Sales enablement vs sales operations: 9 key differences explained

Sales operations and sales enablement are key support pillars within your sales organization, they aim to support sellers and improve their productivity, to ultimately increase revenue growth at your organization.

But what’s the difference between these teams? And how can they work together to create more impact?

We break down:

What is sales operations?

Sales operations (sales ops) focus on optimizing sales processes through technology, data management, and process improvement.

Essentially, sales ops look to streamline a sales rep's tasks and remove blockers to help them close more deals, thus increasing revenue growth. This could be finding a better tool to demo your product, or shortening an approval process.

Sales operations also maintain data hygiene within your CRM, leading to more accurate reports.

Other responsibilities of a sales ops professional include managing compensation planning, setting sales quotas, and assigning sales territories to sales reps. This management of the sales process allows sales leaders to focus on their teams and overall sales strategy, while ops take on the admin tasks that keep sellers motivated.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement supports and empowers sales reps by providing training, coaching, and resources to help them in their roles.

This allows sales reps to improve their knowledge and skills, making them better equipped to conduct sales activities and more likely to win deals. Enablement teams do this by creating strategic sales training programs to upskill reps, training sales managers on effective sales coaching, and creating effective sales collateral.

Other responsibilities of sales enablement teams include onboarding new sales reps, educating the team on product positioning and messaging, creating certifications, and creating guides for new tools.

9 ways sales operations and sales enablement differ

In case you’re still not sure what exactly makes these two functions different, let’s break down nine areas where sales ops and enablement diverge.

Strategy

While these functions share the same broad goals (increasing sales rep productivity and revenue growth), the way they go about achieving these objectives is quite different.

Sales enablement looks to increase sales rep productivity by improving their skills. This may involve creating battlecards and other sales content, training reps on hard and soft skills, and coaching reps to perform at their best.

That is, they provide sellers with the resources they need to close more deals.

Whereas sales operations looks to increase sales productivity by streamlining the sales process. They do this by removing bottlenecks, implementing better tools, and automating tasks.

These tasks make the processes and tools a sales rep uses on a daily basis easier and quicker to do, leaving them more time to have those valuable conversations with prospects.

Metrics and KPIs

Since these functions have different strategies, it makes sense that they’d have different measures of success.

Sales enablement teams tend to track metrics like:

Time to productivity
Available selling time
Content usage
Sales confidence
Win/loss rate
Sales velocity

Whereas sales operations teams track their impact with these metrics:

Close rate
Customer acquisition cost
Average sales cycle length
Time to do task
No. of sales qualified leads
Sales velocity

Hiring

Sales enablers are often tasked with hiring new sales reps (alongside sales leadership). This makes sense as enablement works closely with sales and understands the markers of a good sales rep.

Enablers also know which skills can be taught to a new seller, and which skills or characteristics would be difficult to teach (such as coachability). These would impact the culture fit for a new candidate and are important factors to consider when hiring.

Sales operations teams likely won’t be too closely involved in the hiring of sales reps but they may help to approve the budget for a new hire (by calculating their likely salary and commission) and proving the ROI of additional sales headcount.

Onboarding

Sales enablement teams are tasked with onboarding a new sales rep, providing them with all the training they need to succeed in your organization.

While your HR team will deal with any company policies, enablement’s role is to educate reps on product information, common objections, sales methodologies, and other important information they’ll need to succeed in your org.

This ramp-up period is crucial, as this information will form the foundation of the sellers' product knowledge, and should set them up for success. After this period of intense training, they should be ready to converse with prospects and win deals.

Sales ops isn’t really part of this training phase, instead, you’ll find them in the background ensuring everything is set up correctly for the new hire. This includes creating their accounts with the correct permissions, assigning them a territory, and setting their quota.

Without this, new reps wouldn’t be able to access the prospect information, know who to target, or what their sales quota is.

Employee retention

Both of these functions want to retain top sales talent, as these talented reps are invaluable to maintaining revenue growth. But enablement and sale ops go about this in different ways.

Sales enablement teams focus on coaching sales reps to improve their career opportunities and increase their pipeline. By increasing sales reps’ skills, they are more likely to get promoted and more likely to hit quota thus receiving a larger commission.

Sales operations, on the other hand, make sales reps’ jobs easier by streamlining processes and providing better sales technology. For example, improving the deal approval process, so contracts can be approved and sent to clients quicker.

But that’s not all sales ops do to retain sales reps. This function is also responsible for creating and managing the compensation plan for reps. This includes building the structure of commissions and helping sales leadership to set quotas.

Sales operations managers work to keep compensation plans competitive, so reps are rewarded for their hard work and incentivized to stay.

Technology

It goes without saying that sales enablement and operations teams will utilize different tools in their day-to-day roles, but this isn’t the biggest difference between them when it comes to tech.

The real big difference is how these functions help other teams utilize tools. Sales enablement teams look to train the sales team on how to use tools within the sales tech stack.

This may include showing the benefits of using a tool, creating ‘how-to’ guides, and providing training on new technology.

Sales operations teams can also help to train sales reps on some tools and best practices, such as correctly inputting data in your CRM. But really, their main technology responsibility is buying and implementing tools.

This function looks to optimize sales processes by vetting new tools that’ll help reps perform tasks faster. They’ll then implement new tech within your organization and ensure it’s integrated with your existing tech stack.

Sales ops professionals also use technology to automate repetitive sales tasks and further streamline the sales cycle.

Day-to-day

On a day-to-day basis, enablers work with sales and marketing teams to create and deliver effective training, coaching, and resources to support sellers.

Some tasks associated with sales enablement are:

Onboarding new sales reps.
Creating sales collateral such as battlecards and playbooks.
Hosting training workshops or presentations.
Making sales kickoff meetings effective and engaging.
Coaching sales reps and sales leaders to improve their skills.

In comparison, sales operations professionals may seem more isolated as they spend a larger portion of their time working on systems and data analytics than with other teams.

Some day-to-day sales ops tasks include:

Managing compensation planning and quota setting.
Cleaning CRM data and analyzing sales data.
Setting up automations and checking they work properly.
Assessing bottlenecks and improving processes.
Implementing new technology.

Data usage and management

Making data-driven decisions is always important in the world of sales. However, these teams use different insights to inform their next steps.

Enablement teams use conversation intelligence data to understand how best to coach a sales rep. These insights can inform an enabler which skills, sales techniques, methodologies, or objections an individual sales rep is struggling with and allow coaching to be tailored to their needs.

Another way sales enablement teams use data is by tracking sales content usage to understand which resources are valuable to the sales team and which need to be changed. This allows enablers to prioritize creating content sales reps will actually use.

On the other hand, sales ops use data to understand where processes could be improved and to forecast revenue for your organization. A sales forecast can help sales leaders to plan sales strategy and maintain growth.

The operations team also manages CRM data, helping to keep your organization’s data clean and accurate. This maintenance allows sales reports to be more accurate and helps sales reps to find the correct contact details for new leads.

Increasing revenue growth

To conclude, sales enablement teams increase revenue growth by improving the effectiveness of your organization’s people, while sales operations ensure increased revenue growth by improving your organization’s processes.

In short: people vs process. But both are crucial for ensuring your organization can thrive in the sales environment.

5 ways sales operations and sales enablement can collaborate

These functions may be different, but there’s still plenty of room for sales enablement and sales operations teams to work together to streamline the sales cycle.

Training strategy

When there’s no obvious shortcoming in sales rep performance but the overall win rate or revenue is dropping, it might be time to look at the data.

Sales operations team can look to the CRM and answer questions related to the sales pipeline that might uncover some of the mysteries that enablement are looking at.

By analyzing CRM data, sales ops can spot trends that would be difficult to spot just by talking to sales reps, or surface-level analysis. This information can then help to inform sales enablement training strategies.

Coaching

Conversation intelligence is a powerful tool for sales enablement success, but it can be complex to integrate into your tech stack. That’s where the sales operations team comes in.

Sales ops can swoop in and integrate your new tool with existing software and into your CRM without causing any data hygiene headaches. Allowing the sales enablement team to get the conversation insights they need to effectively coach sales reps on their weak areas.

Getting buy-in for tools/headcount

Both of these teams will have a unique perspective on why a new tool or more sales reps are required to improve sales productivity. So when they combine forces, it can be much easier to gain executive buy-in.

That is to say, when sales operations and sales enablement agree a new tool is necessary for improved productivity and revenue growth, this request will hold more weight than if only one team held this opinion.

By presenting a shared case encompassing both perspectives, approval looks a lot more likely.

Process improvement backlog

Sales operations teams are always looking for ways to improve sales processes, and sales enablement are in a perfect position to advise on potential improvements.

Since enablement teams work closely with sales, they’ll have a good understanding of what could be improved either within the sales team or with enablement processes. As, for example, improving enablement’s content management system would also improve sales efficiency, as content can be found more easily.

These suggestions from enablement can help to build sales operations’ backlog of improvements and ensure bottlenecks are flagged early.

Change management

When sales operations need to change a process or implement a new tool, change management is critical to ensure sales team adoption.

An important aspect of change management is training, so you can probably see where this is going…

By briefing sales enablement on changes before they occur, ops and enablement can work together to communicate and train reps on the change. This allows sales reps to feel confident when the change rolls out, and increases adoption rates.