To Centralize or Not to Centralize: That is the Sales Ops Question

With national sales meetings in the rearview mirror and sales reps digging in for the year ahead, sales ops teams find themselves with a moment to examine their own structures. Any structural review is bound to touch on centralization, which can raise a handful of difficult decisions. We love the supposed benefits of cost savings, efficiency, and consistency, but what will we have to trade in order to achieve these benefits?

Over the last few months, we’ve spoken to four member companies about their transitions to a centralized sales ops structure. Unsurprisingly, the members we talked to highlighted cost savings and efficiency as the main reasons for centralization.

But one of the toughest parts of any centralization effort, according to these executives, is deciding which activities will be brought into the central functions vs. those that will continue to live at the local level. How do organizations make this decision?

Two of the member executives we spoke with decided whether to centralize an activity or not based on the degree to which sales ops staff need to incorporate local factors into their work (e.g., complexities specific to the regional selling environment).
Two other executives used CEB Sales’ Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Operations Organization as a guide to determine whether an activity should be centralized.

So, what activities do organizations choose to manage centrally? While we heard a considerable amount of variety from our members, a few common activities were:

Commissions,
Reporting and Analytics, and
Training and development.

That said, the member companies we spoke with highlighted several obstacles they had to, or are working to, overcome along the road to centralization:

Gaining buy-in from local stakeholders and sales reps,
Integrating IT systems (e.g., CRM), and
Working across different geographies.

For a more in depth look at the member companies’ transitions to a centralized sales ops structure, CEB Sales Members can read our latest research brief on Centralizing Global Sales Operations, and also review our topic center on Sales Ops Management.