High Performance Sales | Blog

Many, if not most, of you will read the title of this blog and think to yourself, “No way! My team is in survival mode. I do not have the time or energy to dedicate to a restructuring right now.”

True, we are living in unprecedented times, and yes, the current environment has left many businesses struggling to make ends meet while their customers’ buying behaviors have drastically changed, slowed to a crawl, and in many cases, stopped altogether. So, how can this possibly be a good time, let alone the right time, to restructure your sales team?

I would argue that it’s likely the perfect time.

Let me explain.

We’ve worked with several clients on elements of their sales strategy, which clearly define who you are selling to, what you are selling, how you are selling, and why you are different -- all to support better returns for the sales organization (Revenues – Cost of Sales). Asking fundamental questions like these begin to point to significant gaps and opportunities around sales structure and alignment.

While decisions related to sales strategy, model, and structure are highly unique to an organization, we find that investigating four core areas -- what we call the 4 C's of sales strategy -- can help guide those decisions:

• Customer – How do you segment customers based on size, potential, needs, capacity, location, etc?  Which are your highest priority segments?
• Coverage – Based on what you learned in customer analyses, how should you define your coverage model to best align with your highest value segments?
• Capacity – What is the workload required to sell and service customers and how do we size/resource our team (and selling roles within it) accordingly?
• Capability – What competencies do our people need in order to engage in the right conversations with different levels of customers, which for many companies span strategic/consultative selling to tactical selling?

We unpack these decisions in our comprehensive Guide to Sales Resource Optimization. By examining each of these areas, a sales organization can maximize both selling efficiencies (e.g., reducing overlapping resources, reducing T&E, and expanding the “bag” of solutions) and sales effectiveness (e.g., more value for the customer through broader solutions, better experience through single point of contact).

You’ve heard the phrase, “we’re all Inside Sales now.” It’s meant as a nod to virtual selling solidarity. Not to be taken literally. But still, it made us think.

So many of our clients have had to make, or are in the process of making, sales org restructuring decisions to fit economic realities. The now outdated “Inside/Outside” sales terminology can muddy the waters on these decisions, particularly if your company doesn’t have clearly defined sales roles, which is a common enough occurrence.

Leaders looking hard at their sales organizations to determine if they need to restructure an “Outside Sales” force that can no longer work outside should ignore the terminology altogether and look instead at the specialization of roles required to achieve their revenue targets. Especially if they have personnel decisions to make.

Consider this scenario: Your company is in growth mode and has acquired several smaller players in your space in recent years. The newly combined selling organization is a mess. Not only are multiple reps calling on the same customers, but it is evident that some sellers are focused on accounts with minimal potential, while others don’t even appear to have the skills necessary to sell and deliver on your value proposition. You aren’t seeing the results you expected and are under pressure to rectify the situation before you lose more market share.

A reorganization of your salesforce is necessary, but where do you start? And how do you ensure you are making decisions that will maximize impact and not just “rearrange the deck chairs,” so to speak? 

Whether you are merging disparate sales teams into one or merely restructuring your team to compete more effectively, a reorg can be quite daunting. Truthfully, there are many “balls” to juggle when restructuring, but if you stay focused on the three essential considerations of alignment, size, and enablement, you’ll end-up with a sales organization poised for success.

“History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.” – Chuck Palahniuk.

If you've ever been into jogging, you know that you usually get injured if you violate one of the three “too’s” – too much, too soon, too fast. It’s easy to get carried away when you first start an exercise program. Similarly, in managing sales, if you don’t take a good assessment of where you currently are, you are bound to miss something and spend more time, resources, and effort than necessary.

I’m not talking about months-and-months of research, but it’s never a waste of time to ask yourself some key questions before you start most endeavors, especially since it’s easy for us to ‘lock-in’ on a single alternative or fool ourselves into thinking we are in a better state than we are.

What are the key questions to ask to determine if you need to optimize sales resources?

According to Harvard Business Review, companies spent $800B on sales force compensation and another $15B on sales training in 2015.  If you add in another $15B investment in CRM according to Gartner, companies spent $830B on people, people development and enabling technologies, which is roughly 5% of total US Gross Domestic Product.  This is a staggering amount of money invested to deliver revenue growth. 

Contrast this figure to the investment we make annually in optimizing the return on that investment.  Once a year, typically during the budget process, we sit down and think through how many sales people we need in the organization.  We may base our sizing assumptions on how we performed this year, our revenue targets for the upcoming year, or a financial analysis of the costs (e.g., recruiting, on-boarding) versus the benefits (revenue ramp-up time). 

More often than not, we devote too little time prioritizing our customers, determining our coverage model, and sizing our sales teams. Our need to reassess our go-to-market strategy is magnified when there have been major market or competitive shifts or if our company has grown through acquisition.

We all know the value of rebalancing our 401K to drive greater returns on our investment portfolio.  Yet, as collective stewards of nearly $1 trillion in sales investment, the question remains – why do we place so little time and effort in driving a greater return on our investment in sales? 

To answer that question, we developed an in-depth guide around the components of Sales Resource Optimization (SRO), including the 4 C’s of customers, coverage, capacity and capabilities. More and more of our clients are annually re-assessing how they organize and deploy sales resources to ensure they are keeping up with market/customer changes, which are happening at an accelerated pace today.

Like many business projects, sales effectiveness projects are often focused on the big 3 – Increasing revenue, cutting costs and/or reducing risks. When we talk to sales leaders, the primary stated business objectives of sales transformation projects usually tie back to increasing revenue – capturing new accounts, improving up-sell and cross-sell, increasing renewal rates, increasing revenue per seller productivity.

I was driving on the “top end” interstate in Atlanta, and the Elton John song, “Levon,” came on the radio. It prompted me to think about partnerships and how there have been famous collaborative groups and song writing partnerships through the years (Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, maybe Macklemore/Ryan Lewis for a more contemporary example). What I find really interesting about the Elton/Bernie arrangement is that it’s not really about collaboration, but rather about specialization.

Across the years we have worked with many different clients in different industries, trying to solve a variety of their sales related challenges. Many of our clients state that they want to “improve sales effectiveness.” However, we have observed there are many variations to perceptions about what that means; improving a sales process, gaining traction on utilization of sales tools, sharpening-up recruiting, enhancing selling skills through coaching and development - You can take your pick.