What Sales Reps WISH You Knew About Closing Deals

Ops teams set policies to reinforce strategy, align people, processes, and data, and drive business outcomes. But for sales reps, it can feel like Ops doesn’t know what’s actually needed to close deals. Without a true partnership, there’s the risk of your reps going rogue. Join Brooke Adair, Director of Mid Market Sales at Ironclad, and Diane Palmer, VP of GTM Operations at Ironclad, as they share their top tips for creating policies that sellers can get behind.

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“We’re not trying to be the IRS of sales policy. We want to keep it simple and reinforce the things that we want to execute on as a GTM organization.” - Diane Palmer

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Sales reps can go rogue when they feel like new policies and procedures are getting in the way of closing deals, especially when there are lengthy manual processes. After all, time kills deals. Improving alignment between operations and sales can secure rep buy-in. Here are 3 expert tips for improving policy adoption at your company.

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Tip #1: Build strong relationships with sales leaders

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“The Ops people I like to work with the most demonstrate a lot of curiosity.” - Brooke Adair

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No matter how much automation we bring into the sales process, business is still done between human beings so building connections internally and across teams is really important. For ops, focus on understanding the unique challenges of each sales team. Learn about their experiences and goals.

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Sales leaders and their reps want to feel heard and understood. When ready, roll out an enablement roadshow for new policies. Remember to stay in alignment, changes in policies aren’t one and done and you need to keep collecting feedback.

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Tip #2: Reduce steps in the deal making process

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“If you’ve got dysfunction in your internal processes, you’re going to ship those out to your customers and not even realize it.” - Diane Palmer

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Time is money, budgets can be gone tomorrow. So keep things as simple as possible. Minimize the amount of steps and Salesforce fields to fill in so your reps can spend more time on customer facing tasks. 

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Audit your current state and interview your reps to find out where you can reduce steps and automate manual processes. When you empower users to act, like being able to send out quotes as quickly as possible, Ops won’t become a bottleneck.

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Tip #3: Take an iterative approach

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“Without a feedback loop, you’re in thrash mode.” - Diane Palmer 

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When you don’t revisit new policies to see how they’re working, you’ll end up with confusion which leads to delayed deals. Consider building pilots into your new policy enablement programs. Pilots are a great way to test new policies, make changes, collect win stories, and build trust.

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They also give sales leaders a chance to understand the policy and identify concerns. But Brooke has a caveat. As a sales leader, determine what the impact of new policies are before speaking up. If you can’t put it into words, you probably don’t need to pass on any negative feedback.

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Dive into real world examples

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“I know we’ve done a good job with new policies when the reps ask questions and the sales leaders can actually answer them.” - Brooke Adair

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When sales and ops work together to deploy new policies, you’ll see quicker turnaround time and more closed deals. Interested in seeing Brooke and Diane’s advice in action? Watch the full webinar for deep dive examples of rollout scheduling, discount policies, and form language. 

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