The Most Underrated Role in Wholesale: Why Sales Ops Deserves a Seat at the Table

Wholesale brands don’t wake up one day and decide they need a sales ops function. They usually get there because something starts to feel harder than it should.

Orders are coming in from too many places, reps are asking for workarounds, and retailers need special pricing, routing rules, order updates, or help placing reorders. Marketing wants to run a promotion, but operations does not hear about it until the last minute. A 3PL needs a better forecast. Accounting needs clean order data. The ERP has one version of the truth, the B2B platform has another. And someone is stuck in the middle trying to make it all work.

Unfortunately, at a lot of brands, that person usually has a completely different role inside an organization, and they’re trying to sandwich the sales ops in on the side while the day job takes up most of their time. It's not a truly dedicated person that acts as the connective tissue between the sales team and operations. But it should be.

On a recent Envoy B2B podcast, we talked with Grant Mahan from Sunski about his role leading sales operations for the brand. Sunski sells through wholesale, direct-to-consumer, drop ship, group sales, corporate buying, and other special order channels. Grant sits across the systems, fulfillment, sales, operations, and retailer experience that make all of that work.

His description of the job was simple, but it says a lot.

“My main focus is to maintain our systems and infrastructure that supports all the omnichannel order web that we have,” Grant said.

That “order web” is where wholesale gets complicated.

Brands aren’t managing one channel, one order type, or one sales motion. They're managing prebooks, at-once orders, replenishment, key accounts, independent retailers, distributor orders, DTC demand, fulfillment partners, account-specific requirements, and internal teams that all need the same information to move in the same direction.

Sales ops is the role that helps hold that together.

Sales Ops Is Where Sales Strategy Meets Operational Reality

A sales team makes promises to the market. They introduce the line. They build relationships. They help buyers understand the product. They talk about availability, delivery timing, order rules, pricing, and what the brand can support.

Every sales team operates by making promises to the market. What is coming in the new line, when it will be available, what the delivery timing is, ordering rules, pricing, and on and on. Then the brand has to deliver on those promises. This is where sales ops becomes a critical role.

Grant described his role as supporting anything the sales team or marketing team brings forward, then helping make it happen “efficiently, effectively, and as cost efficient as possible.”

That work can include systems, order flow, fulfillment centers, 3PL communication, process changes, reporting, special account needs, and the daily problem-solving that keeps wholesale moving.

In other words, sales ops is not just an internal admin role. It is the connective layer between what the brand sells and what the business can actually execute.

Naturally, that connection matters more and more as brands grow.

A smaller brand can sometimes get by with a few people wearing a lot of hats. The sales leader knows the biggest accounts. Operations knows which orders are coming. The founder still has visibility into the details. A rep can text someone and get an answer.

But too few people wearing too many hats becomes a critical problem as the wholesale channel expands. More retailers means more exceptions. More product means more inventory decisions. More fulfillment partners means more coordination. And all the ‘more’ means more places for data to break and workflows to fail.

Without someone watching the handoffs between sales and operations, your wholesale channel becomes a pile of good intentions and failed systems.

The Best Sales Ops Work Is Often Invisible

One of the reasons sales ops can be overlooked is that the work is easiest to see when something breaks. Grant summed it up well: “Everyone notices when everything goes wrong. No one notices when everything goes right.”

That is the strange reality of operational work. When orders ship on time, pricing is correct, inventory is accurate, reps have what they need, and retailers can place orders without extra hand-holding, the business usually just keeps moving. Nobody stops to celebrate the fact that the system worked.

But when things are smooth sailing is exactly how sales ops proves its value. A retailer can place a reorder without emailing a rep. A sales rep can check inventory before promising product to an account. An order can move cleanly from the B2B platform to the ERP and into fulfillment without someone manually patching the process together.

Those are the wins that make wholesale feel smooth. They may not always show up as a big, obvious moment, but they protect the retailer experience, save the sales team time, and keep the business from creating unnecessary friction.

Grant also rightfully makes the point that sales ops leaders need to make that work visible inside the company. If the business only notices operations when something goes wrong, it can be easy to underestimate how much value is being created when things go right. “You have to speak up,” he said. “You have to tell people, this is why this is important.”

That is good advice for any wholesale team. The smoother the operation becomes, the more important it is to show the work behind it. Sales ops is often removing problems before they reach the retailer, the rep, or the warehouse. That work deserves to be seen.

Reps Need A Partner Inside The Business

Sales reps are the closest connection any brand has to the retail buyer.

They hear what retailers are struggling with. They know which accounts need more support. They see when a platform is confusing, when order rules create friction, or when buyers cannot find the product information they need.

But reps cannot fix every process issue on their own. They need someone inside the business who understands what they are trying to accomplish and can translate that feedback into better systems.

Grant said he is in direct contact with nearly the entire Sunski sales team.

“Everybody has my cell phone number,” he said. Reps need fast answers. They are often in front of a buyer, preparing for a meeting, or trying to close an order before a selling window moves on.

Sales ops gives reps a practical internal partner, and there are many examples of how this roles can bring immense value to an organization.

A rep may hear that a retailer wants a different way to view available inventory. Sales ops can evaluate whether that is a one-off request or a broader platform improvement.

Or a rep may need help with a key account order that has special routing requirements. Sales ops can coordinate with operations and fulfillment before the order turns into a problem.

Maybe reps notice that buyers keep getting confused by product organization or pricing visibility. Sales ops can work with the B2B team, marketing, or product data owners to clean up the experience.

The best sales ops people do not treat rep feedback as noise. They look for patterns, and implement solutions when those patterns create friction in the buying experience.

Retailers Notice When The Operation Is Reliable

Retailers may never know who owns sales ops inside a brand, but they feel the impact of the role every time they interact with the business. They feel it when product information is accurate, inventory is current, orders ship when expected, and their rep can answer questions without chasing down three different departments. They also feel it when the B2B portal reflects the way they actually buy, with the right products, pricing, order rules, and account-specific details in place.

Reliability came up several times in our conversation with Grant. He described the goal this way: “At the end of the day, the goal for me is that they can depend on us when they hand that PO over to us and they know it’s going to get out on time and accurately.”

That is a powerful wholesale promise because retailers already have plenty to manage. They are watching margins, staffing, traffic, inventory turns, seasonal demand, and customer expectations. They don’t want to chase basic order information or wonder whether a brand can fulfill what it accepted. When a brand becomes easier to work with, that reliability becomes part of the relationship.

Sales ops helps create that consistency by making sure the internal systems support the external experience. The retailer sees a smooth order process, but behind the scenes, someone has made sure product data, inventory, pricing, fulfillment rules, and account needs are all working together.

Wholesale Systems Need Someone Who Understands The Workflow

A modern wholesale brand likely works across many systems, including a B2B platform, ERP, Shopify, 3PL software, inventory tools, reporting dashboards, payment systems, and a mix of spreadsheets. These are crucial tools, and they don’t manage themselves.

Grant was direct about this. “It’s not just the set it and forget it kind of thing,” he said. “You have to maintain these things.”

That is especially true in wholesale because the workflows are rarely simple. Orders may include account-specific pricing, seasonal delivery windows, prebook deadlines, future ship dates, order minimums, special product rules, rep territories, multi-location inventory, and retailer-specific requirements. A process that worked last season may need to evolve as the brand adds categories, launches a new program, changes fulfillment partners, or shifts its go-to-market strategy.

Sales ops often becomes the business owner for those workflows. That doesn't mean the person in the role has to be the technical admin for every tool. But it does mean they understand how the tools affect reps, retailers, operations, accounting, fulfillment, and the overall wholesale channel.

That perspective matters, because it allows sales op to have a macro view of the entire wholesale channel. A workflow can look fine inside a system and still create friction in the real world. Sales ops is often the person asking whether a change will help reps sell, make ordering easier for retailers, create extra manual work for operations, preserve the ERP as the source of truth, and give the 3PL enough information to fulfill correctly.

Those questions determine whether a system supports growth or quietly creates drag.

Sales Ops Keeps Teams From Working In Silos

Wholesale touches almost every department.

Sales wants to grow the channel. Operations wants clean execution. Marketing wants campaigns and product launches to land well. Accounting wants accurate records. Fulfillment teams want order clarity. Retailers want a smooth buying experience.

Without sales ops, those teams can drift apart.

A sales team may push for a retailer accommodation without understanding the operational cost. A systems team may configure a workflow that makes sense technically but creates friction for reps. A marketing team may plan a sample send without thinking through inventory and accounting implications.

Grant shared a good example from Sunski. The marketing team wanted to send samples to a large group of customers. On the surface, that could have been handled through emails and spreadsheets. Grant pushed for the process to go through the ERP because the business needed visibility.

As he explained, accounting needs to know how much product is being given away, and the data needs to be recorded and tagged.

That is sales ops thinking.

The goal for Grant here wasn’t to slow business down. The goal is to make sure good ideas are executed in a way the rest of the business can support and learn from.

Better Sales Ops Makes Fulfillment Stronger

Grant also manages relationships with Sunski’s 3PL partners, which makes sense. Fulfillment is where many sales promises become real or fall apart.

He talked about having regular meetings with 3PLs, even if they are short. The reason is simple: the more accurately Sunski communicates what is coming, the better its fulfillment partners can perform.

“The more information you give them accurately, the better that they can be,” Grant said.

In wholesale, shipping isn’t a one-size-fits-all deal. A large account may have routing requirements. A seasonal order may need to hit a specific window. A retailer may need product before a high-traffic weekend. A late shipment can mean missed sales for the retailer and a strained relationship for the brand. In short, brands need to stay actively engaged with the shipping process, monitoring and adjusting based on retailer’s needs, business demands, and outside factors.

Grant said Sunski’s sales director drilled a simple idea into the team: “We can’t miss weekends in high season.”

That is the kind of operational reality sales ops helps protect.

The rep may close the order, but sales ops helps make sure the order can move through the system, reach fulfillment, and arrive when the retailer can still sell it.

Sales Ops Helps Brands Scale Without Piling On Workarounds

Every growing brand creates workarounds. A spreadsheet here. A manual export there. A special process for one account. A backdoor fix that solves an urgent problem.

Some of that is normal. Wholesale is too human and too account-specific to eliminate every exception.

But things get dicey when workarounds become the operating model.

Grant talked about Sunski entering a phase of simplification after years of building processes to support different needs. “If you try and do too many things and make too many hacks for all these different things that you need to do, it spreads a little thin,” he said.

This is likely a familiar scenario for wholesale brands. At first, the workaround feels helpful. Then five teams depend on it. Then no one remembers why it exists. Then it breaks during the busiest week of the season.

Sales ops can help decide which exceptions are worth supporting, which ones should become standardized workflows, and which ones should be retired.

That is a big part of scaling.

Growth does not come from adding more manual steps every time the business gets more complex. Growth comes from turning repeated needs into repeatable processes.

A Stronger Sales Ops Function Becomes Necessary When Handoffs Start Breaking

There is no perfect company size where sales ops suddenly becomes necessary. Some brands need it earlier because their wholesale channel is complex. Others do not feel the pain until they add more reps, retailers, products, channels, or fulfillment partners.

The signs usually show up in the handoffs. Reps spend too much time chasing order details. Retailers are confused about pricing, inventory, or order status. The ERP and B2B platform do not always agree. Important account requirements live in someone’s inbox. 3PL partners are surprised by volume or special requests. Marketing campaigns create cleanup work for the operations team. Leadership has a hard time seeing what is happening across channels.

Individually, those issues can look like small process problems. Together, they point to a bigger need. The brand needs someone who can look across the entirety of its wholesale channel and make sure sales, operations, systems, fulfillment, and retailers are not all solving the same problems separately.

That role can start as part of someone’s job, sure. It might sit under sales, operations, revenue, or go-to-market. The reporting line matters less than the mandate. But when those hand-offs start getting muddy and the fulfillment slows down, then sales ops need to be graduated into its own role, with permission to work across teams, improve processes, challenge messy workflows, and keep the wholesale channel aligned around the retailer experience.

When the role is working well, it does not just clean up problems after they happen. It helps the business build stronger processes before those problems reach the rep, the retailer, or the warehouse.

Technology Helps, But People Still Matter Most

A strong B2B wholesale platform can make sales ops much more effective.

Reps need access to content, pricing, inventory, and order tools. Retailers need a portal where they can discover products, build assortments, place prebook and replenishment orders, and reorder without unnecessary friction. Operations needs clean order data. Leadership needs visibility into the channel.

That is where Envoy B2B fits naturally. Envoy helps brands bring digital catalogs, order capture, rep enablement, retailer self-service, and wholesale workflows into one connected platform.

But software alone does not solve the whole problem.

Someone still has to own the process. Someone has to listen to reps, understand retailer needs, coordinate with operations, and make sure the system reflects the way the wholesale business actually works.

That is why sales ops deserves a seat at the table.

The role helps brands avoid chaos as they grow. It protects the retailer experience. It gives reps better support. It helps operations plan ahead. It makes systems more useful. It turns invisible wins into visible progress.

Grant described the purpose of his role in a way that every wholesale brand should pay attention to. The goal is to support the sales team so “they can generate the most amount of business” and the process “is not a burden.”

Sales Ops clears the path so wholesale teams can sell, fulfill, learn, and grow with more confidence.

FAQ: Sales Ops for Wholesale Brands

What is sales ops in wholesale?

Sales ops, or sales operations, is the role or team that helps connect sales, operations, systems, fulfillment, and customer needs across a wholesale business. In a modern wholesale brand, sales ops often helps manage order workflows, rep support, retailer requests, B2B platform processes, ERP coordination, reporting, and fulfillment communication.

Why is sales ops important for wholesale brands?

Sales ops is important because wholesale selling depends on clean handoffs. Reps need accurate information, retailers need a reliable ordering experience, operations needs clean order data, and fulfillment teams need enough visibility to ship correctly. Sales ops helps make sure those pieces work together so the brand can sell more without creating unnecessary friction.

When should a brand invest in sales ops?

A brand should consider investing in sales ops when handoffs start breaking down. Common signs include reps chasing order details, retailers asking repeated questions about pricing or inventory, operations learning about sales programs too late, 3PLs being surprised by volume, or leadership struggling to see what is happening across wholesale channels.

How does sales ops help sales reps?

Sales ops helps reps by giving them better tools, cleaner information, and a direct path for solving process issues. When reps have accurate product data, pricing, inventory, order history, and account details, they can spend more time helping retailers and less time chasing answers internally.

How does sales ops improve the retailer experience?

Retailers feel the impact of sales ops when the brand is easier to work with. That can mean accurate inventory, correct pricing, clear product information, smoother ordering, faster answers from reps, and more reliable fulfillment. Even if retailers never interact directly with sales ops, they benefit from the consistency the role creates behind the scenes.

Is sales ops the same as customer service?

Sales ops and customer service can overlap, but they are not the same thing. Customer service often helps resolve individual issues after they happen. Sales ops looks across the wholesale process to improve the systems, workflows, and handoffs that can prevent those issues from happening repeatedly.

Does sales ops manage wholesale technology?

Sales ops often plays an important role in wholesale technology, but that does not always mean owning every technical detail. The role usually helps make sure tools like the B2B platform, ERP, inventory system, and 3PL workflows support the way reps, retailers, and operations actually work.

How does a B2B wholesale platform support sales ops?

A B2B wholesale platform can support sales ops by centralizing product content, account-specific pricing, inventory visibility, order capture, retailer self-service, rep tools, and replenishment workflows. When those pieces are connected, sales ops has a stronger foundation for helping reps sell, retailers order, and operations fulfill more efficiently.

What problems can sales ops help prevent?

Sales ops can help prevent missed handoffs, inaccurate order details, disconnected systems, delayed fulfillment, rep confusion, retailer frustration, and manual workarounds that become hard to manage as the brand grows. The role is especially valuable when wholesale becomes more complex across channels, accounts, and fulfillment partners.

Why do wholesale brands sometimes overlook sales ops?

Wholesale brands often overlook sales ops because the best operational work can be invisible. When orders flow correctly, inventory is accurate, and retailers get what they need, people may not notice the effort behind it. The value of sales ops becomes more obvious when brands start to see how much smoother the wholesale channel runs with someone actively managing the handoffs.