that shapes it into something useful as it moves through the lengthy combination of systems, processes, and activities. Sales enablement would be the oxygen that keeps it going. You need both to keep key business outcomes your sales team alive and growing. The problem is, if you don't know the differences between them, you won't know where to hop in and take ownership of your company's full sales potential.

Enable sellers with an easy-to-use platform

What we've talked about before is the secret of every single function - to understand whether it's successful or not, you just have to understand who does it serve. It's itself deep irony that the internal function assesses its value in the company's performance, thereby consistently negating their end user effectiveness from the driver's seat. Unlike other internal functions, sales operations matters significantly to the core of company performance, which paradoxically makes it even harder to gauge whether the inner work of improving the leverage points in the sales process matters in any meaningful way. One thing is clear though: when sales operations isn't doing its job, just as it isn't clear what sales operations is meant to do. Sales teams become ineffective, the company loses revenue, and all the mission-critical metrics become suddenly harder to explain. If you sell a technology or senior leadership in technology, the normal tendencies to solve any problem big or small with more technology. But, as we've discovered, you can't hire your way out of a problem. More technology, more money, or more attention to daily numbers. You need to look at the problem at the core. The functionality of the sales teams with a critical eye towards revamping existing sales process and teams momentum, creating a performance-driven organization that balances the personal touch of high tech with deliver to all.

Sales enablement and sales operations converge around one goal - to enable sales to sell better and faster. But they go about achieving that goal entirely differently. The goal of sales enablement is to enable sellers with the right content, training, and analytics. The seller, specifically, is who sales enablement serves. This end user focus manifests when the function is evaluated. Sales enablement is measured by seller proficiency, buyer and seller experience, and process efficiency. Sales operations doesn't design for the seller or the sales team. They design for the sales organization. And the way a sales organization decides to realize its goals can help or hinder the effectiveness of the sales team. In sales enablement focuses in operations, the end user is the company. And that's why at the end of the day when measuring effectiveness, sales operations is measured by three things: revenue, retention, and growth rates.

Discover how we can level up your Sales Operations and Enablement today.