Why Your Current Sales Structure is Not Producing the Activity You Need

Without quality activity, sales teams fall short of their performance goals.

If it seems that more than a third, or even more than half, of your team is struggling with producing quality activity, it’s time to take a hard look at your sales structure, because your sales structure is perfectly designed for the results you’re getting.

To identify where you might have a problem with your sales structure, break the sales process into three key areas:

Generating Leads
Selling Solutions
Serving Clients

Is there one clear area that more than a third of your team is struggling with?

Begin with Your Gut. Then Check the Metrics.

You probably already know the answer to where your team is struggling, and it makes sense to check your gut first. But follow your gut feeling up by looking at the metrics.

What are you seeing in your CRM, target trackers, or forms you’re using to help your salespeople track and manage their sale process activity?

Managers tell us that running and tracking a Target Drive has a hidden benefit beyond generating new business revenue. A well-documented Target Drive generates metrics that can provide key insights into each step of your sales process.

Once you look at the metrics you can begin to define the problem and which areas are holding you back: lead generation, selling solution, or serving clients—or possibly all three.

Stop Expecting Salespeople to Do Everything

Many organizations find that their sales structure problems stem from asking the salesperson to handle too many different aspects of the process.

Some sales structure issues need major changes, but many can be improved with minor tweaks. It’s important to discuss this with your entire sales management team.

Here are a few possible solutions to consider:

Generating Leads: Consider adding Account Based Marketing, Inbound Marketing, appointment setters, a call center, or sales enablement resources.
Selling Solutions: Give your salespeople a better roadmap with sales plays and sales playbooks. Review if the team has the right account assignments given their individual talents and skills. Or give them more selling time by giving them assistance in the lead generation step above.
Serving Clients: Divide selling and serving between different team members. Many of our clients have had success moving to a model of Account Executives selling and Account Managers serving.

A key thing to consider here is if there is simply too much that a salesperson needs to do in order to excel with Generating Leads, Selling Solutions, and Serving Clients. Depending on your sales structure, you may not be able to generate quality activity and top performance if you expect one person to own every aspect, of every step in the process.