7 Ways To Structure Your Sales Team For Growth and Performance
Xant Team
Sometimes if you need to gear up the efficiency of your sales team, you’ll need to alter your team’s structure. Study your sales team structure and check to see if there’s anything you need to change to optimize it. To see what works, have a look at these 7 ways to structure your sales team for growth and performance.
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In this article:
- Aim for the Longer Term
- Organize Your Team Around Your Customers
- Hire a Mixture of Generalists and Specialists
- Hire for Agility in Industry Shifts
- Search for Managers Who Are Caring, Transparent and Constructive
- Incentivize Growth by Hiring “Hunters”
- Align Your Incentives Together with Your Team’s Future Success
7 Tips on Structuring Your Team for Success
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No matter what business you’re in, sales teams have a united goal of increasing profits through new or repeat business. Teams work differently depending heavily on your market, product, and other people.
1. Aim for the Longer Term sales team structure
One of the most effective sales team structures is an arrow. This structure guarantees a sharp focus on forward-looking income streams.
The point of the arrow is the confident, tactical reps focused on sales and growing accounts.
The spine of the arrow is reps, who are hooked into supporting and expanding growth for the business.
The feathers, who are your sales management, help to guide the arrow to its target.
2. Organize Your Team Around Your Customers
There are many ways to structure a sales team, but few that work like an oiled machine. In a perfect world, you should always structure your organization around your customers to build confidence and familiarity. This may differ if your products are technical, where the focus may lie instead, but a customer focussed structure is usually the simplest. Other factors that need to be considered include customer type, geography, and account demographics.
3. Hire a Mixture of Generalists and Specialists
Sales departments should consist of a different skill set, and you should always have specialist sellers and experts on the product. Having a combination of resources allows you to widen your team and deliver optimal solutions for clients. The experts should be available to build individualized customer relationships to deliver value and revenue growth holistically, and the specialists should provide deep expertise at a high level.
4. Hire for Agility in Industry Shifts sales team structure
There are always changes in buying activities, but you do not need an enormous team to be responsive to changes. You only need a good workforce of agile and willing staff.
You cannot foresee when future changes will happen, but you can be pre-emptive in predicting these changes. Monitor customer acquisition costs to work out when and the way your sales team must adapt to maximize future sales.
5. Search for Managers Who Are Caring, Transparent and Constructive
Hire managers who care about their direct line staff, are who are eager to be transparent and provide constructive criticism.
Maintain top quality onboarding processes and training programs that will weed out the sales staff that won’t last in a competitive and faced-paced environment.
6. Incentivize Growth by Hiring "Hunters" sales team structure
Most sales team roles are supported by different behaviors. Not all people are cut out to be salespeople, and some are natural at it. Structure your team so that your “hunters” bring in new business. Your “farmers” should be working in the background on accounts, but not necessarily at the forefront. This way, you’ll maximize growth and not use your skilled sellers on mundane tasks.
7. Align Your Incentives Together with Your Team's Future Success
Regardless of the industry, you’re in or the size of your sales team, there’s nothing more important to make sure you have future success than aligning incentives.
Boost future sales and ensure that your salespeople are motivated to sell. Most salespeople will be motivated by money and enjoy the power of earning extra money.
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It’s sometimes going to feel that leading your sales team to success is impossible, as you’ll see, it is not. By simply taking the time to plan and implement the sales management strategies outlined above, you ought to start to ascertain a definite improvement in your sales team.
Have you tried all of the above strategies, but still aren’t seeing an improvement in your team’s performance? It is essential to keep in mind that a robust sales team begins with hiring the appropriate salespeople. If your sales team consists of a variety of low driven and unmotivated salespeople, you’ll likely see your team struggle to seek out consistent success over time.
How do the above tips differ from your own? What successes have you had? Please share your ideas below.
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