Review of the Sales Ops Specialist Role

CRM systems are extremely powerful tools for businesses and organizations of all types because they provide?an organized, centralized database for all the information a company might want to track about its customers. A?CRM system is?also customizable, so it can be used by different types of businesses and industries,?from finance and?manufacturing companies to educational institutions and?nonprofits, and everything in between.

The best part of all this? Because CRM is so powerful, and because its applications are so diverse,?there are entire job markets for people with CRM skillsets. This specific professional certificate will teach you the fundamentals of Salesforce — the most widely used CRM in the world.?The focus throughout the certificate will be on the sales operations (or "ops", for short) specialist role, but remember: by gaining fundamental skills in Salesforce, you will be prepared for a variety of different sales positions.

The Sales Ops Specialist Role

As you might remember previous lessons, the role of a sales operations department is to support sales teams and enable them to do their job better, which is to sell more efficiently. While the exact job structure and responsibilities will vary from business to business, a sales operations specialist typically achieves this by providing value under four main categories:

• Strategy — for example, providing sales forecasting through the use of Salesforce data, and offering ideas for how to optimize the sales process.
• Technology — for example, leading the adoption and customization of a CRM like Salesforce as well as other integrations in the sales team’s tech stack.
• Operations — for example, finding the best use of the many tools in Salesforce to make sales and support teams' work more efficient.
• Performance — for example, using reports to leverage Salesforce data to determine how effectively and efficiently the members of a sales team are doing their jobs.

Keep in mind that depending on the company, the sales ops specialist role may go by a variety of different names like “Sales Support Specialist”, “Revenue Operations Specialist”, or sometimes even just “Sales Representative”. Every organization defines the responsibilities of this role differently, but the one consistent that you need to do this job well is a strong foundation in Salesforce, which the courses in this professional certificate will give you.

As you will see throughout this professional certificate, all the work in the above examples can be achieved through Salesforce. Before we dive into these tasks in more depth, however, let's learn a bit more about?Salesforce in general?and what kinds of businesses use it.