Operations is vital to how your business runs on a daily basis. It contributes by way of streamlining processes, providing a pathway for leads, and generally providing the underlying structure to the other role areas’ day-to-day work.
Here are some of the things Operations can do for you:
Operations can minimize revenue loss
From an outside perspective, operations can seem like a necessary evil. Or something that sucks up resources better spent elsewhere. But its primary purpose is to make the process of generating income easier. The smoother your operations path is, the easier it is for the customer to purchase your product and the easier it is for you to make money.
Whether you want it or not, you have an operations team. The only difference between an effective team and a non-effective team is specialization. If you have your marketing team and salespeople doing their own operations management, there can be practical problems that inhibit revenue. If they’re too busy fixing a funnel problem, they can’t focus on reaching out to customers, and the more time spent on it, the more revenue opportunities are lost.
Having a dedicated operations team is one way to ensure that fewer pieces fall between the cracks and that sales opportunities aren’t lost to jury-rigged systems.
Operations can maximize team efficiency
Having a dedicated operations aspect to your business’s inner workings can help ensure that the team is doing the best kind of work. For instance, Marko Savic of FunnelCake talks about how one of his clients had a team with high-performing Sales reps, salespeople with a high number of leads, but none of their leads were converting to revenue.
Those with the highest lead numbers weren’t passing on good leads, whereas an operations analysis showed that the ones with the most leads converted to revenue had a much lower number of total leads. But each of the latter group’s leads had a higher level of qualification before they were passed on.
In the words of Brett Queener, “Metrics are meaningless without segmentation.” If you don’t understand your market segment, the number of leads you bring in doesn’t matter. And an operations team can help identify this disconnect and bring it to light.
Operations can fix problems
The operations role is a bit like being a psychologist. Identifying problems, predicting obstacles, prescribing remedies. When they find a problem, it’s their job to either make that problem disappear or mitigate the consequences of that problem by means of an operational process.
In all things, operations is to treat their fellow employees in different roles as their customers. If the operations team is specialized for marketing or for sales, then those departments are their customers. It’s their job to make the marketer or salesperson’s life easier.
There is also the danger of being too quick to prescribe remedies that can throw off the delicate balance of an organization. Even so, this is a danger that faces every person, not just limited to operations.
I hope that this impresses upon you the importance of a skilled operations team for your business. Without it, a company’s employees, time, and resources might go to waste.