How an Operating Model Delivers Exceptional Value

To deliver high performing results for salespeople, marketing, sales, and product teams need to work together effectively and seamlessly with a good Operating Model. When there’s a lack of strategizing or communication, employees, clients, and businesses suffer. Implement a cross-functional operating model in your company is an efficient, proven method to organize teams, processes, and results.

What is an operating model?

An operating model is a business concept that signifies how the organization works in terms of process, information, strategy, and people to deliver value to the company’s customers. Since your company doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all sales force, your sales enablement operating model needs to be set up to deliver value in a variety of different ways. For an operating model to be successful, you must have strategies in place that the team follows to guarantee value.

For example, operating models are setup to deliver:

• Tasks: Are you setup to provide standard tasks to others?
• Projects: Are you setup to complete projects you have selected or others have mandated?
• Programs: Are you setup to run a standard set of programs that repeat year after year or quarter after quarter?
• Experiences: Are you setup to provide end-to-end experiences for salespeople by deploying talent enablement, message enablement, pipeline enablement or organizational enablement services to executives?

Each of these examples have their own operating model strategy, setup, and stakeholder management. Their processes, information, and technology requirements are different. And the skills of the people involved are also different.

What is an example of an operating model?

An operating model is a critical value-driver in any commercial organization. For instance, think of the steps required when publishing a blog article. First, someone needs to research the topic, then write the subject, then edit, and then submit for review. Once the article is approved, it is published and usually promoted on the company’s social media. These steps make up a business process. That process gets the task done.

A model would then need to support that process. How do you determine what blogs to write? Who are the blog posts for? Why are you writing a blog in the first place? Who decides what “good” looks like? How do you decide when to take the blog down? These are just some of the questions you would answer to begin thinking about your operating model to support a “blog strategy, topic, process, and posting process”. There’s a sequence of events that interact with one another in order to deliver value. 

Why is an operating model important?

Your Commercial Enablement operating model is critical to your success because it means the company is organized and able to effectively execute the sales strategy with your leadership and help. These models are beneficial to internal teams from low levels to higher management because it helps everyone understand how the business converts ideas into value to meet client expectations. If a Sales Enablement operating model is not in place, then an organization tends to run without systems or strategies, which turn into random acts of sales support, putting your function at risk.

What are the benefits of an operating model?

these models provide a lot of benefits to your organization, including:

• Helps teams understand the interdependencies to create value for sales
• Streamlines processes to lead to a valuable result
• Sets systems, processes, and structure in place to give staff direction
• Delivers high performing staff and better value for clients
• Gives management a better understanding of each level of the organization
• Provides a shared sense of purpose to all staff

Without operating models in place, an organization becomes disorganized and can lead to low performing teams and disappointed clients. At OrchestrateSales.com we understand how important it is to have high performing sales teams to accelerate growth and deliver value to your clients. Want to learn more about how to create and grow exceptional teams? Join our community and listen to the podcast!