Or How… which one is the chicken, which is the egg when it comes to sales team structure?

Last week we reflected on “When and why to restructure the sales team/organisation or how”…….  and finished the first of this two-part post with the claim that there is a different way when it comes to continuously assessing appropriateness of sales team structure and form that is diametrically opposed to the ubiquitous pain-response mechanism.    The key is running a proactive sales team optimisation process annually as an integral part of your whole-of-company revenue and cost budgeting.  This will keep you nimble, on your toes, proactively and regularly testing appropriateness of structure, form, deployment.  As opposed to reacting to an “oh shit” experience.

Keen sales team optimisation enthusiasts will intuitively know that the annual refresh cycle requires key data tranches to be updated and remodeled.  If your process and tools are well designed, the outputs of such a process should produce for you a defensible headcount requirement.  Involving all members on the sales team in an exercise that guides them to individually document their activity base and time allocation –

• Territory time vs office time
• Visit time vs drive time
• Proactive vs responsive vs reactive visit types
• Hunting vs farming visit types and ratios
• ….amongst other forms of activity and time revealing probing ……..

…….will round out the defensible headcount requirement from above with the qualitative overlay to test, review and potentially anew your sales team structure, form and deployment.  Much better to pre-empt than react.