Let’s say you are ready to migrate to a team-based selling model. Now you have to decide about changes in your staff. What adjustments will you make?
The primary goal is to have your field salespeople making four calls a day, twenty calls a week. If you currently have ten salespeople making two calls a week, you don’t need to keep all ten of them making sales calls, you just need two. And since you will pick the two best salespeople to do the selling, they will be very good at the task. And since that is their only task, like heart surgeons who only do one type of surgery day in and day out, they will get better and better.
That leaves eight people who will no longer be selling. What will they do? To answer that question, let’s look at Justin Roff-Marsh’s description of the other tasks in the sales department.
- Sales coordinators assume ownership of sales opportunities and plan activities (appointments) into salespeople’s calendars. (A sales coordinator works with a salesperson as does a personal assistant with a senior executive.)
- Technical experts (project leaders) assume responsibility for solution design and the generation of proposals. Project leaders also manage the relationship between customers and operations during delivery.
- Customer service representatives assume responsibility for the ongoing management of accounts — including the procurement of repeat purchases.
- A promotional coordinator interfaces with marketing to ensure that sufficient opportunities are generated to enable the sales coordinator to maintain the salesperson at 100% utilization.
Now that we know which positions need to be filled, how many should be transitioned to each role? Once again, here is Roff Marsh:
In most organizations we convert most of the existing salespeople into project leaders. Typically, the new project leader role is the role most similar to salespeople’s existing job profile. Furthermore, converting salespeople to project leaders tends to improve customer service and minimize the risk of losing valuable team members.
In the chart below you can see the specifics.
