3 Essential Considerations When Reconstructing Your Sales Team

Consider this: Your company is growing and acquired several smaller players in your space in recent years. The newly combined selling organization is very disorganized. Reps are calling on the same customers. Sellers are focused on accounts with minimal potential. Other personnel don’t have the skills necessary to sell and deliver.

Simply put, you aren’t seeing the expected results and feel pressure to rectify the situation before additional market share loss. A reorganization of your salesforce is necessary, but where do you start? How do you ensure maximum impact?

Whether you are conjoining disparate sales teams or merely restructuring your team for effectiveness, a reorg can be quite daunting. Truthfully, there’s many restructuring elements to consider. It’s important to focus on the three essential steps of alignment, size, and enablement, so you’ll end-up with a sales organization poised for success.

Many B2B sales organizations use Sales Resource Optimization (SRO) – the process by which companies align, size, and enable their sales teams to maximize top and bottom-line impact. It’s essential to maintain a quality and quantity of sales resources, skills, and capabilities to excel.

Step 1: Company Alignment

Before you start reconstructing the org chart, you first must ensure alignment with both the organization and the marketplace.

• Alignment With the Organization: Does your reorg goal support the strategic goals of the organization? For example, if the company goal is to reduce costs, then your goal is to find efficiencies through the elimination of duplicative positions. Whatever goal(s) you work towards, it should parallel the overarching strategic goals of the company.
  
  
• Alignment Across the Organization: All departments in the organization are impacted by the reorg goal, not only sales. It’s important to include the affected department decision makers and ensure cross-functional support for the reorg.
  
  
• Alignment with the Marketplace: Once you reach cross-functional support, the next step is to evaluate the company’s ability to sell to the markets and customers with the highest potential for success. What market segments are best for your products/services? Are you competing where you can win? Are you setting-up your sales reps to lose, because you are competing against larger, more equipped companies? What customers fit within the target market? Are you focused too heavily on low-return clients? It’s critical to develop the correct customer segmentation model prior to determining rep goals and onboarding.

Step 2: Size-Up Your Coverage and Capacity Needs

Now that you have created alignment, you can shift focus towards the people component of this process.

• Coverage: The type of resources necessary to service your various identified customer segments across their lifecycles. How do you optimally “cover” these prioritized markets and accounts? If sales are transactional, can you push customers through online channels? If sales are more complex, do field sales reps provide necessary support? Is there a combined coverage approach that might be better suited?
  
  
• Capacity: The capacity model determines the quantity of resources each role needs to achieve revenue goals, as well as optimizing sales managers’ span of control. Do you have enough salespeople placed to address needs? Do you have a surplus of employees focused on specific roles? If so, can you use the overflow in different capacities?

Step 3: Enable Your Salespeople and Teams 

Once the coverage and capacity models have been defined, next comes the capabilities analysis of the current sales force. This helps identify people with successful ability and tenacity. It fills in the gaps to provide sales training for new hires.

Successfully implementing your plans requires the right tactics. Companies often use multiple sales processes and tools – all of which might not align with reorg goals. It’s important to assess what’s working and what’s not. Do we have the right support, tools, and resources that a successful sales team requires?

It’s critical to define roles and responsibilities across all teams. Sales, marketing, finance, customer service, etc. should mutually understand the responsibilities they hold in company sales processes and outcomes.

The Impact of Effective Sales Restructuring

It’s essential that companies regularly evaluate their org structure to appropriately align with marketplace changes. This restructuring isn’t a “one-and-done” project but requires consistent tweaking to stay ahead of the curve.

You might argue that it’s not worth the effort – that optimizing your sales team will cost more time and resources than the return is worth.

If done right, however, the benefits far exceed merely reducing costs. The benefits of thoughtfully executing an SRO include:

• Sales productivity: Improved win rates and cross-sell; reductions to sales cycle time
  
  
• Employee engagement: Improved sales rep satisfaction and lower attrition rates
  
  
• Profitability: Improved average deal size and customer retention rates

With these necessary benefits, how can you afford not to optimize your sales organization? If you are unsure whether it’s time to optimize your sales resources, Contact Us to best address your individual needs.