Is It Time to Restructure Your Sales Operation?

Perhaps as a sales manager or sales executive, you have pondered the question, "Is it time to restructure my sales operation?"

When you're not getting the results you need from your sales team, it's certainly tempting to consider restructuring how you're going to market.

How to Determine If You Should Restructure Your Sales Team

Getting breakthrough performance from a new approach is very appealing, as it should be. There are downside risks, of course, as restructuring your sales operation can look like a major remodel to your house while you are still living in it— messy, distracting, and potentially hazardous.

So, how do you know when it’s time to actually undertake that remodeling process or just let it ride and try to pound out more performance from your current structure? 

Here are some guidelines we suggest.

Determine if the structure is actually the problem. You can start by asking yourself a few questions:

• What is our current structure designed to do?  Hopefully, you can answer that, but if not, that might be an indication that clarifying that would be a worthwhile project.
  
  
• Are you getting consistently strong performance in the three to four areas most important to you? 
  
  
• If you’re not thrilled with your results, ask yourself if it’s a people problem or process problem.  If it’s a process problem, then the first place you should look is sales structure.

How can you tell if it’s a people or process problem?  We suggest the rule of 3s:

The rule of 3s is an analysis of the individual achievement of each salesperson against your top three sales metrics. If only a small percentage of your sellers are lagging in these areas, you likely have a people problem, not a process problem.

But if more than 1/3 of your sales team are lagging in these top three sales metrics it’s likely a process problem that points right to a need for a change in your sales structure.

Now determining what your new structure should be and how to roll it out successfully are entirely different topics.  All of that requires its own sequential process, but if you are wondering if you have a sales structure problem at all using the rule of three’s is a very good place to start.